Thanks for stopping by.
mark jr.

I take acceptation by your outlandish remark where “modern Evangelical Christianity so glibly say, “Jesus was a friend of sinners”?” I’ve never heard anything more absurd!

In hopes that you might give Evangelical Christians more credit then you do, consider this, eating and drinking; living as did other people. They say, Behold a man gluttonous; they found fault with both, and rejected both, like fickle, capricious children, whom nothing could please. Wisdom is justified of her children; right and wise ways, like those which John and the Saviour pursued, will be approved by the spiritually wise and good.

Advocate4Good

Jesus told His disciples that the world HATED Him because He testified that what it did was evil and that they should expect the same. This is quite anti-thetical to “homeboy-ness”. There is a great difference between “going for souls and going for the worst” and calling them your friend before they repent and turn to Christ. Nice, polite….yes. He only called one group of people His friends and He waited 3 years to say it. Read the passages. It’s not complicated.

I gotta go to sleep.
G’night…

“You completely missed the entire point of the post. This isn’t about that, as I have already said. It is about the church carnalizing Jesus to make Him everyone’s “homeboy” or using these verses to excuse drinking in bars “for Jesus”.”

How could one ever find scripture that would suggest that drinking in bars for Jesus is remotely wrong? We’d look just like Jesus at Canna.

We’re to be salt and light, “in but not of” the world… these ideas reflect that it is the attitude of our heart that defines us as Christ followers. There will be folks who follow Christ whom Christ will keep far from bars or alcohol… and there will be others who will be salt and light to the bar. It is about where we’re seeking life.

We have a really helpful men’s night out at our church, called “Beer and God Night”, where we provide a really tasty microbrew for folks… we’re friends, even when they are not yet certain that Jesus even exists, let alone whether they LIKE Him.

We are called to be the conduit of love and grace from Christ to the world, because that is what He modeled for us in His ministry.

So where are the stories in the Bible where Jesus reminds the sinners that He isn’t their homeboy, and that they’re not welcome? I can think of a number of time where He does that to the religious folk, and maybe one could stretch that to include the Rich Young Ruler… but he walked away from what I remember, he was not sent away.

Word up.
mark jr.

25. Abruptly Jesus broke into prayer: “Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. You’ve concealed your ways from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out clearly to ordinary people. 26. Yes, Father, that’s the way you like to work.”

and earlier in the chapter,

15. “Are you listening to me? Really listening?
16. “How can I account for this generation? The people have been like spoiled children whining to their parents, 17. ‘We wanted to skip rope, and you were always too tired; we wanted to talk, but you were always too busy.’

18. John came fasting and they called him crazy.

19. I came feasting and they called me a lush, a friend of the riff-raff. Opinion polls don’t count for much, do they? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

20. Next Jesus let fly on the cities where he had worked the hardest but whose people had responded the least, shrugging their shoulders and going their own way.

21. “Doom to you, Chorazin! Doom, Bethsaida! If Tyre and Sidon had seen half of the powerful miracles you have seen, they would have been on their knees in a minute.

I’m thinking that the ordinary people think He loves them.

I think that Jesus DID hang out in bars, in the social gatherings that found people drinking alcohol together, and I think He made some of the best hooch any of them had ever tasted. And He made it when people were half in the bag already, in large quantities, and in the very ceremonial containers that the religious folks used ceremonially.

I take this to be like Jesus, crashing the party in a town, and making high test wine in the baptismal of the local tee totaling Baptist church.

Jesus was not only a friend to the sinner, but he pissed the religious folk off to no end… if it weren’t for the sinners, He’s have had no friends.

As Manning reminds us, “Jesus did not die at the hands of muggers, rapists or thugs, Jesus fell into the well scrubbed hands of deeply religious people, society’s most respected members.”

-vern-

I do differ, though, on your premise that the motivation of those who criticized Christ were doing so completely out of malice… I believe that those who were critcizing Christ lived by almost impossible standards, and that Christ rejected those standards with prejudice. Christ insisted that the rules of the Pharisees wouldn’t save them, a proposition THEY rejected.

Folks who believe that the law will save them, and who have invested large aspects of their lives TO the law, are not overjoyed when Christ walks by and points out that their investment was worse than a complete waste. That it is Christ alone who will save them.

I think that mining a specific passage for deep meaning has value, but I think that the your example of mining this scripture for deeper meaning shows how far off we can get when we consider one bit of scripture outside the context of the whole of scripture.

Jesus was HARD on the folks who were hard on sinners, who INCREASED the burdens of the sinner instead of helping them. I cannot think of ONE passage in scripture where Christ HAMMERS on a sinner… the woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well, even the subjects of His many stories… the hero was always the sinner, the the moron was always the religious guy. Take, for instance, the parable of the Good Samaritan… a sinner with bad theology is the hero, and the religious folks the buffoons.
Given the entirety of the life story of Christ, I don’t think a reasonable case can be made that Christ was not a friend of sinners.

I believe Christ saw sin as OPPRESSION, that He saw leaving sin as freedom, and that He came to set the captives free. No dislike there IMO.

-vern-

He’ll save a sinner, but He only called His disciples friends and that was conditioned upon obedience. Throwing out a random verse that is off topic does not thwart the entire thrust of scripture on this point.