11/08/2026
That picture of Jesus is laughable.
Jesus was not some sweet, neatly groomed white guy wandering around with a baby lamb in his arms, picking daisies, patting children on the head, and dispensing sentimental advice about being nice. And lose the halo. Jesus was not the harmless, domesticated figure Christianity has so often made him into.
Jesus pi**ed people off. He violated religious expectations, crossed boundaries respectable people considered sacred, touched the untouchable, ate with the unacceptable, defended the condemned, and repeatedly confronted religious authorities who believed they spoke for God.
Jesus called religious leaders hypocrites, blind guides, fools, snakes, and whitewashed tombs. He walked into the temple, overturned tables, disrupted business, and drove people out. Imagine Jesus doing that in your church this Sunday. Security would have him on the pavement before the second worship song.
There was a Jesus before Christianity. Before the creeds, denominations, popes, pastors, megachurches, worship bands, doctrinal statements, altar calls, Christian bookstores, Christmas pageants, and $80 leather Bibles.
Jesus wasn't a Christian. He never asked anyone to become one. He did not start Christianity, formulate a doctrine of original sin, construct a theory of substitutionary atonement, or tell people they had to believe the correct theological propositions about him to escape eternal torture.
Christianity was built around him after he died, and somewhere along the way one of history's most disruptive figures became the mascot of the very kind of institutional religion he spent his life confronting. The Jesus before Christianity was fierce, confrontational, courageous, and almost impossible to domesticate. He announced another kingdom in the shadow of Caesar's empire, welcomed people religion pushed aside, warned the powerful, blessed the poor, and kept finding himself at tables with the people respectable society had condemned.
Jesus did not tell people to behave themselves and accept the world as it was. He told them the world they had accepted as normal was upside down, and then he started turning it over.
That is why the historical Jesus was a lightning rod. Rome didn't crucify people for being nice. Crucifixion was public torture carried out by an empire against people it regarded as threats to its order. Jesus ended up hanging on a Roman cross. Sit with that for a moment before turning it into jewelry.
Which brings us to the church's favorite question: WWJD?
Please.
Most Christians don't actually want Jesus doing what Jesus did. They want him safely contained in stained glass. They want a Jesus who blesses their lives, validates their beliefs, protects their tribe, endorses their politics, forgives their sins, guarantees heaven when they die, and asks as little as possible of them in the meantime.
The actual Jesus is far more threatening. He might overturn some tables. He might ask why your church needs another multimillion-dollar building while people sleep on sidewalks. He might sit beside the person your religion says God rejects. He might have harsher words for religious hypocrisy than for the people you've been calling sinners.
Jesus said that following him meant taking up a cross. We turned the cross into a necklace. There may be no better symbol for what institutional Christianity has done to Jesus. An instrument of ex*****on became an accessory. A summons to radical transformation became a belief system. The man who challenged religious authority became the supreme authority of another religion. Somewhere along the way, believing things about Jesus became a substitute for becoming anything like him.
Because worshiping Jesus is much easier than following him. You can worship Jesus and keep your privilege, protect your reputation, despise your neighbor, surrender your conscience to a political party, and remain comfortably embedded in systems that exploit, exclude, humiliate, and destroy other people. You can worship Jesus without changing much of anything. Following him is another matter.
Following Jesus puts something at risk: your certainty, your comfort, your status, your tribe, your need to be right, and your allegiance to institutions that demand your silence or complicity.
Maybe that is why Christianity has spent two thousand years making Jesus safer. A domesticated Jesus can be worshiped without disturbing much of anything. The Jesus before Christianity is considerably harder to deal with.
And there is a bitter irony in all of this: the man who terrified religious authorities became the centerpiece of a religion that is often terrified of people who behave like him.
- Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy
Read IA -> http://tinyurl.com/pr67yz2
