Jesus in a Box
Mark 3:19-22 Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebub, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” (NRSV)
Honestly, I think most of us would be much more comfortable with Jesus if He’d just leave us alone to get on with our lives, so long as He shows up when we need Him. Yep, that’d be the perfect relationship with Jesus, don’t you think?
If God is indeed God, then He is vast, eternal, omnipotent and omnipresent. If God is God, then He is completely and utterly beyond our comprehension.
And there’s the problem, because our finite human minds can’t cope with that so what we do is we put Him in a box; we put limits on Him simply because we can’t cope with a limitless God. Hopefully today we have Him in a much bigger box than last year, but a box nevertheless.
It’s interesting that when Jesus went around preaching and healing people and crowds flocked to Him, even His own family thought He’d gone stark raving mad.
Mark 3:19-22 Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebub, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” (NRSV)
So this whole thing of putting Jesus in a box is nothing new. People have been misunderstanding Him for thousands of years.
And you know, the more you read about this radical, untamed Jesus, the more you come to realise that He just isn’t some tin pot little god that you can keep in a box.
At some point, we each have to come to the conclusion that we can’t domesticate Jesus. At some point, in our heart of hearts we need to let Him loose to turn our lives upside down too.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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