JESUS WAS THE ORIGINAL WEIRDO
Jesus was the original weirdo with a beardo.
T-SHIRT SLOGAN
If you’re open to the renewal of your mind by the Holy Spirit, and if such renewal serves the purpose of making us more like Jesus, then you need to brace yourself —you’re going to get more weird!
That’s because Jesus was the original weirdo.
The Gospel accounts continue to defy the church’s best efforts throughout history to turn Jesus into some kind of tame, dignified religious leader. Again and again, the Gospels reveal Jesus to be a strange and unlikely messiah. So strange and unlikely, in fact, that those who were searching the signs most intently for the coming of the promised king completely missed him.
This perspective is presented most powerfully by Mark’s Gospel, which begins in rather dramatic fashion with a wild and crazy John the Baptist, dressed in camel’s hair clothing and subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey, screaming at his listeners, “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (Mark 1:7-8).
In other words, “If you think I’m weird, wait until you get a load of the guy who’s coming!”
When we do meet that guy, he definitely lives up to John’s introduction. In chapter 1 alone, Jesus is baptized under a torn sky and a descending Holy Spirit, is sent out into the wilderness to be with wild beasts while angels ministered to him, and drives out demons and heals all manner of sicknesses. Mark 1 gives the impression of a wild Messiah wandering the highways and byways of Israel accompanied by wild animals and angels and with demons and sickness flying off in every direction.
Soon after, we start to get an impression of how the religious leaders saw him. Not just as weird, but dangerous.
In Mark 2:6-7, he’s accused of blasphemy for claiming to be able to forgive sins.
In Mark 2:16, aspersions are cast on him because he is socializing with sinful people and Roman collaborators.
In Mark 2:23-24, he is called a lawbreaker.
In Mark 3:20-21, his own family try to apprehend him because they believe he is insane.
And soon after (Mark 3:22) the teachers of the law interpret his behavior not as insanity, but demon possession. In fact, they believe he is possessed by Beelzebul, the daddy of all demons.
You can’t get very far into Mark’s Gospel without having to come to terms with the out-and-out strangeness of Jesus.
Years ago, a publisher asked the gothic rock singer-songwriter Nick Cave to write an introduction to Mark’s Gospel. At first, Cave was uncertain, recalling Jesus as the “wet, all-loving, etiolated individual” he heard about in his childhood Anglican Church, “the decaf of worship.”[38] But to his surprise, the Jesus he discovered in Mark’s Gospel wasn’t the wishy-washy Christ of his childhood church. It was the wild Messiah. He explains,
The Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about Him that I could not resist. . . . The Christ that the Church offers us, the bloodless, placid “Saviour” —the man smiling benignly at a group of children, or calmly, serenely hanging from the cross —denies Christ His potent, creative sorrow or His boiling anger that confronts us so forcefully in Mark. Thus the Church denies Christ His humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps “praise” but never relate to. The essential humanness of Mark’s Christ provides us with a blueprint for our own lives, so that we have something we can aspire to, rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences, rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy.[39]
As we explored in the previous chapter, if the renewal of the mind by the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to the gospel and shapes us to become more like Jesus, then it follows that we, too, should become more weird the more Christlike we become. Nick Cave concludes,
Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness, keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity —our ordinariness, our mediocrity —and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and to fly. In short, to be Christ-like.[40]
I sometimes despair at the advice given to Christians by some of their teachers and leaders, cautioning them not to be weird. Be different, they say, but don’t be a nut. Don’t be strange. But any cursory reading of the Gospels reveals Jesus to be very strange, even to his strongest supporters and closest friends.
He was a homeless, unmarried, thirtysomething rabbi who recruited a bunch of young (some still in their teens), uneducated boys to hit the road with him, preaching the coming of the Kingdom and calling on people to repent of their sins.
He didn’t mince words. He told the truth, even when it made people hate him. Especially when it made powerful people hate him.
He fraternized with prostitutes, extortionists, collaborators, zealots, and those euphemistically referred to as “sinners” —ordinary, irreligious people. He was unconcerned by what his friendship with such people would suggest to others.
When he taught people, he didn’t quote directly from the Torah. While he did refer to “the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (as in Luke 24:44, for example), he didn’t do so as normal religious teachers, which was to provide commentary on specific ancient texts. On the one occasion when he came closest to doing so, in Luke 4 where he reads Isaiah 61:1-2 and announces, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” it literally caused a riot.
