No, He Wasn’t Boring, Meek and Mild, or Safe

I have to admit that the image of an anemic, meek and mild, almost frightened-looking Christ has always left me brutally cold.

If, as the Church teaches, He came into the world to transform us – indeed to save us – well, He certainly better have some real fight in Him.

The world, myself included, does not respond kindly to hesitant and feeble requests made by those we think of as weaklings.

We’d just as soon dismiss them, make fun of them, trash them.

But we do take notice of confident, dynamic – and, yes, sometimes frightening – personalities.

I believe that we’ve gotten the Christ imagery all wrong.

Perhaps intentionally.

Because Christ was anything but weak, anything but mild, anything but non-confrontational.

Today’s homily at St. Mary’s Church in Manhasset, New York, truly turned the Jesus-as-weakling imagery on its head.

Our celebrant took careful note of the words of Dorothy Sayers, first published in 1949.

Here is how Sayers described the one we all too often think of as meek and mild. Every description she sets forth here is a gem.

We need to think on these things:

The people who hanged Christ, to do them justice, never accused him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe.

It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him  ‘meek and mild’, and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.

To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggested a milk and water person: they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.

True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites; he referred to King Herod as ‘that fox’; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a ‘gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; he drove a coach and horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper defense for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb.

He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.

But he had ‘a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly,’ and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him.

So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.

No, Christ wasn’t boring. He wasn’t meek. He wasn’t non-confrontational.

We can’t do away with Him in order to secure our peace and quiet.

Because He’s never been safe.

And He never will be.

Peace

Image Credit: NASA via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain