Jesus of Nazareth wasn't afraid to tell it like it is. Those who claim to follow him, on the other hand, often are. It's easy to settle for a tamed and domesticated Jesus. A bound-and-gagged Jesus. A Jesus of our own making. That's why this book focuses on the fifteen most outrageous things Jesus said: the fifteen things you are least likely to hear preached about in church. If you ever suspected that Jesus wasn't crucified for acting like a polite vicar in a pair of socks and sandals, then this book is for you. Fasten your seatbelt and get ready to discover the real Jesus in all his outrageous, ungagged glory.
Jesus of Nazareth wasn't afraid to tell it like it is. Those who claim to follow him, on the other hand, often are.
If we're not careful, we can settle for a tamed and domesticated Jesus, a gagged-and-bound Jesus, a wouldn't-say-boo-to-a-goose Jesus, a Jesus of our own making. But he isn't the real Jesus.
If you have ever suspected that Jesus wasn't crucified for acting like a respectable vicar in a pair of socks and sandals, then this book is for you. It focuses on the fifteen most outrageous aspects of Jesus' teaching – the fifteen things that you are least likely to hear preached in churches today. They are the fifteen things which make most people want to gag him. They are also the things which got him killed.
People have been trying to gag Jesus for 2,000 years. They have tried to sit him on their knee like a ventriloquist's dummy and turn him into a spokesman for their own cause. You can tell how successful they have been from the fact that the gagged-and-bound Jesus is so popular. He never ruffles feathers because he says exactly what we want to hear.
The enemies of Communism tried to gag Jesus too. Rather suspiciously, they told the world he was a liberal Westerner and a free-thinking capitalist, just like them. The American president John Quincy Adams declared in one of his Fourth of July speeches that "The birthday of this nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Saviour… It forms a leading event in the progress of the Gospel."² President Richard Nixon cursed and schemed and lied his way through five years in the White House, but that didn't stop him from invoking Jesus as an ally in his speeches and from ending them with a confident prayer that God would bless America.
This trend continues unabated today. All around us people are trying to gag Jesus. Muslims claim that Jesus was a Muslim prophet who was simply misunderstood. Self-help gurus tell us that Jesus was the ultimate life coach. I even read an article by a gay rights activist which argued that Jesus' decision to spend three intensive years with twelve male disciples is proof that he was gay. Jesus isn't just the most talked about, sung about, written about and fought about person in world history. He is also the most gagged and kidnapped and hijacked person in world history. Everybody wants to put their own words into Jesus' mouth and to make him say exactly what they want to hear. But more and more people are longing to do away with the background noise and to let the real Jesus do the talking.
That's why I think that you will find this short book very helpful. If it is possible to get to know the real Jesus, then we ought to. Nobody is thought about, talked about, written about, blogged about, tweeted about, sung about or ranted about as much as Jesus – and yet nobody is so little understood. Each of us needs to research the life and teachings of the greatest human being who ever lived.
In this book we will strip away the background noise by going back to the four original historical sources for the life of Jesus. Two of Jesus' twelve disciples wrote accounts of the real Jesus as they knew him: we know those books today as the gospels of Matthew and John. Another of Jesus' disciples was an uneducated fisherman named Simon Peter, who asked his more educated friend Mark to write down his account of the life of Jesus in a third gospel. Shortly afterwards, a highly educated Greek doctor from the multiracial city of Antioch turned his hand to investigative journalism and spent two years interviewing all the key eyewitnesses of Jesus' life across the length and breadth of Israel. His historical account is known to us today as the gospel of Luke.
Matthew was a greedy tax collector until he met the ungagged Jesus. Peter and John were simple fishermen. Luke was a typical pagan. Instead of trying to gag Jesus and to force him to say what they wanted to hear, they had the humility to listen. When they did so, they found that his teaching changed everything. They listened open-mouthed to the fifteen outrageous things which I highlight in this book from Jesus' teachings, and they fell in love with the most controversial figure in the whole of human history.
So get ready to discover the real Jesus of Nazareth for yourself. He isn't bound and gagged any more. He is ready to tell it like it really is to us today.
Most people don't find the first of Jesus' ungagged teachings very controversial. That's because they haven't understood it. They think that Jesus' teaching about stress and worry is nothing more than fortune-cookie wisdom, nothing more than a first-century version of the Bobby McFerrin song, Don't Worry, Be Happy . But it isn't. It is much, much more radical than that. It tells us that stress is the chief symptom of our idolatry and self-worship. When we understand what Jesus said about stress and worry, it's easy to see why it got him killed.
Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?
I live in London. It's a crazy, stressed-out city. In fact, it's a city where people wear their busyness and stress as a badge of honour. When I catch the train to work, none of us are resting. We are part of an army of commuters who all tap away at smartphones and iPads, determined to squeeze the juice out of every single second of the day for sending emails, social networking and, above all, making money. When we get home from work we don't spend the evenings and weekends resting. We cram our free time with so many leisure activities that most of us have to go back to work on Monday to recover.