Instead of telling stories about Moses or Abraham, he told them about housewives, farmers, business managers, and disrespectful sons. To describe his vision of the Kingdom, he referred to yeast and seeds, a mustard bush, a pearl, a banquet. None of this sounded to the casual observer like normal religious teaching at all.[41]
He was a miracle worker. He could read minds. He knew when people thought ill of him and when they would betray him.
Only the guileless —simple fishermen, lepers, outsiders, the sick, the possessed —felt at home around him. The conspiratorial, the proud, those with much to lose —they despised him, because he knew too much and what he knew could bring their worlds crashing down around them.
What he asked of them was that they repent. All he wanted was for them to move out of the shadows, away from their guile, their scheming, their fear, and into the light. His light.
Get real, he demanded. Repent. Quit lying to yourself. Love one another. Do good.
To some he met, he was absolutely weird. To others, he was beautifully winsome. It all depended on whether you wanted freedom. Jesus came, bringing the weird and winsome message that you can be truly free if you follow him. He personifies what we looked at in chapter 1. He possessed the kind of cognitive disinhibition of the eccentric identified by Shelly Carson. If the renewal of the mind by the Holy Spirit makes us more like Jesus, it will make us weirder and more winsome, just like him. Here are a few case studies as proof.
WINSOME AND WEIRD CASE STUDY 1: NICODEMUS
Most Christians know the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3. Their conversation gave rise to one of the best-known verses in the Bible —John 3:16. But don’t let your familiarity with the words “For God so loved the world . . .” cause you to overlook how remarkably weird Jesus’ interaction with Nicodemus was.
A visit from a guy like Nicodemus might normally be considered a big deal, even if he did arrive furtively under the cover of darkness. John introduces him as “a Pharisee, . . . a member of the Jewish ruling council” (John 3:1), which is really saying something. He was religious (a Pharisee), educated (Nicodemus is a Greek name), and powerful (a ruler). Most importantly, he was a son of Abraham, a guardian of the Jewish tradition, and he begins his meeting with Jesus by saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him” (verse 2). That’s his way of saying, “Bro, I’m a son of Abraham, a child of God, and I know you are too.” It’s a statement of solidarity.
But Jesus wasn’t having any of it.
His reply is downright strange, if not rude. “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (verse 3).
He’s basically saying, “Dude, don’t think we’re brothers just because we share the same bloodline. To join my family, you must be born again.” Or maybe more accurately, “born from above,” because one of Jesus’ best-known expressions, “to be born again,” might not be best translated that way. There’s actually some ambiguity in the Greek text: anōthen generally means “from above, from on high,” although it can refer to repetition, hence “again” or “anew.”
Actually, it might be intended to mean both. In the context of Jesus’ conversation with a proud Jewish leader like Nicodemus, and given what he tells him later about fleshly birth and spiritual birth, it seems clear he is telling the Pharisee that his physical birth in the line of Abraham isn’t enough for him to enter the Kingdom of God. He needs another birth, a spiritual birth from above.
This isn’t just a strange esoteric answer. To someone like Nicodemus, it would have been utterly offensive.
You see, all Jews, but especially religious ones like Nicodemus, believed their descent from Abraham guaranteed their entry into heaven. A common image often painted by rabbis at the time was that of Abraham standing watch at the gates of hell ensuring none of his children accidentally entered there.[42] Now, here was another rabbi, one whose miraculous powers assured Nicodemus he must be from God, daring to teach that their physical birth as Jews was no such guarantee at all. They must be born from above.
It says something about the strength of his curiosity about Jesus that Nicodemus stays and continues the conversation. He replies, “Huh?”
Seriously, that’s pretty much his answer. He has no clue what Jesus is talking about. I’ve heard preachers saying that Nicodemus’ inability to grasp what Jesus was saying was indicative of his sinful heart, but let’s face it, “You must be born from above” is pretty cryptic teaching. What exactly does it mean to be born from above? Here’s Jesus’ explanation:
Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, “You must be born again.” The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
JOHN 3:5-8
In brief, he’s saying that those who are born of the Spirit are free! They are disinhibited in the way that the wind is disinhibited. Collective behavior no longer constrains them. To the outside observer, they probably appear eccentric, but that’s because they are —and their eccentricity, birthed in them by the eccentric God, has set them free.
