People like Jesus, but they don’t like Christians.
I’ve heard it a thousand times, with most of the posts and articles prescribing solutions of improved Christian behavior to solve this problem. What would Jesus do, and all that. Act more like Christ, and people will like us again.
But the problem of cozying up to Jesus but not His followers actually starts in a completely different place:
We don’t know Christ as well as we do Christians.
Our portrait of Jesus is static—a flannel, mystical guru serving up cherry-picked platitudes we remember from Sunday School.
We like Jesus because He said profound things, healed the sick and the lame, fed the hungry. He is long ago and far away, solid and unchanging, and incapable of betraying our fixed concepts of Him.
Christians, though—we know them all too well.
They are here and now, failing and fallen, asking too much of us, letting us down. Unlike the Christ we remember, Christians are in our face and unpredictable. They are easy to dislike, easy to blame, easy to discard when we get hurt.
But truthfully, when I really begin to get to know Jesus—when He becomes a person and not just a portrait painted from my memory and to my tastes—He sometimes rubs me the wrong way, too.
The real Jesus—the Word of God—is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword.
He pierces the thoughts and intentions of my heart (Hebrews 4:12). He calls me to deny myself and take up my cross (Matthew 16:24). He asks my kids to hate their hope in me in comparison to their hope in Him (Luke 14:26).
The real Jesus asks me to believe in impossibilities—a virgin birth (Matthew 1:23), the dead raised to life (John 20:24-28), His exclusive power to offer eternal life (John 14:6).
He commands me to not worry about a moment of my life (Matthew 6:25), to trust in Him and not one bit of my own performance, even if it’s done in His name (Matthew 7:21-23).
He asks me to believe that He was God among us—infinite, eternal glory confined and defined as a baby in a manger, a carpenter on a cross, dying for me.
The real Jesus is difficult, far more so than dealing with pesky Christians.
