Once Jesus asked his friends, ‘Who do you say I am?’ I don’t know if you have thought much about it lately, but the Jesus we know from the Gospels wasn’t a lot like us. Oh, yes, I know that the Letter to the Hebrews testifies that he was in every respect tempted as we are, yet without sin, and I affirm that, but that’s not what I’m driving at. I’m suggesting that the people who encountered him knew he was different. Surely that was part of his allure, part of the reason crowds came to see him, part of the reason otherwise responsible adults left all to follow him. And it was also an aspect of his capacity to frustrate and alienate his foes. He was a stranger, and that with a capital “S.” The Catholic theologian Hans Kung has written:
‘He did not belong to the establishment nor to the revolutionary party, but neither did he want to opt out of ordinary life.... Obviously he did not adopt the role which a saint...is expected to play. For this he was too normal..., offending the world-forsaking ascetics by his uninhibited worldliness. For those who supported law and order he turned out to be a provocateur, dangerous to the system. He disappointed the activist revolutionaries by his nonviolent love of peace... And for the devout who adapted themselves to the world he was too uncompromising. For the silent majority he was too noisy; for the noisy minority he was too quiet; too gentle for the strict, and too strict for the gentle. He was an obvious outsider.’
If Jesus is who we say he is, if Jesus truly is who we know he is, if Jesus is who the Bible proclaims him to be, nothing and no one can place a higher claim on us than he. Jesus, the ultimate outsider, invites us to be like him, to go with him, to identify with the weak, the outsider, the downtrodden, the hapless and hopeless, to see them as he does, to serve them as he served, to give ourselves for others as he gave himself for us. To say , as did the disciple Peter long ago, ‘You are the Christ,’ is to speak less with the tongue and more with the offering of our whole life.
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