Our Discomforting Savior

Have you seen this? Michael Spencer discussing one of the most uncomfortable (and therefore most avoided) sayings of Jesus. I have a mind to collect such uncomfortable sayings all on one blogpost. It would be a long post, though. The cumulative impact might be rather surprising. I have no desire to set up some kind of dichotomy between the comforting Jesus and the discomforting Jesus, but such a dichotomy is implicit in our avoidance of this category of teaching, always scanning the Scriptures for "comfort" verses. Are we missing something?

Getting back to Michael's post, check this out:

What’s challenging about so much of Luke 14 is how it seems to contradict so many things we take for granted as normal and moral, especially family.

A new landowner assumes he should go see what he’s bought. A farmer buys five oxen- a major purchase- and wants to examine them. A newlywed wants his honeymoon. (Deuteronomy 24:5 gave him a year at home!)

All of these become examples of excuse makers who are more interested in the normal routines of life than the Kingdom of God that is coming.

I would put myself- and all of you- squarely in the group Jesus is describing, by the way. If you think you aren’t an excuse maker who would rather inspect his oxen than enter the Kingdom, you’re not going to see the intent of Jesus.

In the parable where these examples are found (14:15-24), the man giving the banquet (God working through Jesus) must literally drag and force people to come to the banquet. (“Compel them to come.”) Eventually his house is filled with the crippled, the blind, the lame and the assumed uninvited and unwelcome.

As Michael says, Jesus is often "purposely provocative." That's a pretty acute phrasing there. Very true. Like all the true prophets of old, I guess. We are more "of" this world than we like to admit, so the Scriptures, when we hear them clearly, often bring us up short, reveal us to be hiding in the bushes with fig leaves covering our embarrassing parts, and on those fig leaves are scrawled all the comfort verses of the Bible.

I put it this way over at Mount Jesus, apropos of another possible disturbing utterance of the Savior of the world:

if these opening words of Jesus [in the sermon on the mount] are not a little shocking to us, a little disturbing, making us shift in our seat a little (our comfortable seat in the grass with Jesus), if these beatitudes ripple over us like refreshing water instead of piercing us like the arrows of God, then perhaps we are not understanding them after all. That's my take. I want to be pierced by the Word (Heb 4:12), not just comforted. These words of Jesus have sharp points and fly faster than light.

Someday I'm going to need much comfort, I'm sure, and perhaps all that I say here will seem then like utter nonsense. But this is where I'm at right now. The Word is "two-edged," somebody said. Perhaps one edge is for piercing, and the other for healing.

Anyway, I think one of the most uncomfortable concepts of the Bible is that we who believe are "sent" for the purpose of the Gospel. We sing songs about being in the arms of Jesus, having our worry and fear subside as we remember that Jesus loves us, etc. All good. We get together and talk about our needs. When do we get together and talk about our mission? I'm just wondering. I'm sure we've all got cattle to look after, family matters to attend to, even a close relative's funeral to go to . . . then we can talk about following Jesus.

But our very discomforting Savior has another idea.