Nicodemus and his compatriots are trapped within the confines of their fleshly birth, their bloodlines, their heritage, and their religious system. You are anchored to the earth, Nicodemus, but if you could be born from above you would be free indeed.
Bear all this in mind and jump over to John 10 with me. Jesus isn’t speaking to Nicodemus any longer, but he is talking to Nicodemus’s crew, the Pharisees. And his condemnation of the Pharisees in John 10 should be seen as the background to his conversation with Nicodemus the Pharisee in chapter 3.
In John 10, the metaphor isn’t birth, but shepherding. He begins,
Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.
JOHN 10:1-5
We often confuse what Jesus is saying here and think he means as a good shepherd, it’s his task to keep the sheep safe inside the sheep pen. Actually, he’s saying the opposite. He’s condemning the Pharisees for penning the people of Israel within their draconian religious laws and teaching that God’s Kingdom is for Jews alone. Not so, says Jesus! He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
No sheep wants to be locked in a dry, dusty sheep pen. They want to graze in green pastures beside fresh streams. And Jesus is saying he’s come to lead them to freedom, away from the earthly control of Israel’s leaders. And then, in verse 16, he says the weirdest thing.
I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.
The gift of the Kingdom of God was entrusted to Israel in order that they take it to the nations and invite Gentiles to come under the reign of Yahweh and find life. Instead, the Pharisees had closed ranks. They had shuttered Israel from the outside world and refused entry to Gentiles unless they undertook the most daunting process of conversion. Jesus tells them he has come to satisfy God’s covenant with Israel and to lead his people to freedom, to join with those non-Jews who would acknowledge the Good Shepherd and unite them as a new, spiritual nation under his kingship.
Remember back in chapter 1, I quoted Richard Beck saying the Kingdom of Jesus is eccentric because it doesn’t create walls or borders; it is “embedded, pilgrim, landless, possessionless, homeless, sojourning, itinerant [and] missionary.”[43] Here is Jesus being his most eccentric.
And just like Nicodemus in chapter 3, the Pharisees are dumbstruck and have no idea what Jesus is talking about (John 10:6).
This, I believe, sheds more light on that strange conversation Jesus has with Nicodemus. To be born of the Spirit, or born from above, is to be set free from the earthbound burden of your Jewish birth. It means being set free from religious legalism and superiority and being lifted up from earth and scattered by the Spirit to the four corners of the planet to bring the Good News of the Kingdom to all.
In his beautiful book The Spirituals and the Blues, James Cone says that slaves and the children of slaves used spirituals to express exactly this idea. Though literally enslaved, this music affirmed their spiritual freedom and their essential humanity in the face of oppression. Though physically born slaves, they had been born from above, and this gave them a new sense of dignity in light of the promises of God. While their slave owners defined them as nothing, the spirituals redefined a powerful sense of black identity and hope. For slaves, their Christian music became a medium for lifting them up from their physical state and reshaping them by their extraordinary eschatological hope.
The only ones unnerved by their singing should have been the slave owners. In the same way, the only ones unnerved by Jesus’ teaching were the Pharisees. They were like slave owners, trying desperately to maintain their system of control. As we’ve seen, prostitutes, lepers, tax collectors, and outsiders were profoundly drawn to Jesus’ message of freedom. They needed to be born from above, because the promises of their fleshly birth had been well and truly dashed.
To be born again, then, isn’t simply to embrace a certain set of doctrinal beliefs about human sin and the atonement of Christ. It means to be free. Truly free. In Christ. As James Cone says elsewhere, “Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology.”[44]
Nicodemus is intrigued by all this. And asks the most obvious question —“How?”
How does one experience this rebirth from above?
And then things get even weirder.
Jesus refers to an obscure (and frankly, odd) story buried back in Numbers 21, where the Israelites, wandering in the wilderness, are afflicted by nests of poisonous snakes. Moses is told by God to make a bronze serpent and elevate it on a pole so that if anyone is bitten by a snake, they only have to look at it and they’ll be healed.
We all know what Jesus means, right? After all, we’ve read to the end of the story. We know he will be lifted up on a “pole” as he suffers and dies for our sins. We know what he means by his reference to Numbers 21, but how could Nicodemus understand? It must have been the strangest conversation. But as we’ve seen and will continue to see, strange conversations with Jesus were par for the course.
