Wilson rocks

The quote below is another reason I like Doug Wilson, who is on a real tirade against post-modernism lately - emergent church, Brian MacLaren, all those guys - over at www.dougwils.com. This one below is on letting Jesus be Jesus.

"One of the experts in the law answered him, "Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also." Jesus replied, "And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them. "Woe to you . . ." (Luke 11:45, NIV).

"Jesus responds with no explanation at all... All He does is turn to the expert in the law who thought himself grieved and insulted, and say, "Oh, and that reminds me. You guys . . ." In for a penny, in for a pound.

"... There are many ways in which we have portrayed Jesus to the unbelieving world as a smarmy milksop. This trick of denying the plain teaching of Scripture is just one of them. We want a blank screen Jesus, a Jesus upon which we may project our sentimentalist fantasies. The only problem with this procedure is the text.

"Jesus is such a real character, more alive than any man who ever lived, and He had so many angular features that we can do nothing about. So we get out the platitude brush, and persist in painting our pietistic varnish in glossy layer after layer on the text of Scripture. To change the metaphor, we are trying to put sentimentalist Victorian wallpaper on top of some rough Mexican stucco. And despite our intense and prim efforts, when we are done, we still have a Jesus who damned fig trees, healed withered hands, threw furniture around in the Temple, not to mention some of the coins, forgave adulteresses and IRS men, called the tetrarch a name, went to dinner parties thrown by disreputable people, and threw consistent, unrelenting taunts at the squeaky-clean religious leaders of His day. Anyone who misses this is simply not paying attention. But Jesus commands attention.

"We let the language of holyspeak roll over us, such that we are not paying real attention any more. We like the feeling it gives us, but that is not necessarily the same thing as listening. But our attention is grabbed if an uninspired someone takes the words of Jesus, and puts them into our context, and points the gun at our Pharisees. "Jesus," we say to the new arrival, the rude guy, "could not possibly have ever done anything like that. Why, that conflicts with the traditions of the rabbis."