Jesus: Favorite Uncle or Uptight Boss? by Scot McKnight

Guest post by Scot McKnight, who blogs at www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed. Scot's latest book is One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow.

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I don’t know about you, but I get tossed between absolute wonder and utter frustration when I read the moral challenges of Jesus. Some days I wonder if we ought not call Jesus a "moral zealot" to chase away our beliefs that he is an avuncular Lord. Consider words like this: "Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect" or "Let the dead bury the dead," or the always yougottabekiddin’ me! line of Jesus that if we don’t give up our possessions we can’t be his disciple.

 

Sometimes, if I were to confess the deepest truth, I can almost unconsciously dismiss these lines with "that’s just the way Jesus talked," but I can’t for one conscious moment think Jesus said some of the following things and didn’t mean business:

• If you don’t have surpassing righteousness you can’t enter the kingdom (Matt. 5:20)

• If you don’t do the will of my Father you can’t enter into life (Matt. 7:21-27)

• If you don’t become like children you can’t enter the kingdom (Matt. 18:1-4)

It's the "you can’t enter" stuff that disturbs me.

My years of studying these lines (and I teach some of them nearly every semester and encounter them more times a year than I care to count) has convinced me that they are designed at their deepest core to confront us with the singular challenge Jesus gives to us as a daily summons. It goes like this:

 

We’ve got "one life."
Jesus is the Lord.
He casted before us a kingdom vision of what God wants for us.
His kingdom vision generates in us a dream of what God can do.
His difficult words about entering the kingdom are ways of saying this:

I want you. All of you. From this day forward. I want you to give your One.Life to me. I want your One.Life to be completely shaped by the kingdom dream, the kingdom vision, the will of God for God’s people.

Jesus used words like this to challenge us to give the "Me" in all of us to him. That's how we become the person God wanted us to be.

About Scot McKnight Scot McKnight (PhD, Nottingham) is Karl A. Olsson professor in religious studies at North Park University, Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of several books, including The Blue Parakeet, Galatians and 1 Peter in the NIV Application Commentary series, and the award-winning The Jesus Creed. Learn more at his blog, www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed.

Comments

[Lou Barba]

Hi Scott,

I don't think we can use contemporary connotations of relationships in our relationship with Jesus. We need to continually seek Him out (as in the eucharist) so that He can teach us the depth and meaning of our relaationship with Him. The benefits of that kind of communing with Him become more and more obvious.

Lou Barba