What If Jesus Would Have Said…Instead Of…
Jesus had a way with words. He was one of the first word masters. Words of wisdom he uttered on hillsides, in temple courts, and walks through the lands have been memorized by generations and generations, sometimes with a “thus saith”, “thou”, or “thine” in the good King James tradition.
I’ve wondered how our view of the grace and love of God would be altered if Jesus had said some of his sayings differently. What would be our belief system if He had altered just a few words?
What if He had reworded Matthew 5:43-44 that says “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” to say “Loving your enemies is overrated. Show them justice, because if you don’t they will persecute you.”
That would put a different spin on the idea of the love of Christ.
What if instead of Jesus saying “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” (Luke 18:16), Jesus would have said, “My time is short and thus I don’t have time for short people.”
How might that affect the theological understanding of how to minister to children?
What if instead of Jesus telling the group of men who bring an adulterous woman to him that the man without sin could cast the first stone at her, He would have said with an absence of mercy, “Such as these do not deserve to enter the kingdom of God!”, and then he bent down and picked up a nice sized throwable stone, instead of drawing something in the dirt?
What if Jesus would have left the house where the paralyzed man had been lowered down through the roof? What if He was more concerned about the size of the crowd, instead of the condition of the man?
What if, instead of spitting in the dirt and putting mud on the eyes of the blind man, He would have said to him, “The sin of your parents has caused this. The effects of sin can not be wiped away.”
What if Jesus would have minimized the mite offering of the widow and applauded the extravagant size of the gifts of the rich?
With each of Jesus’s situations, He had options as to how He was going to respond. Our Christology comes out of what He DID say, as opposed to what He DIDN’T say. Our belief system, thankfully is based on what’s written in the red.
But I need to qualify that last sentence. Sometimes our belief system is trumpeted as coming from what Jesus said, but gets revised in the living out of our actions. I’m not referring to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, but rather how we melt away the words of Jesus to make them sweeter for our lives. We re-say them to suit us and end up reflecting a Jesus who is judgmental, rigid, and wishy-washy.
As a result, we are vulnerable to creating a Christology that is based on the idea, “What Jesus meant to say was this, instead of how it’s written.”
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