JESUS AND RELIGION

When I was a lad I wanted to be a missionary. In those long ago days missionaries were real men. When they disappeared up the Yangtze or the Amazon, often they were never seen or heard from again.

Anyway, I changed my mind about being a missionary When I was in my late teens. I looked around one day and saw that the religion I had wanted to share with folk in the Third World was self-righteous and hypocritical. And then I asked myself; if I don’t want them to have this religion, do I want it?

Just about this time a friend the family, a seventeen year-old girl, got pregnant. Her parents were nice, decent, God-fearing people – and that sort of thing doesn’t happen to daughters of nice, decent, God-fearing people. So the young lady disappeared for a while, and when she returned she wasn’t pregnant anymore. They had sacrificed an innocent, unborn child to their god of respectability. And that was the straw that broke my camel’s back. If that’s Christianity, thought, I want no part of it. So I dumped it. And I’ve never regretted it.

But where was Jesus in all this? He was appalled by it, and that was my breakthrough. For the first time I could see that it wasn’t the Roman authorities that called for Jesus to be crucified. It was religious leaders, those whom he called ‘hypocrites,’ ‘whitened sepulchres,’ ‘brood of snakes,’ ‘sons of hell.’

They wanted rid of him because he was an untidy, unpredictable trouble-maker who just would not conform, whose teaching undermined their hollow status that was based on a system of rules. They kept the common people in subjection by making them feel dirty, Jesus spoke the truth and set them free. A veneer of self-righteousness only just covered their corruption, and they hated Jesus because he saw right through them.

But Jesus wasn’t religious, he’s the one we should resemble, and I honestly believe that there are many people who are Christians but they don’t know it because they think they have to be religious. Trust me. You don't!