I just noticed this great Christmas post (it linked my defense of Christmas). I mostly agree and appreciate it. However, I noticed especially in the comments a tendency to see everything “gentle” about the story fo Jesus as being the part of God that unconverted people can stomach, while the “severe” parts are what they hate and what reveals their hardened hearts.

Now, that may be the rhetorical strategy of current Western unbelief, but as an ageless principle, I don’t think this understanding of unbelief will hold up. I think the Gospels are quite clear that it was Jesus’ humiliation that counted as a great source of offense and unbelief. When Jesus told his disciples he had to die, they either outright confronted him for teaching error, or else assumed he must be speaking a mysterious parable. When Jesus was on the cross, onlookers mocked his claim to be God’s king by telling him to prove his claims by coming down from there in a display of power. God meant power to them and weakness claiming to be associated with him was a joke or a blasphemy.

And when Paul writes to the Galatians he has to confront the report that he is really a man-pleaser rather than a fearer of God. After all, Paul was insisting on “low-cost” Chritianity for the Gentiles in the eyes of traditional Jewish Christians. No circumcision. No Sabbath. No fleeing from pork. What a softie. Paul acted like God loved all the nations equally.

In our own day, we see people both inside and outside the Church abusing the Bible’s stories so that Jesus’ welcome is divorced from his teaching about sin, condemnaton, and repentance. Naturally, we need to correct this and restore a whole-Bible context. But lets be careful not to fall into the idea that God’s severity is somehow the proper essence of God that must be recognized.

Because, after all, people want a God who is less patient, and quicker to act. When you look at peoples’ (sometimes understandable and justified) response to injustice and evil that they recognize, it is no mystery why the mob preferred a patriotic revolutionary like Barabbas rather than Jesus. Barabbas saw a problem and started killing foreign invaders to fix it. That’s what people wanted God to do and it is what they want God to do now. Jesus’ way looked wimpy at best, and treasonous at worst.

A real god would support the forces of liberation now.

For further reading: The Extra Mile by Jeffrey Meyers