the tindog coffeehouse

I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, and so far I’ve really been challenged and inspired by it.

In one chapter, he talks about his friend Penny, who wanted nothing to do with Christians but eventually became a Christian herself. One day, she told him about how she started to read the Bible with her Christian friend Nadine:

We started reading through Matthew, and I thought it was all very interesting, you know. And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward. He wasn’t diplomatic, and yet I feel like if I met Him, He would really like me. Don, I can’t explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me. I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio. I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me. But it wasn’t like that with Jesus. There were people He loved and people He got really mad at, and I kept identifying with the people He loved, which was really good, because they were all the broken people, you know, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcasts or pagans. There were others, regular people, but He didn’t play favorites at all, which is miraculous in itself. That fact alone may have been the most supernatural thing He did. He didn’t show partiality, which every human does.

The Gospels are my favorite part of the Bible. They’re the core of the entire thing, the main attraction, the moment when we finally see Jesus in the flesh. Everything in the Old Testament simply leads up to that moment, and everything after refers back to it.

And what many people who’ve never read them don’t realize is just how much of a revolutionary Jesus was. He directly took on the establishment–not the Roman government which controlled Israel at the time, but the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees who really ran the show. His ministry was a threat to them, to their way of life, so much so that they finally had Him arrested and crucified.

And yet, the reason His ministry was so dangerous to the Pharisees wasn’t because He was leading a political or military uprising (which the Jews expected their Messiah to do against the Romans), it was because He was talking about love.

So yes, Jesus is very disturbing. And that’s a good thing.

There’s an old song by the Christian band Jacob’s Trouble, “Way of the Cross”, that puts it better:

Jesus was born in the dung and straw
Israel’s king in a donkey’s stall
It was no accident
It was the way of the cross
He had a bad reputation and a scandalous streak
Passed over doctors and lawyers
To hang with beggars and thieves
It was no accident
It was the way of the cross
Brings forth life from a barren womb
Puts wise words in the mouth of a fool

He pardoned the sinners and healed the diseased
But the teachers of religion were His enemies
It was no accident
It was the way of the cross
He gave the keys of the kingdom
To the meek and the mild
He told the self-righteous grownups to
Act like a child
It was no accident
It was the way of the cross
Cuts down giants by the hand of a boy
Knocks down city walls with nothing but noise

He tore down the curtains, blew open the doors
For a handful of fishermen, pushers, and whores
It was no accident
It was the way of the cross
He stripped off our disguises
Our cover was blown
At the end of all we thought we knew
Naked past the bone
It was no accident
It was the way of the cross
Slays whole armies with the jaw-bone of an ass
Puts the end of the world in a book from the past

Jesus was killed on a cross of wood
The king of the Jews died like an ordinary hood
It was no accident
Brings forth life from an empty tomb
Burns His words in the heart of a fool like me