Greentree Community Church

Based on the last two weeks, I’ve tried to make it clear that I agree that Christians can be hypocrites and can often misrepresent Jesus in their failure to live up to his standard, in their failure to let Jesus’ call to love, service, and kindness match up to their words.  The final solution is for Christians to stop using so many words, to stop telling everyone else why they’re screwed up and how they should live. Instead, Christians should be pointing to the real hero, not my moral actions but Jesus’, not my goodness but Jesus’, not my inability to live out the Gospel but Jesus’ ability. 

On that basis, let’s look briefly at Jesus’ record for violence, oppression, and persecution.  First, throughout Scripture, God continually puts the poor, widows, orphans, and outcasts at the center of his heart and mission (Ps. 68.5, Is. 61.1-4Jer. 22.16).  When Jesus steps on the scene, he defines his mission directly from Isaiah 61 in these terms, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”  And so, Jesus chose these same types of people to walk with him and inaugurate his ministry (I Cor. 1.26-29).  We can conclude that in His ministry, Jesus does not hate, persecute, or practice hypocrisy.

Yet Jesus does not only identify with the outcast in empathy but actually chose to become the outcast.  Hypocrites cast blame, reproach, derision, hate, and horror on others; hypocrites look down their noses, mock, scorn, rebuke, wag fingers and praise themselves.  Instead of sitting beside them, Jesus came and sat beneath them, at the other end of their derision, scorn, and hate.  Hebrews 13.13 tells us that Jesus bore the reproach of others on the cross.  Philippians 2.5-11 tells us that though He deserved all praise and honor, He instead “made Himself nothing” and took the “form of a servant.”  Luke 15.1-2 tells us that Jesus was scorned by the religious people as a lover of sinners and Luke 7.34 shows us that the religious people wagged their finger of condemnation in Jesus’ face, calling him a glutton and a drunkard.  Of course, all the Gospels portray Jesus as not only mocked and derided but actually killed as a victim of religious violence and injustice.  Despite his death in that way, Jesus does not retaliate with fire from heaven as He could have done, but with a plea to God for their forgiveness (Luke 23.34).  Jesus knocks Christian and non-Christian, religious and irreligious alike on their backs.  Jesus knows that all of us, Christian or non-Christian are hypocrites; none of us live up to even our own standards, much less His, and yet He calls us to come to Him to experience His grace, His forgiveness.  He calls us to come and give up our scathing hatred and our distrust and fall into the arms of the only non-hypocrite on the planet, One who endured the pain of hypocrisy, took it on Himself, and now freely gives grace to the moral and the immoral (Luke 15).  How will you respond?