Jesus Was Angry on Your Behalf
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 21-75
He Was Never On Their Side
There is a specific kind of wound that only religion can inflict.
Not the wound of tragedy, which arrives without explanation and has to be absorbed without anyone to hold responsible. Not the wound of ordinary human failure, the friend who let you down, the marriage that ended, the parent who was absent in the specific ways that left the specific gaps. Those wounds are real and they go deep and they take years.
The religious wound is different in kind because it arrives with God’s name attached to it. Because the person inflicting it is doing so with apparent divine authorization, citing scripture, invoking standards, deploying the vocabulary of holiness and judgment and accountability in ways that make the harm feel like something other than harm. Like correction. Like love. Like what God requires of people who take their faith seriously.
This is the wound that keeps people out of churches for decades. That makes the word Christian produce a flinch rather than a recognition. That turns the concept of spiritual authority into something to be avoided rather than sought. That causes people to associate God himself with the specific pain of the specific person who used his name to cause it.
And the most damaging thing about it, the thing that makes it so hard to recover from, is the lie embedded at its center.
The lie is that God was behind it. That the authority figure who loaded you with burdens, who used the language of holiness to control you, who shut the door of the kingdom in your face and called it faithfulness, was representing the God they claimed to represent.
This post is designed to unmask that lie. Because the Jesus of the Gospels does not leave any room for it. He addressed it directly, at length, with a specificity and an anger that is unlike anything else in the four accounts of his life.
And he was not on their side. He was never on their side.
Jesus is famous for gentleness. The image most people carry of him is constructed from the passages that emphasize it, and those passages are real and they are load-bearing and they tell you something true about who he is.
Blessed are the meek. Come to me, all who are weary and burdened. Neither do I condemn you. Let the little children come. The father running down the road. The shepherd leaving the ninety-nine to find the one. The woman searching the whole house for a single coin. The images Jesus chose to describe God’s disposition toward human beings are almost uniformly images of pursuit, of welcome, of a love that does not wait for the conditions to be right before moving toward the person who needs it.
That picture is accurate. But it is incomplete.
Matthew 23 shows a different face. And the difference is not incidental. It is not a momentary departure from character. It is a revelation of something essential about who Jesus is and what he regards as the most serious possible offense against the people he came for.
Matthew 23 is the longest, most sustained, most specific confrontation Jesus delivers in any of the four Gospels. It is not a parable about a distant situation. It is a direct address to specific people in a specific context, and it is delivered at full intensity without softening and without qualification. Seven times in this chapter Jesus says the same thing. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. Seven times. Each woe a different indictment. Each indictment more specific than the last.
The word woe in the Greek carries more weight than the English translation usually suggests. It is not primarily a threat. It is closer to a lament, a declaration of the severity of the situation, the announcement that something has gone deeply and consequentially wrong. When Jesus says woe he is not primarily issuing a punishment. He is naming a reality. He is saying: look at what has been done here. Look at what this is.
Seven times he names it. Because it is worth being named carefully.
