i am busy reading Leonard Sweet’s book, ‘The Bad Habits of Jesus: Showing us the way to live right in a world gone wrong’. It has a very different way of looking at Jesus in terms of picking up some things that might be seen as bad habits – He spat, He procrastinated, He was constantly disappearing, He offended people, He hung out with bad people and so on – and showing how they point us towards the heart of God.

Here are two extracts that stood out for me from the chapter titled, ‘Jesus Offended People, Especially in High Places’:

CAUSE FOR ANGER

This first passage from the book looks at Jesus getting angry:

‘Jesus bad habit of not being afraid to offend so offends our PC sense of rectitude that He would be liable to be arrested for indecency. Consider the plight of Yvette Bavier, the sixty-year-old New Yorker whi a few years back was arrested for littering. Her offence? She was feeding sparrows on her lunch break in Central Park West. Offensiveness, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. We will not mean to offend. But we will. Nearly eight hundred years ago, Thomas Aquinas, the church’s greatest theologian, lamented that we had no name for the virtue of anger in our religious lexicon. He quoted the words of John Chrysostom to make his point: “Whoever is without anger, when there is cause for anger, sins.” Jesus offended people with multiple anger episodes: when He saw how people were treating children, when He saw how a tree was hoarding its resources for itself and not feeding a hungry world, and when He saw a sacred courtyard turned into a stockyard and stock exchange. This last Temple tantrum gave such offence, it proved the last straw for the religious establishment. To the casual observer, Jesus completely lost it. He went off on the guys working in the Temple. I mean, He put don a beat-down on them that they did not soon forget. He called them robbers and thieves. But from whom did they steal and what did they take that got Jesus so hot under the tunic? I don’t think it was money; rather they stole the grandeur away from God by serving the institution rather than God. They turned a house of prayer into a house of profit. When people today work for the church instead of working for God, love a denomination more than they love God, cherish their traditions more than they cherish their relationship with God, then they steal what is due only God. And I bet Jesus still gets anrgy – not angry at us, but angry over us. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” may be the most famous sermon in US history, but God is not angry at us. As the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich pointed out, “If God were angry with us even for a moment, then we would cease to exist.” But God does get angry at our lack of offense at how we treat each other. ‘

LOVE IS EASILY PROVOKED

The passage continues with this piece that describes a different perspective on a well-known descriptor of Love:

There is only one passage where Jesus is said to get angry directly. But His anger at their “hardened hearts” leads Him to heal. This is not the ale and testosterone raging of today’s road rage, home rage, work rage, political rage, or religious rage. Jesus’ anger is righteous outrage. Weddings have made famous the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. And the reader usually lingers lovingly over the phrase that love “is not easily provoked”. But that is a terrible translation. First, the word “easily” is not in the Greek but added by the translators. Second, the actual Greek word we translate as “provoked” is paroxynetai, the root of which gives us the word “paroxysm” or more popularly “fit”. Love does not issue in “fits” – fits of despair, fits of anger, fits of hopelessness, or fits of selfishness. But love is provoked, and love is provocative. In fact, that’s the very meaning of love, to be provoked by suffering and injustice and humanity. To follow Jesus is to be provoked… and provocative. If we are to live out Christ in the world, we need to get rid of out fear of offending people and get on with Christ’s mission in the world.’

Sho, some really good stuff in there:

# “Whoever is without anger, when there is cause for anger, sins.”

# But love is provoked, and love is provocative. The very meaning of love is to be provoked by suffering and injustice and humanity.

# If we are to live out Christ in the world, we need to get rid of out fear of offending people and get on with Christ’s mission in the world.’

It is a simple and easy to read book but so far pretty challenging and worth taking a look at. Let me know if you’d like to be next in line for my copy.

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