02/24/2025
The Best Kind of Trouble-maker
While working on this last week’s sermon I was looking through Phillip Yancey’s excellent book—The Jesus I Never Knew—when I came across a section that I found profound. It didn’t quite fit my sermon, but it caught my eye enough that I copied it down.
“Jesus was “the man for others,” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s fine phrase. He kept himself free — free for the other person. He would accept almost anybody’s invitation to dinner, and as a result no public figure had a more diverse list of friends, ranging from rich people, Roman centurions, and Pharisees to tax collectors, prostitutes, and leprosy victims. People liked being with Jesus; where he was, joy was. And yet, for all these qualities that point toward what psychologists like to call self-actualization, Jesus broke the mold. As C. S. Lewis puts it, “He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can’t really be very well ‘adjusted’ to your world if it says you ‘have a devil’ and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.”
Jesus was a man for others and people enjoyed being with him, but he was also someone who would not compromise the message he’d been given by God—he was someone who stayed true to his mission and purpose. Was he “well adjusted”? In one sense, he was the most adjusted person who ever lived. In another sense, he was adjusted to the world—the way that God designed it, the way that it was intended to be. Unfortunately, that got him in trouble with all kinds of people. When I read words like these I think that it’s okay if I am upset or disturbed over state, national, or international relations. It’s okay to take a stand against cynicism and hypocrisy. As a follower of Jesus I am actually encouraged to resist conforming to the world as it is.
I want to be a man for others and I want to enjoy the people God has put in my life (as I hope that they might enjoy me), but I also know being faithful to Jesus’ vision for our world and for our relationships with one another is going to stir up some trouble. I suppose you can’t emulate a crucified King without expecting a little pushback every now and then. Thank God we don’t have to face that pushback alone.
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