If you live in an apartment, you may have somebody living on the floor above yours. Imagine that, one night, the people above you have a few work friends in for a drink and they make noise until the early hours of the morning. If these people are your friends, you may reprimand them on your next encounter; but if they are not friends, you may well report them to the tenants' association and strive to avenge the disturbance. The offending action is the same in both cases; it is your reaction that is different.
And it is different because of the bias you have for or against the people upstairs. We all have our biases. They can be influenced by our faith, our race, our upbringing, our gender or by any other influence that has worked on us in the past. The strong words of tomorrow's Gospel (Mark, 9:34-48) could well be a challenge to every religious bias that we have ever held dear about Jesus.
Jesus's words and images - millstones around necks, cutting off your own hand - are difficult to stomach. I have yet to meet a Christian who has not attempted to water down these violent and grotesque instructions. Jesus is, after all, supposed to be a kindly revolutionary, not a preacher of self-mutilation. But the fact is that these words of Jesus are there and it is hard to construe them in any other way than in the way that they appear.
John Hicks spoke of a criterion of embarrassment when he studied the words of Jesus. He was trying to decide which words were authentically spoken by Jesus and which were edited by the evangelists. He believed that if the words were embarrassing to our overall image of Christ, then they were, unfortunately, likely utterances of Jesus. In this case the criterion of embarrassment definitely comes into play.
When we stand aside from the gentler images of Christ we see a man who was genuinely perturbed by those who did harm to either God or their neighbours. The cleansing of the Temple, the instruction "leave the dead to bury their dead" (Matthew 8:22) and tomorrow's Gospel all show a man who was deeply angered by wrongdoing. We see a man burning with zeal to protect those who are trying to live good lives. We see a Jesus who offends the complacent images we treasure so much in our bias-bank.
Those of us who bear his name should pay close attention to the hard message that Christ speaks. We have watered down the character of Jesus to the level of inoffensive do-gooder, and in doing so we have alienated him from the desire of future generations of Christians who would be challenged by the strength of his convictions. It is essential that Jesus's character and nature do not get subsumed in a bland popculture and it is the duty of every Christian to protect the integrity of his teachings and actions, however much the complete picture offends our own images of the man. The reduction of Jesus to the role of comforting celebrity is an insult to Christ and to the billions of people who have lived their lives according to his Gospel.
Behold the Lamb of God! This is he who rails against those who defile the innocent; this is he who is angered by our wrongdoing; this is he who takes away the sins of the world - but, despite what we would prefer him to be, he isn't afraid to challenge us in strong terms!
F. MacE.