I spent three weeks this summer studying the Gospel of Mark with 20 teenagers. They were a great group and our conversations, as we meditated on every word and story in Mark, led to some interesting observations about Jesus that aren’t so common in popular conceptions of him.
I asked the teens what percent of their exposure to the Gospels came from Sunday school and what percent came from their own reading and sermons. They guessed that easily 80% of their exposure to Jesus in the Gospels came from their Sunday school teachers, who tended to turn every story into a moral lesson. And even then, those teachers (and the curricula they used) cherry picked the stories they liked and avoided ones they didn’t care for. For most people, their exposure to Jesus is far less than this group and all they have are vague impressions picked up from who knows where.
Meager and poor exposure to Jesus in the Gospels leads to a meager and poor impression of who he is, a meager and poor following of him as his disciples.
So, what did these students discover about Jesus? Here are the top five of numerous things they encountered that stretched their faith.
1. Jesus is not as nice as they’d been led to believe.
Years ago, when I was pastoring, a woman left the church because I said, “Jesus isn’t nice.” I wish she’d taken time to read through Mark before making that decision. I wish she’d hung out with these teenagers.
It doesn’t take much reading in Mark’s account before the reader is confronted with how, well, confrontational Jesus turns out to be. He intentionally makes religious leaders angry. He hones in on the topics they hold most dear and he attacks their understanding and their practice of them. Fasting, Sabbath-keeping, the Temple, tithing to avoid helping parents, not paying taxes, divorce, marriage, who the Messiah is, rebellion against Rome, and avoiding hanging out with so-called sinners. Each of these gets bulldozed by Jesus. He forces them to rethink everything.
No perspective is left unscathed by Jesus. The conservatives get tongue-lashed. The liberal progressives get scolded. Both don’t know their Bibles or God.
And beyond the issues, Jesus intentionally sets himself on a collision course that will lead him to the cross. He does such a thorough job of unsettling and angering his opponents that he basically writes his own death sentence.
I’ve made people unhappy by the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve said, and the actions I’ve done. But I’ve yet to do so in such a way that people conspire to put me to death.
2. Jesus is an exorcist.
No reading of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) fails to impress the reader with the sheer number of exorcisms Jesus does. He seems to be casting out demons left and right. Even though there are many people who dislike Christians while liking Jesus, almost none of them even consider his engagement with unclean spirits. I’m guessing far fewer of them would like him if they did.
Jesus talks to them and they respond to him. They know who he is when no one else does. These observations alone point the reader away from demythologizing these stories into mere accounts of epilepsy and mental illness. Even if they were just accounts of epilepsy and mental illness, Jesus still heals the afflicted people of their maladies. That’s a pretty big stretch for the modern mind as well. So why not stretch our minds a little further and include not just impossible healings, but the casting out of evil spirits?
The Gospels are clear: You can’t have Jesus without entering into a supernatural war between spirits.
Jesus talks about it far too much to dismiss it without dismissing him. So, if we’re going to take Jesus seriously, we’ve got to take this battle seriously along with him. There is no other choice.
And if we’re going to take Jesus and his deliverance ministry seriously, we’ve got to consider how it plays out in our lives and the world around us. Our world isn’t just haunted by God, it’s haunted by supernatural forces which stand against God.
3. Jesus was far more popular than they realized.
Living in an era dominated by modern medicine to such a degree that prices can increase by more than 10% per year while salaries stay stagnant and we don’t flinch (too much) at paying them, we don’t have much of a concept of what it was like to live in a pre-modern medicine world.
Jesus wasn’t just an exorcist, he was a healer. And the Gospels tell us that he healed vast numbers of people wherever he went. And in a world where working with your hands was pretty much a given, having those hands (or legs or eyes) damaged meant the end of your livelihood. And in a world without building regulations and codes, without flat sidewalks, and without all the other protections we take for granted, damaged bodies were everywhere.
So, when Jesus shows up and starts healing people, the crowds thronged to him. They longed to simply touch him, knowing that that act alone was enough to heal them. In fact, there were times when Jesus would get in a boat to go to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to avoid the crowds, only to be greeted by a crowd when he reached the other side. People dropped everything and ran to be with him in the off chance that he might touch them and heal them.
And once they arrived for the healings, there was his evocative story-telling, his ability to say things that moved their hearts while putting the religious leaders in their place. And then there were the miracles of food that made him seem like a new Moses.
