The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey

by Brian Zahnd

That Jesus could become King of the Jews through suffering and death is inconceivable to Peter. For Peter, a messiah who is killed is a messiah who fails, and Peter didn’t sign up for failure.

Christianity is not a theology of glory, but a theology of the cross. But to choose the way of the cross over the way of glory is a hard lesson to learn.

Most of us are scripted to think that life is a game and the purpose of life is to win. This is the way that seems right. But the divine truth is that life is a gift and the purpose of life is to learn to love well.

Grasping for greatness is the way of the rat race. But as Walter Brueggemann says, the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat. Or as Jesus put it, what do you gain if you win it all, but lose your soul?

When we’re in competition with our neighbors it’s hard to love them.

The glory of the kingdom is Jesus Christ crucified and James and John had unwittingly asked to be crucified with Jesus.

the kingdom of Christ does not come in the way of worldly power politics.

Caesar and all his successors come to power through conquest. But Jesus became King of Kings on Good Friday.

And I’m afraid that most of us are still very susceptible to this lie. We think of love as mere sentiment, while accepting violence as true power. Yet the whole life and ministry of Jesus is a reputation of this lie.

The kingdom of God is a kingdom of love, not domination. As followers of Jesus we are called to the practice of radical patience, because the kingdom of God is without coercion. We persuade by love, witness, Spirit, reason, rhetoric, and if need be, by martyrdom, but never by force. This is what Alan Kreider described as “the patient ferment of the early church.”

The early church understood that the kingdom of God did not and could not come through Caesar or the ways of Caesar, thus they had no ambition to wield the power of Caesar’s sword.

Most of us could stand to be a bit more like Bartimaeus. As we continue in our Christian life we may experience enough disappointments in prayer that we slip into praying safe prayers—prayers that never risk disappointment. We no longer pray boldly like Bartimaeus; instead we pray careful prayers—prayers that are so vague and ambiguous that we would be hard-pressed to tell whether or not they were ever answered.

But if we never actually ask Jesus to specifically and definably intervene in our life, though we may shield ourselves from disappointment, we also preclude the possibility of experiencing a miracle. We need to risk disappointment in prayer.

But if we abandon all expectations in prayer, we surrender to a modern skepticism that leaves our lives a barren and sterile landscape devoid of divine presence and intervention. I can live in a world where not all of my prayers are answered. But I cannot live in a world where a prayer-answering God is never called upon and thus absent.

As Jesus considered the course of his ministry, the devil tempted him to compromise the integrity of his mission. Jesus couldn’t be tempted by overt evil, so the devil tempted him with a trilogy of “good ideas.”

The three good ideas suggested by the devil were to feed everyone, persuade everyone, and liberate everyone. And who could disagree with these ideas? They seem like good ideas. But there’s a devil lurking in those good ideas, a devil that Jesus discerned.

God is not a divine vending machine dispensing desired outcomes in exchange for the right amount of faith currency. God is not a machine and faith is not a medium of exchange. God and faith are much more complex than this.

Yes, mustard seeds are small, but they possess the capacity for tremendous growth.

Faith is not a commodity or a currency—it’s not a coin to operate a vending machine. Faith is organic, living, and capable of growth. Faith is like a seed, not a coin.

It’s interesting to consider that though Abraham is the father of faith, he may have never known “faith” as a word.

For Abraham faith was not an abstract concept, but the orientation of his soul toward God.

Abraham did not become the father of faith by accumulating a currency of faith; rather faith grew in Abraham’s life until it was the most dominant reality in the garden of his soul.

Though we could speak of doing the impossible, I think it’s better to speak of becoming what we once thought was impossible. The emphasis should always be on becoming over doing.

But it’s how the temple tax is paid that makes the story so delightful—from a shekel coin found in a fish’s mouth! People who followed Jesus always found that there was somehow more than enough. Water turned into wine, loaves and fish multiplied, and money for a tax bill was found in a fish’s mouth. Jesus taught his disciples not to worry about provision. When we seek first the kingdom of God, what we need will be provided.

when we walk with Jesus we can expect to be surprised by miracles of provision.

Yes, some Christians will gain notoriety, but it should be for Christlikeness, not for celebrity based on bigness. Bigness is not a Christian value.

Lamech’s insane commitment to revenge led to the exponential violence in the days of Noah one generation later. Though we often imagine other lurid sins, violence is the only sin mentioned in the text.

In an age where the killing capacity of Cain’s club has been exponentially multiplied by the creation of nuclear arsenals, searching for Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat instead of seeking to rid the world of violence really is an exercise in missing the point!

And so the Savior of the world directs us toward a re-appropriation of Lamech’s seventy time seven equation, applying it to the practice of radical forgiveness. The most remarkable thing about Christ-informed ethics is its commitment to forgiveness—indeed, if Christianity is about anything, it’s about forgiveness.

