You’ve definitely heard it in the songs. Take for instance The Killers, who make Jesus seem like a guy you’d like to bring home to mom & dad:
He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus
but he talks like a gentleman
like you imagined when you were young
Think about it for a second…how closely does this line up with the Jesus presented to us in the Bible?
-He’s homeless.
-He is relatively ugly.
-He’s poor—to the point that women are traveling with & supporting Him. (But He always pays His taxes…sometimes with coins that pop out of fish mouths)
-He sometimes loses His anger and flips over tables in a fit of rage.
-He is constantly, publicly cursing all the pastors in your town whom the rest of the community reveres. etc.
Would you really want to bring Him home to ma & pa?
How about another example, this one from Tom Petty regarding the followers of Jesus:
She’s a good girl, loves her mamma.
Loves Jesus, and America too.
Same idea. How do we know she’s a good girl? Well, because she loves Jesus and America (but we’ll ignore that association for now). It’s ironic because the most radical, dedicated Christ followers I know are not necessarily what the world would consider nice, quiet girls like the ones Petty refers to. They’re usually the ones who have sold their homes or belongings and live with the poorest of the poor. Or the ones people think are drug addicts.
Rich Mullins went barefoot everywhere, didn’t have a home, and gave the vast majority of his money to Native Americans.
Mother Teresa had disgusting feet because of how she dug through each shoe donation box and pulled out the worst possible pair for herself.
My friend Josh would always scream at the top of his lungs when he saw me in the streets of Chicago, even from three blocks away, “HEY ETHAN! I LOVE YOU MAN! PRAISE GOD MAN!” Everyone on those three blocks hears, then looks at him and then at me. He’s a bit wild and unpredictable, not unlike John the Baptist. Josh and his wife sold all their things and moved to Cambodia a few years ago, where they also work with some of the poorest people in the world.
Are these the type of people who come to mind when you hear “Free Falling”?
Have we replaced the Jesus of the Bible with some soft, mushy milquetoast? Do we imagine a lamb-hugging dude (which…never happened in the Bible) whose greatest characteristic is that He’s really nice?
If that’s all Christianity can cough up in regards to its central figure, I’d want nothing to do with it. Nor would most guys I know. Probably most women, for that matter.
What’s more, if Jesus is nothing more than nice, that means His followers need to do nothing other than be nice. Is that all the kingdom is about? Is that why I got “your kingdom come” tattooed over my heart, just to remind me to be more nice?
Niceness alone won’t save the world. Niceness won’t overthrow the Third Reich, dole out justice for sex traffickers, or fix systemic racism.
Yet this caricature of Christ has sunk so deeply into our collective subconscious that we blindly accept these references to Nice Guy Jesus without a second thought. Then, when we do get around to cracking our Bibles open, we’re surprised that He sometimes says mean things,
that He gets pretty heated and goes nuts,
that He won’t let go of this idea that He is actually…God,
that He comes a second time wearing a robe drenched in blood,
that He looks at the religious teachers of His time and basically says f— you.
Wait a minute…I thought Jesus was nice!