4. Jesus is focused on the kingdom of God.
Most Christians assume the gospel Jesus proclaimed has something to do with salvation by grace. But you don’t hear the word “grace” from Jesus. You hear it from Paul.
Most people on the street assume Jesus talked about loving everyone as his core message. He did in fact say things like that, but he didn’t say them often. He definitely showed love. No question there. But that wasn’t his focus. Jesus was all about the kingdom of God.
There are lots of ramifications to this, but what is the most obvious is that Jesus retains the image of God as King as the primary way we are to engage with him. Yes, there are other metaphors, but King dominates. Therefore, as important as the Fatherhood of God is to us, the Kingship of God completely overshadows it. And the rest of the New Testament concurs.
Now, the way God is King is different from the way the rest of the world thinks of royalty and authority. Jesus addresses this head-on when his disciples jockey for position in the coming kingdom. And he redefines it yet again in the way he himself is crowned King: crowned with thorns and lifted up on the cross, with its mocking placard naming him King of the Jews.
This kingdom is centered around God — he is King, not me — but he uses his authority on our behalf, as our servant.
This means that not only do we bow the knee to God, but we bow in service to one another. And that means we don’t bow to our desires in an American pursuit of happiness. That is completely ruled out.
This is hard for us Americans to hear. It’s in our cultural DNA to rebel against kings and to strike out on our own. But Jesus will have none of that when it comes to the kingdom of God.
5. Faith makes things happen (and a lack of it keeps things from happening).
Faith isn’t magical. But Jesus responds to faith. He stops. He pays attention to those with faith. And he gives them what they ask for.
We see this numerous times in Mark’s gospel.
There are the friends of the paralyzed man who tear a hole in the roof of the house where Jesus was teaching (some scholars believe it’s Peter’s house and N.T. Wright suggests that it was Jesus’s own house, which really changes the way the story is heard). It’s not the man’s faith that impresses Jesus in this instance. Rather, it’s the faith of the man’s friends which impels the story and compels Jesus to act on the man’s behalf (Mark 2:5).
People simply want to touch him (Mark 3:10). The most interesting of these is the woman with the 12-year flow of blood (Mark 5:25-34). She touches Jesus and is immediately healed. Jesus feels power go out from him and says, “Who touched my clothes?” The disciples are mystified by the comment, since there are dozens of people jostling him. But Jesus can tell there’s something different about this touch. It’s a touch done with faith and it draws power and heals the woman.
So, Jesus says to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has healed you.” He doesn’t say, “My power healed you.” No, it’s her faith that’s the active agent here.
The same is true of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:51-52).
The exact opposite takes place when he returns home to Nazareth. There, a lack of faith actually restricted his ability.
He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith (Mark 6:5-6).
In the language of 1 Thes. 5:18, they quenched the Spirit.
There is no doubt-shaming here. Jesus doesn’t need a lot to work with. The feeding of the 5,000 proves that:
But he answered, “You give them something to eat.”
They said to him, “That would take more than half a year’s wages! Are we to go and spend that much on bread and give it to them to eat?”
“How many loaves do you have?” he asked. “Go and see.”
When they found out, they said, “Five — and two fish” (Mark 6:37-38).
All they bring to Jesus is five small loaves and two fish. Jesus does the rest. The same is true in the feeding of the 4,000 (Mark 8:1-9).
What we see here is that Jesus is always partnering with us. We always bring something. He never does it all on his own. When we bring nothing, he does nothing. When we bring even a meager faith, he does the rest.
The classic story that expresses this is the father of the son possessed by an unclean spirit. He says to Jesus:
“… But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”
“Everything is possible for one who believes.”
Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:22-24)
Everything is possible. Everything. When unbelief is confronted, miracles takes place.
We see this again in Mark 11:
“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins” (Mark 11:22-25).
Jesus is extremely bold here. Promises so much, but it’s a promise with a requirement. Faith must replace doubt.
This is so tough for us, especially when we have attempted it and it hasn’t worked. It seems like magic, but it’s really a partnership.
I know I fall far short of this, having prayed for the healing of my Mom after her stroke and having prayed for the healing of my sister after her car was hit by a drunk driver. But my Mom remained handicapped and my sister died. And those two experiences have made me afraid to ask for audacious things from God. And yet I hear those words from Jesus throughout the Gospel of Mark and I can’t ignore what they call for from me.
And so I join that father at his wit’s end and say, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”