The Jesus I Never Knew

As Pascal22 said, “The Church has had as much difficulty in showing that Jesus Christ was man, against those who denied it, as in showing that he was God; and the probabilities were equally great.

antagonism between

He likened God to a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep inside the fence and hunts frantically for one stray; to a father who can't stop thinking about his rebellious ingrate of a son though he has another who's respectful and obedient; to a rich host who opens the doors of the banquet hall to a menagerie of bag ladies and bums.

“Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”

There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to. We are judged by the righteousness of the Christ who lives within, not our own. Tolstoy got it halfway right: anything that makes me feel comfort wit

people clamored around Jesus. “He had compassion on them,” says Mark, “because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” Instead of spending the day renewing his spirit, Jesus spent

impossible ideals

“end run” around Iraq's elite Republican Guard,

often “moved by compassion,” and in New Testament times that very word was used maternally to express what a mother feels for her child in her womb. Jesus went out of his way to embrace the unloved and unworthy, the folks who matter not at all to the rest of society—they embarrass us, we wish they'd go away—to prove that even “nobodies” matter infi

with prominent citizens, and I can easily understand why: Jesus hardly