If we want Christian faith to survive in a secular age we have to figure out how to form Christian faith in little children.

if we want faith in Jesus to remain realistically possible in a secular age, one of the most valuable things we can do is bring children to church.

Even though you may stubbornly maintain some kind of faith in Jesus without belonging to a church, your children probably will not, and your grandchildren almost certainly will not. One of the essential tasks of the church is to pass on the faith from one generation to another, and without the church this is nearly impossible. If we’re interested in our children and grandchildren sharing our faith, we need the church.

Today you might want to ask Jesus what you can do to help make Christian faith possible for future generations. I can’t think of anything more important.

We are never more prone to put a softening varnish on Jesus than when he broaches the subject of money.

The kingdom of heaven is not a meritocracy; the kingdom of heaven is an economy of grace.

Why are we so convinced of our own deservedness? Isn’t it just as likely that in the sight of God we are those who though only laboring one hour still need—not deserve, but need—a day’s wage? Ask yourself this question: Am I sustained by the law of just deserts or by the grace of God?

In the Stygian darkness of the pagan world the Law and the Prophets enabled the Hebrew people to grope forward in the understanding of who God is. The Law and the Prophets are the moon and stars that enabled Israel to navigate a treacherous world of idolatry and injustice. But when the day dawns, the moon and stars recede and give way to the rising sun. Jesus Christ is the sun of righteousness risen with healing in his rays, and Moses and Elijah have come to Tabor to bear witness to the greatness of the Son of God.

Simon Peter seems to have missed this symbolism, thinking instead of erecting three shrines—one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus. But this idea of making the Law and the Prophets equal to Christ is quickly shot down when the voice from the cloud says, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!” Jesus is what God has to say. A flat reading of the Bible allows us to proof-text any idea we want, but Jesus is the Word of God.

What we see in today’s Gospel reading is the “Sons of Thunder” (as Jesus aptly nicknamed them) trying to coerce the Prince of Peace into launching a drone strike on their enemies!

Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test, telling us more about ourselves than about God.

All Scripture is fulfilled in and by Jesus Christ. So if we don’t see it in Jesus, we let it go—because even the Bible must bow to Jesus. If we read the Bible allowing it to do what it does best by pointing us to Jesus, we are engaging with Scripture properly. But if we read the Bible in search of texts to force Jesus to conform to our ideas about who to hate and how to justify violence, we can expect to be rebuked by the spirit of the living Christ.

The biblical scholar understood that Jesus had spoken correctly when he had identified love of God and love of neighbor as the heart of Scriptural revelation and the way that leads to life, but the scholar was looking for a loop-hole because there were obviously people he didn’t want to love,

Jesus could have constructed his parable so that a noble Jew showed mercy to a Samaritan victim. This would have been a step in the right direction, but it would have kept the Jew in the superior role. Jesus’ parable is more subversive than that. Jesus casts his parable so that a Jew is the victim, other Jews fail to act in love, and a compassionate Samaritan is the hero of the story. Jesus was challenging the Jewish tendency to look at Samaritans as two-dimensional villains. Jesus is essentially asking, “What are you going to do if the people whose theology you scorn are more merciful than you? What if the one you’ve made an outsider treats you as a neighbor, what are you going to do then?”

Rabbi Pinchas once asked his students how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun. One student suggested “Could it be when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it’s a sheep or a dog?” “No,” answered the rabbi. Another asked, “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it’s a fig tree or a date palm?” “No,” answered the rabbi. “Then when is it?” the pupils demanded. Rabbi Pinchas said, “It is when you can look into the face of any person and recognize them as your sister or brother. Until we’re able to do that, it is still night.”

Without some form of contemplative practice we will spend too much time in one of three undesirable mental states: drifting back into the painful past, flitting about in the distracted present, or rushing ahead into the anxious future.

In liturgical and personal prayer we use words to become properly formed and to present our petitions. But in contemplative prayer we sit silently acknowledging the presence of Christ.

This parable is not a voyeur’s view of the damned to inform the comfortable and curious. I have to read the parable as a rich man living in a world where at least a billion people long for the crumbs from my table. I don’t read it and then think, “Well, after all, I prayed a sinner’s prayer years ago so I don’t need to worry about any of this.” That would be to mock Jesus. The very thing the Pharisees did! To be a Christian means I am deliberately attempting to follow Jesus. Being a Christian does not mean I can ignore Lazarus with impunity! Being a Christian means I can no longer pretend that I don’t see Lazarus lying at my door.

Most of us are predisposed to divide the world into good and bad people, the righteous and the unrighteous. But Jesus rarely does this. For Jesus the most dominant categories are the proud and the humble.

It’s important to understand that the Pharisees began as a sincere and commendable movement seeking to preserve Jewish identity in a pagan ocean. Unfortunately by the time of Jesus the Pharisees had devolved into the self-appointed morality police, deeply infected with a poisonous self-righteousness.

Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector teaches us to love the sinner and hate our own sin.