WINSOME AND WEIRD CASE STUDY 2: THE BLEEDING WOMAN
The Gospel writers often take great care in recording the names of individual men Jesus met (Nicodemus, Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus, Jairus), but not the women. Our second weird encounter with Jesus is one of the Gospels’ most beautiful, but the female protagonist is sadly unnamed, known only throughout history as the hemorrhaging or bleeding woman.
The nameless woman’s story appears in all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 5:25-34; Luke 8:43-48) and constitutes one of Jesus’ strangest and yet most touching miracles.
In all three accounts, the healing of the bleeding woman is presented as an interruption to a larger story —Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead. Jairus, a synagogue leader, has approached Jesus, asking him to heal his dying child, and the two of them, together with the disciples, are making their way through a dense crowd of onlookers and supplicants toward Jairus’s house. En route, the nameless woman approaches Jesus in secret, blending in with the thronging crowd, believing if she can merely touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, she might be healed.
The Gospel writers tell us she had been subject to vaginal bleeding for twelve years. She had spent all her money on remedies and treatments, only to find herself destitute and alone, a shadow person dwelling at the edges of society. She would have been viewed as a niddah, that is, a menstruating woman, and therefore ceremonially unclean. But she wasn’t menstruating. She was continuously bleeding, which effectively made her a permanent niddah, in a constant state of uncleanness. The implications of this are tragic. At this time, no man would put up with this condition. As a single woman, a very rare thing, she lived an extremely tenuous existence in the ancient Near East. It would appear she was unable to carry a child or give birth. She would have been barred entry to the synagogue or temple. She was broke.
I can’t emphasize enough the social and religious isolation she —an unmarried, childless, penniless woman, unable to enter religious premises or make offerings to God —would have endured, not to mention the discomfort of her physical condition.
Little wonder she believes she can’t approach Jesus directly.
Instead, she tries to steal a miracle from him by touching the fringe of his garment.
At first, this might seem like an odd decision, but there was some precedent for this decision. The Pharisees at that time had taken to wearing the tzitzit —extra-long fringes or tassels on their prayer shawls or clothing. In Matthew 23:5, Jesus berates them for such outward displays of religiosity, bemoaning, “They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long.” Nonetheless, common people had come to believe that because of the Pharisees’ great religious standing, their tzitzit was imbued with a mystical power.[45] This might very well be exactly what the Pharisees wanted them to think, but Jesus had scorned them for behaving so. There’s no power in a Pharisee’s tzitzit whatsoever, he declares. It’s all for show. They’re charlatans.
Unaware of this, and assuming Jesus to be equivalent to a Pharisee, the bleeding woman comes to believe that if she could just touch the fringe of his clothing, she would be healed.
This whole situation is so desperately sad. A filthy, hungry, sick woman, who dares not appear openly in public or approach a holy man face-to-face, slinks furtively through the crowd, edging her way toward Jesus, not knowing there’s actually no special power in the fringe of his robe.
And yet . . .
Mark’s Gospel says that upon touching Jesus’ cloak, “Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering” (Mark 5:29).
It’s weird, isn’t it?
Even though Jesus isn’t a Pharisee and the fringe of his cloak isn’t magic, this poor, forlorn woman has reached out in faith, and that is all it takes.
Remember, Jesus was being led by Jairus toward his home and his dying daughter. Did he see the woman approach? Did he know what was in her mind? Did he recognize her plan was misguided, even if her faith in him was well placed? Or was the whole miracle a surprise to him, as suggested by what he said next?
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.
MARK 5:30-32
It seems so unlikely that Jesus was ignorant of what had happened, as if you could trick him into healing you unawares. I might be wrong, but I’ve always assumed he knew exactly what had happened and he had honored the woman’s mistaken belief in the mystical quality of his fringe because behind that belief was a deep faith in him as her Savior. I suspect he is feigning surprise and calling on the identity of the miracle thief in order to do precisely what he does next:
Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.
MARK 5:33
He forced the terrified woman, accustomed as she was to the shadows, to step out into an assembly of men and to testify to her actions. He did it, though, not to shame her, but to honor her.
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
MARK 5:34
In the assembly of men, in the presence of a synagogue leader, Jesus brings testimony of the bloodied woman’s great faith. He makes her the hero. He’s doing what he told Nicodemus he would do. He’s being the ultimate eccentric, leading his sheep out of darkness and fear, out of religious superstition and sickness, into fresh pastures.
