In writing a book about Jesus, one impression struck me more forcefully than any other: we have tamed him. The Jesus I learned about as a child was sweet and inoffensive, the kind of person whose lap you want to climb onto: someone like television’s cuddly Mister Rogers, only with a beard. Indeed Jesus did have qualities of gentleness and compassion that attracted little children. Mister Rogers, however, he assuredly was not.

I realized this fact when I studied the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the persecuted. Blessed are those who mourn.” These sayings have a soft, proverbial ring to them—unless you happen to know someone poor, persecuted, or mourning. The homeless huddling over heating grates in our major cities, the tortured prisoners whose pictures are distributed by Amnesty International, the families of terrorists’ victims—who would think of calling them blessed, or “lucky”?

In all the movies made about Jesus’ life, surely the most provocative—and perhaps the most accurate—portrayal of the Sermon on the Mount appears in a low-budget BBC production entitled Son of Man. Roman soldiers have just invaded a Galilean village to exact vengeance for some trespass against the empire. They have strung up Jewish men of fighting age, shoved their hysterical wives to the ground, even speared babies. Into that tumultuous scene of blood and tears and keening for the dead strides Jesus with eyes ablaze. “I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you,” he shouts above the groans.

You can imagine the villagers’ response to such unwelcome advice. The Sermon on the Mount did not soothe them; it infuriated them.

I came away from my study of Jesus both comforted and terrified. Jesus came to earth “full of grace and truth,” said John: his truth comforts my intellectual doubts even as his grace comforts my emotional doubts. And yet I also encountered a terrifying aspect of Jesus, one that I had never learned about in Sunday school. Did anyone go away from Jesus’ presence feeling satisfied about his or her life?

Few people felt comfortable around Jesus; those who did were the type no one else felt comfortable around. The Jesus I met in the Gospels was anything but tame.

“Unwrapping Jesus,” Christianity Today,

June 17, 1996 (31 – 32)

Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).