A Strange Group of People

From the time I was born, there has seldom been a Sunday during which my family and I did not attend at least one worship service at a local church whether we were at home or on vacation. I remember often singing about the wee little man named Zacchaeus during Sunday school and then sneaking back into the classroom to play with the funny looking flannel board characters which in all likelihood boar absolutely no resemblance to the people they were intended to represent. I sometimes would “play church” at home using Pop-tarts and Juicy-Juice as the communion meal. Every now and then I would “baptize” my little brother over and over again in the pool even though he had no desire to be immersed (probably because he never got more than three seconds to breath in between dunks). I am not sure when, but at some point I realized that Christians can be weird. We can decide to focus on odd things that have no real bearing on what it means to be a true follower or Jesus.

Matthew Paul Turner had a few similar experiences as a child. In his book, Churched: One Kid’s Journey Toward God Despite a Holy Mess, he recounts one encounter with an all too sure Bible class teacher:
“One Sunday, Mrs. Snover handed each of us a black-and-white picture of Jesus grinning from ear to ear and holding two fish and five loaves of bread. She had just finished telling us how Jesus performed a miracle and fed five thousand hungry male followers. I’d heard that story many times before, but when Mrs. Snover pulled out a loaf of Wonder Bread and a couple of cans of Bumble Bee tuna to help us visualize the miracle, it opened my eyes to a new facet of that biblical story. Sometimes Jesus smelled like cat food.

As soon as Mrs. Snover handed me the coloring picture, I immediately jumped up and ran to grab the Kelly-green and tangerine-orange crayons out of the coloring box. I began filling in Jesus’s robe with my favorite shade of green.

‘Matthew.’ Mrs. Snover darted around the table to where I was sitting, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m coloring Jesus.’

She didn’t say anything at first; she just stood, rooted, and stared over my shoulder like a very disappointed nun. ‘Uh, no, no, no. Jesus’s robe was not green Matthew; it was white…Jesus didn’t dress in those kinds of colors. He just wore a plain white robe.’

Since I was only a second grader, I wasn’t sure how she knew so much about the dress code of Jesus, but as I got older, I sometimes wondered whether or not she had been around him in one of her other lives, perhaps as one of the demons he cast out.” (pp. 90-91)

Even during his ministry on this earth, Jesus dealt with people who simply did not understand him or his purpose. In Matthew 12, Jesus and his disciples are walking through a grain field on the Sabbath day, and one of those disciples breaks off a piece of wheat because he is hungry. The Pharisees quickly take advantage of the situation, accusing Jesus and his followers of doing what is “unlawful.” Jesus responds by saying that these teachers of the law do not understand the intent of what they were teaching. He uses David and priests of the temple as examples of people who had done much worse things on the Sabbath and were still counted as sinless. Jesus concludes by saying to the Pharisees, “…if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless” (v. 7).

Today, we are bombarded with messages about who Jesus was and what he expects of us. The truth is that he simply wants us to follow him. He simply wants us to be disciples who go out and make other disciples. There is no need to overcomplicate things. Jesus wants disciples who love him, love those around them, and serve the world.