"That Jesus Is a Nice Boy"

On a recent Sunday you heard Jesus ask a question with an obvious answer: "Do you think I have come to bring peace?" Duh.  Of course you did, Jesus.  You're the Prince of Peace.  The angels sang at your birth, "Glory to God in heaven and peace to his people on earth."

But as you might have guessed based on earlier encounters with Jesus' surprising ways (especially in Luke's gospel), it's a trick question.   "No, I tell you, but rather division...they will be divided: father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

What!?

To read the gospels is to discover that Jesus did come to bring peace: peace between us and God.  But he also called us to follow him, to become his disciples, and that discipleship is of such a radical nature (loving enemies, rejecting wealth and possessions, celebrating servanthood, etc.) that it has a way of creating an unintended conflict.

For some reason, along the way somewhere, the word "nice" came to be tied up with being a Christian.  How or why, I don't know, because the word "nice" doesn't appear in the Bible (much like you'll never hear Jesus say things like "How's your spiritual life?" or "There's not enough.").  As John Eldridge writes, "Christianity has come to the point where we believe that there is no higher aspiration for the human soul than to be nice.   We are producing a generation of men and women whose greatest virtue is that they don't offend anyone.  Then we wonder why there is not more passion for Christ. How can we hunger and thirst after righteousness if we have ceased hungering and thirsting altogether?"

And he continues, "The greatest enemy of holiness is not passion; it is apathy. Look at Jesus. He was no milksop. His life was charged with passion...This isn't quite the pictures we have in Sunday school, Jesus with a lamb and a child or two, looking for all the world like Mr. Rogers with a beard.  The world's nicest guy. He was something far more powerful.  He was holy."

We aren't called to be nice, folks. Love, yes. Compassionate, yes.  But no where are we called to set aside our fierceness, our strength, our passion.   Quite the contrary, we're called to engage every part of our heart, soul, mind and strength as we love God and our neighbor as ourselves.  And sometimes that means that people will look at us with amazement and fear and maybe even contempt as we set about following this passionate, holy God.