Where is the real Jesus.?

The Jesus of today, as commonly understood, is far from the truth of the real Jesus. The church has made a comfortable Jesus. The church (or that which calls it's self the church) are guilty of making Jesus in our own image. Jesus is now safe. Jesus is whatever we want him to be, and above all, “nice.” A suitable addition to a comfortable lifestyle, today’s Jesus that we endorse is so easily more a figment of our imagination than anything like the person who lived and walked and talked and made a difference two millennia ago.

For in our niceness and pleasantness, the true Jesus is allowed to say very little. He is transformed into icons and images, greeting cards and statuettes. The picture is what we want, not the disturbing reality of what he said and did, how he lived and died.

Christ was never viewed as a “safe” option in his lifetime. He was always seen as someone who made a difference, who was radical, dangerous even. In fact he was not allowed to live because the powers that were decided he just was not safe to have around. Only with the passing of the years has his revolutionary nature been accommodated into a placid, reassuring, and comfortable faith.

For he was radical even for the radicals. He himself said: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’” Matt. 10:34-36.

Jesus did not hesitate to use a direct approach and was not a stranger to controversy. He called the religious leaders of his time “whitened sepulchers, full of dead men’s bones.” He called the respected pious men of his day hypocrites. He called the king a fox. He identified the establishment as a “brood of vipers.” He was associated with publicans and sinners, accused as a glutton and a wine-bibber. He accused the religious leaders of turning the Temple into a den of thieves. In his public addresses he did not mince his words but clearly showed what he thought of the narrow-mindedness of religious tradition. Jesus had no time for mock holiness.

He used unconventional approaches to healing: he deliberately healed on the Sabbath knowing what offence this would bring to those who believed they were especially religious. He recognized that his identification of the Isaiah passage with himself in Nazareth would bring immense conflict and danger, but went ahead anyway. He seemed not to care about property ownership when he sent the demons into the pigs; when challenged about his civic duties he arranged a miraculous payment from the mouth of a fish.

Jesus cared nothing for wealth or social position or power. He didn’t even bother talking to Herod, the ultimate insult to a king. To Pilate he was brief and to the point, not seeking any kinds of favours.

Most of all, Jesus was not “nice.” He represented nothing of that “niceness” which is so characteristic of Christianity today, a bland amorphous faith that is simply, well, nice.

We do not want a "nice" Jesus just a real one.!!!!