Jesus Wasn’t Nice

We’re Just Nice

In Into the Woods, Meryl Streep sings a song beginning with the words, “You’re so nice. You’re not good; you’re not bad; you’re just nice.” I feel like this sums up a great deal of our culture. Too often, we are Lewis’s “men without chests” or Nietzsche’s slave population, our passions impersonal and our causes shallow.

We don’t really get mad about anything because we don’t really care about anything. We barely know you, but we’re very nice. We may watch with interest as you destroy yourself, but we won’t offend you. We may stand by as you bleed to death, but we won’t insult your fashion choices. Evil is regrettable, but goodness forbid we be rude!

These are extreme examples. Don’t worry; I still have faith in humanity. But keep this trend in mind for the rest of this post.

The Bible and the Odyssey

Recently I’ve been watching The Bible on Netflix. I’d heard good things about it, and I was pretty happy with its depiction of the Old Testament stories. Even in normal cases, the book is always better; how much more so in this case. But I thought they did a good job of “staying true to the spirit of the book.”

Then, though, we arrived at Jesus. He’s very… nice. Just… nice. Honestly, he comes off as a little ditzy, like he’s never quite sure what’s going on. Things just kind of happen to him. The phrase “spoke with authority” doesn’t come to mind. This is the man that set the world on fire? That made Judaea and then Rome shake? That people wanted to lead a revolution?

Today I watched Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. When I read this account, I always think of Odysseus coming home to find his house trashed by his so-called ‘friends’, who are gorging themselves on his wealth while attempting to take advantage of his wife. Odysseus (spoiler alert) arrives home disguised and scopes things out and then, in the climax of the book, decimates the would-be suitors, cleansing his house and rescuing his wife.

God also returned home in disguise and found his so-called servants gorging themselves and taking advantage of his people. You remember the story – he was twelve years old and started arguing with the priests. This time he was done flying under the radar. He “drove them out” with “a whip of cords” calling them a “den of thieves” because “zeal for [his] house had eaten [him] up.” What he did not do was get all teary-eyed, gently swat a few smaller tables, and then leave.

The Wrath of God

Now, I understand that if you’re trying to reach the general public, you want to find common ground. And since we’re all very nice people, this means showing the nicest side of Jesus. But (as I’ve argued before) there’s no point in connecting with people if you never do anything with that connection, if you only validate what they already think without challenging them with the things they haven’t yet considered.

We generally only paint pictures of Jesus with a lamb or a child in the crook of his arm and a benevolent smile upon his face. There is, in Chesterton’s words, “something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath.” But it is important that we recognize that nice does not mean good and, what’s more, good does not mean nice. Goodness is hard and challenging and painful and pure. The Christ who forgave the adulteress is also the Christ who told Abraham he was going down to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Love of God

Why is it important to present the judgment of God? Because God’s forgiveness is meaningless unless you understand his judgment. If what was depicted in this episode was the wrath of God, then honestly, I think we’d be okay without redemption. That’s why, as I’ve said, I don’t understand professed Christians who claim no one has sinned. What’s the point of being saved from sins you don’t have?

But the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness – and it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. We are in trouble, trouble that requires more than a few nice sayings and a couple miracles, trouble that requires all the mess and terror and tragedy of blood and sacrifice.

And if Jesus was, as much of the world thinks he was, a really nice man who said really nice things, (politically-correct by today’s standards), he could do exactly nothing about that. Broken people can’t be fixed by other broken people (including those in government, but that’s another discussion.) Weak wrath only requires weak love, but God’s wrath required God’s love to appease.

I haven’t gotten to that episode yet. Maybe things will get better.