Things Jesus Never Said

What does it mean to be a Christian? You get baptized, you take communion and you follow Jesus. I’m OK if you don’t want to do the first two as long as you do the “follow Jesus,” one.

But following Jesus is really the hard one.

It’s so hard that a lot of Christians would rather make up a bunch of other stuff to do and argue about. That way we can feel better about ourselves even if we’re not doing the hard stuff..

Here are some things Jesus didn’t say, but if you listened to some other Christians you might think he did.

• Obnoxiously as possible, point out each others’ private sins. If you can’t find any, make up some stuff to complain about that I never mentioned like Critical Race Theory, dancing on Sundays, vaccines and evolution.

• Go ye therefore and start an exclusive club with difficult rules about who is in or out.

• Insert your own angry opinions into the domain of God’s grace because vengeance belongs to all of you.

• Verily I say unto you, my words and all scripture before me was written as the ultimate science textbook. I would hate to see you use the minds I gave you.

• I’m really into the law, so try to make a religion with a lot of rules and even better, form political action committees to force those rules on people I haven’t won over yet.

• You guys know how much I love my birthday, right? But you know what really makes me mad? When people want to enjoy their own religious traditions on any day within two months of my birthday. I think that’s like declaring war on my birthday.

• When you pray, do so very loudly and in a public place, preferably a school or a football game.

• Suspect your neighbor, especially if they come from a different country or vote for someone you don’t like. Beat them up any chance you get, but screaming through bullhorns, fastening giant flags on your truck and shooting teargas are fine as well.

• The kingdom of God will come like a thief in the night. So if I were you, I’d start hoarding and hiding gobs of money, lock all your doors and build a bunch of walls. You can never be to safe against thieves.

Guess what. If you pay attention to the things that Jesus actually asked us to do, you’d realize that we’re all really bad at being Christians. I fail at these things all the time:

• You cannot serve God and money.
• Love your enemy.
• Take up the cross and follow me all the way to death.
• Serve the poor, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, feed the hungry.
• Sell everything you have.

Maybe we should spend more time on these actual words of Jesus before we get so upset over how other Christians practice their faith. I’ll bet if we all compared our actual lives to these words of Christ we’d all appreciate some liberal forgiveness.