Jesus: The Heretic

What a way to start an entry huh? Jesus the Heretic. Sort of gets your attention? Well, it was actually something Jesus heard alot while he was teaching. And I would venture to say that if he were here teaching today, there would be a surprising number of religious "Christian" leaders who would say the same thing. There are so many who claim to know him and his message and yet, in truth, they really do not have a clue.

Remember, this blog is primarily dealing with the message of grace and love. We are not here to discuss in depth every aspect of the teachings of Jesus nor the validity of the biblical version of his life. But I will say this - the higher on a pedestal you place the man Jesus, the harder it will be for you to truly understand and follow him and his teachings. The problem is - it has been shoved down people's throats for so long that "Jesus is God" that everyone forgets that Jesus was a man - a human being, capable of everything and anything that any other human being has ever done or will do. And it was as a man that Jesus taught and ministered as he did.

Jesus constantly questioned and even disputed claims held as truth by the sacred texts of his time. Even things credited to have been written by the patriarch Moses, Jesus flat out said "This is not the nature of God." And he was called a blasphemer and heretic because of it. There was even at least one time when the angry crowd took him to the edge of a cliff in order to throw him over and stone him to death because of his having said things such as this. This was recorded to have happened near the beginning of his ministry. Now think about all of this. Here is this virtual nobody from the ghetto (Nazareth/Galilee) who is bringing into question things attributed to one of the greatest patriarchs of your religion - the one who is said to have written a major set of your most sacred texts. Not only was Jesus a "nobody", most of those that knew him considered him to be either a bastard (literally) or at least to have been conceived illegitimately. So needless to say, Jesus was looked upon with disdain from his birth by this highly religious and pious community. So who was he to even think of questioning the sacred writings of his religion?

Why Is Grace Such a Scary Topic?

Grace seems to be a scary topic for most churches and religious people. Why is it so scary? I believe it is largely due to the fact that they really do not understand God's love - and grace and love are tied together inseparably. You cannot have love without grace and you can't have grace without love - at least not God's kind of love and grace. And God's love and grace, being inseparable, are both unconditional. People have a hard time with unconditional love. I guess it would be pretty safe to say that we, as a whole, typically have a hard time with "unconditional" anything.

We tend to put the same limitations on God that we ourselves think we have. Because we may find it hard to love unconditionally - we think God is incapable of it as well. We try to make God in our own image. It's somewhat funny and also very sad that we do this. I have seen so many people try to justify themselves by saying that God thinks the same thing or acts the same way when in fact, it really shows that they do not know God as well as they think they do. They will even try to use "sacred" texts such as those found in the ever popular "Holy Bible". But what they do not realize is that when, in fact, these "sacred" texts put any kind of limit on God's love and grace - it is precisely because the writer of that text had a much too limited view of God him or herself. But that would be blasphemous, wouldn't it, to say that these "sacred" texts present us with a possibly skewed view of God? Well, just ask Jesus.