Is there a compromise Jesus?
- June 25, 2010
Jesus Christ is gentle, “meek and humble of heart” (Matthew 11:29), but he can also seem so demanding and uncompromising that we are intimidated. The Gerasenes felt that way about this man who dealt so radically with their possessed neighbor and with their herd of pigs (Luke 8:26-39). Perhaps they would have felt better disposed toward the healer if he had stopped at the cure and not permitted their squealing investments to be driven over the cliff. The Gerasenes were some of the first people to choose between Jesus, on the one hand, and peace and prosperity, on the other. They made the popular choice: they asked him to leave town.
Compromises of all sorts tempt us: moral, spiritual, personal, political, economic, and social. All the time, however, Jesus is uncompromising, and we need him to be uncompromising. If that is hard to understand, imagine for a moment a “compromise Jesus.” Picture him with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-7), as she cowers before him and the crowd. Then imagine Jesus saying something like this: “If some of you haven’t sinned too very much, at least not lately, perhaps you could throw a few of the smaller rocks.”
Imagine Jesus calling the rich young man (Matthew 19:21) to go, sell everything, put it into a trust fund, and then follow him for a while to see whether it felt agreeable enough to stay with him. Or imagine the Messiah responding to the Pharisees’ rebuke for curing people on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:10-12) by promising to cut down on it gradually, or to limit it to extreme cases only, or to try to schedule healing for sunset, or even later. Those are the responses of a forgettable prophet, one who will die in bed and not on a cross. He’s not the Jesus we need, the radical Jesus who challenges us to our roots.
The compromise Jesus is related to another false image of God more prevalent in recent years: the divine pushover in the sky, the “Good Old God,” a kind of cosmic sweetheart who could never be angry with anyone, let alone condemn what they do. Even the most wrong-headed, wrong-hearted, and destructive attempts at human living and relating will be fine with Someone Up There Who Likes Everything About Us. “Good Old God” thinks everyone should get an E for effort, or maybe even an A for attempt.
What’s wrong with that image of God? Jesus is wrong with it. We have only to look at his treatment of the woman accused of adultery. Jesus does not condemn her, but neither does he say something fuzzily “modern” to her: “I understand, dear. Yours was probably an arranged marriage. No doubt your husband is much older than you, and he travels a great deal. You were lonely, and Jerusalem is a big city. Besides, we know that social mores are changing rapidly all across the empire.”
Instead, noting that no one else has condemned her after his challenge to them, Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, (and) from now on do not sin anymore” (John 8:11). For Jesus, sin is sin, it calls for repentance and conversion, and there is always compassion, forgiveness, and grace from God. As Christians, we reject the motto “Anything Goes,” and say instead, “Everything is grace” (to summarize Ephesians 2:4-10).
The reflection above is from Archbishop George H. Niederauer’s book, “Precious as Silver: Imagining Your Life With God,” published in 2004 by Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN.
