Monday, May 11, 2009

Would Jesus make a good lifeguard?

About a month ago I was musing about things Jesus says that don't sound like he would say them.
In general, I've been rediscovering how hard, challenging, confusing, and seemingly random Jesus can be.  Because of this I've started to read Robert Farrar Capon's book Kingdom, Grace, Judgment:  Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus.  I'm only a few chapters in, but it is promising to be a really good and thought provoking book. 

He had this to say about the Jesus presented in the Bible: 
The New Testament proclaims an unlikely Savior.  The work of Jesus in his incarnation, life, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension makes no worldly sense at all.  The portrait the Gospels paint is that of a lifeguard who leaps into the surf, swims to the drowning girl, and then, instead of doing a cross-chest carry, drowns with her, revives three days later, and walks off the beach with assurances that everything including the apparently still-dead girl, is hunky-dory. 
What a great way to explain how upside-down God's plan seems to us.

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