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- Author: Douglas M. Jones and Peter J. Leithart
- Full Title: Dismissing Jesus
- Category: #books
- And yet the temptation was subtler than that, too. Satan wasn’t offering bread the way Egypt did. Satan suggested that Jesus himself perform magic on the stones. This angle involved an appeal to easy, efficient solutions rather than the need for wilderness suffering. Henri Nouwen observed, “I would not have been able to reject the magical gift of making the dusty stone-covered streets [of Lima] into places where people could pick up any of the thousands of rocks and discover they were croissants, coffee cakes or fresh-baked buns.”19 But the easy path doesn’t build the right sort of community. It doesn’t build a community of self-sacrifice and virtue. Jesus rejected it.
- Note: The need for self sacrifice and virtue
- The apostle observed: “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17).
- Simply put, refusing to share with a fellow Christian is a sign we’re not genuine believers. We haven’t learned lesson one. John shows that it’s a heart issue. Not to share is a failure to indwell one another, a failure in basic empathy
- The rich work and supply money to the place that was supposed to care for the poor, the Temple. The rich were giving so that ministries could succeed. I hear that often in my circles. But Jesus wasn’t impressed. Wrong messiah.
- But that’s what charity is, isn’t it? It’s when we rich donate some of our abundance to the poor. That’s how the world turns. Charity is our way, but it isn’t the way of sharing. It isn’t the way of the cross.
- There’s certainly a place for the same kind of people with the same kind of ideas sharing meals together. Jesus ate with his apostles, after all. But both groups above end up disobeying Jesus more explicit call to community, to the way of sharing. In fact, what we call a “good church community,” Jesus told us not to do: “When you give a dinner or a supper, do not ask your friends, your brothers, your relatives, nor rich neighbors” (Luke 14:12). Don’t do that, he said. Don’t do what we normally do. “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind” (Luke 14:13). Jesus is not opposed to feasts, just the kind we normally give.
- Jesus repeats his command to love our enemies, explicitly and implicitly, multiple times throughout the gospels, and love of enemies is not even mentioned once in the most prominent Reformation creeds. Are we even on the same planet? Are we looking at the same Jesus?
- Paul doesn’t give anything like a constructive view of the state, there. He merely tells Christians not to use violence against the state, like the zealots. Since the beginning, God has used various Babylons and now uses Rome to accomplish his purposes in history. But that doesn’t mean that God wants the church to fight with those same weapons.