WINSOME AND WEIRD CASE STUDY 3: THE CHILDREN IN THE TEMPLE
Most people are familiar with the story of Jesus fashioning a whip of cords and driving the money changers out of the Temple, scattering their coins and overturning their tables. He was infuriated by the ecclesial trade that had sprung up at that time that allowed worshipers to purchase sacrificial animals and change their foreign coins right in the Temple precincts.
Jews and proselytes had traveled from far and wide for the annual Passover festival and needed to exchange their Roman currency, which bore the head of the godlike emperor Caesar, for shekels in order to pay the temple tax.
They also needed to offer animal sacrifices, but, having traveled far from home, would have no such animal with them. This had encouraged dealers in cattle and sheep to set up in an outer court of the Temple —in every likelihood the Court of the Gentiles —and charge premium prices for animals. And those who sold pigeons to the poor (those unable to afford a sheep) would do likewise.
The animal dealers and money changers had the international visitors over a barrel. It was worshiper exploitation. And Jesus was outraged:
“It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
MATTHEW 21:13
A lot of people have assumed that Jesus was motivated primarily by concern that the hallowed halls of the Jewish Temple were being defiled by the tawdry business of religious trade. But remember, earlier I mentioned his words to the Pharisees about being the Good Shepherd who leads his sheep out to green pastures and how he wishes to call sheep from other pens to join them (John 10). It was these very sheep —the ones from “other pens” —who were being disadvantaged by the trade in religious devotion going on in the Temple. The Pharisees who had restricted the news of God’s Kingdom to the geographic borders of Israel were also restricting worship of that God to those who could pay for animals and currency exchange.
In “cleansing the Temple” —as this incident is often called —Jesus reinforces his promise to set God’s people free and to unite them with Gentile believers, whom he would call from other nations. It is an overt act of religious rebellion.
But it’s what happens next that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
Matthew reports that once the court was vacated by the money changers, the blind and the lame came to him, and he healed them (Matthew 21:14). The verse says they “came to him,” but they may have already been there, begging for alms from worshipers, and perhaps when Jesus drove everyone out, they remained, unable to leave so easily. But it gives the impression that after Jesus created a void in the Temple, the space was filled up with the most broken and needy people. And as Jesus healed them all, the most unlikely choir filled the temple with song. Children —possibly the children of the money changers or even the blind and lame themselves —burst into praise: “Hosanna to the Son of David” (verse 15).
This strange and improbable Messiah is left alone in his “Father’s house,” as he called it (John 2:16), surrounded by children and the disabled. These were the days when both those categories were silent in general society, their voices unacknowledged, unheard.
The dancing, cavorting, laughter, and singing of Jerusalem street urchins forms the most adorable act of worship recorded in Scripture.
And of course, the chief priests and the teachers of the law stood at a distance, disgusted with what they observed, unable to see in this beautiful scene both the fulfillment of Scripture and the weird new world Jesus was ushering in.
Yep, Jesus was pretty strange. But it’s in his weirdness that Jesus reveals more than just what an eccentric lifestyle looks like. He reveals the folly of the world as it is. New Testament scholar James Resseguie describes Jesus’ use of opaque language and unlikely metaphors and how strange it made Jesus appear to his contemporaries. But he goes further, saying that Jesus’ teaching and language reinforces not only his own otherness but also shows up the outlandishness of the assertions of the dominant culture. Resseguie says, “It is true that his forms of speech emphasize his strangeness, but his strangeness serves to emphasize our strangeness, making strange our common, narcotized way of viewing the world.”[46]
Here is the weird and winsome example of Jesus: At first, he seems strange to us, but the more we look, the more we realize that what is really strange is the culture in which we have become content. We have been sleepwalking. But the strangeness of Jesus wakes us up to the world as it should be.
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
- What was your initial reaction to the title of this chapter, “Jesus Was the Original Weirdo”? Were you intrigued? Offended? Why?
- Which of the “weird and winsome case studies” offers the most appealing portrait of Jesus for you? Why?
- How might a similar encounter play out today in the churches in your community? What do you think Jesus would say to your church? Why? In what ways do you think churches have “domesticated” Jesus, making him safer and less confronting than the Gospels depict him?
- How do you think our churches can recapture the biblical Jesus, in all his winsomeness and weirdness?