Was Jesus Christ an idiot?

I guess that got your attention, huh?  Rest assured, the answer to that question is 'absolutely not', but that leads to another, harder question.  If Jesus Christ wasn't an idiot -- if he knew what he was talking about and was able to correctly convey his thoughts to his followers, and by extension to us -- then why do so many people act as if he were?



Why do 'liberal' scholars proclaim him a great moral teacher, then deny all that he taught?  Why do 'Bible-believing Christians' ignore large portions of his recorded words, and reinterpret much of the rest to fit their preconceptions?  Why is the world so fascinated with all the secrets that Jesus supposedly told to everyone except the guys who were to write it all down for posterity?

The Sermon on the Mount is one of my favorite passages of Scripture.  It's one of the most concentrated doses of spiritual teaching in the Bible, and it's a wonderful picture of what the Kingdom of God looks like and the impossibility of reaching it under our own power.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of another text that leads me so strongly to hope in Christ and lean on his strength.

Oh, and it's completely and utterly opposed to life as we know it in 21st-century America.

It's that opposition that brings the two earlier questions to the forefront.  Two things in opposition can't both be true.  'X' can't equal 'not X'.  Like most modern Americans, I grew up believing that American ideals were normative for everyone.  Clearly, we were the greatest nation on earth and always right, so anything that didn't agree with our beliefs and values was by definition wrong.  That's an easy and comfortable way to think, provided you're careful not to think about it too deeply.

Then I read the Bible, and suddenly I was confronted with a dilemma, because Jesus seemed to be saying that the way I was taught to think was wrong.  He said things that simply didn't mesh with my upbringing, and indeed seemed designed to utterly destroy it.  Even the rudimentary Christianity I professed made me feel more like his enemies than one of his followers.  There was simply no way to reconcile the two; any attempt to do so devolved immediately into ridiculous mental and semantic games that even a fool like me could see through.

'X' couldn't equal 'not X'.  If Jesus was who he said he was, and had said what he meant to say, and had been quoted exactly as he meant to be quoted, then my entire worldview was wrong.  If modern American values and practices were, as I'd been taught, exactly what God wanted for the world, then Jesus was an idiot or a liar.  I was rapidly coming to an undeniable belief that the former was true.  I was going to have to reject 'not X'.

That was nearly ten years ago.  Since then, I've found myself faced with the same choice on numerous occasions.  Jesus says 'X'.  My upbringing -- or my loved ones, or society as a whole -- says 'not X'.  Choosing 'X' is hard, and there have been plenty of times when I retreated back into the comfort of my old ways.  Thankfully, though, he won't leave me alone.  He forces the question, and he demands an answer.

And the answer is always the same, because while Jesus Christ is most assuredly not an idiot, I've proven time and again that I am.  Thank God he loves stubborn, hard-headed morons, and refuses to give up on them.

We all face the same choice:  do we believe Jesus or not?  Do we accept him at his word or not?  If so, we have to obey him even -- especially -- when it means surrendering everything else we hold dear.  If not, then we have to admit the truth that we're not his followers, and stop claiming to speak in his name, to hold his Scriptures dear, and be open about the fact that it's not him we worship, but ourselves.