Not many of us like to have our cages rattled or our chains jerked. We like the status quo, for the most part, and view events or information contrary to our perception of the world as threats and intrusive.

This is why we choose friends that think like us, share our values, and respect our boundaries. It’s why we go to the churches that we do. We want to be affirmed and confirmed in our correct and biblical viewpoints, as well as in biases and blind spots. We have our comfort zones, after all, and feel entitled to them.

Jesus will have none of it. He is interfering, intrusive, meddling, prying, and nosey. He is a continual threat to our categories and world view. Just when we think we’ve got our theology and Christian life all figured out and nailed down, we hear a sermon or read a passage that raises a question.

Of course, we can shoot the messenger if it’s a sermon or book, but when the book happens to be the Bible . . . well, maybe we gloss over it or mark as something to be studied and considered later. Later, as in “when I get to heaven I’m going to ask God about that.”

When we are confronted with such information, we can do one of two things with it: we can assimilate it or we can accommodate it. To assimilate new facts or ideas means to fit them into our pre-existing categories; we like to assimilate because we don’t have to change. Or we don’t have to change in a direction that we don’t want to go. Assimilation is our friend.

Accommodation, however, means we have to create new categories or abandon old ones that don’t fit any longer. Accommodation is being transformed by the renewing of our mind, conformed to the image of Christ. Accommodation is sanctification.

Some day, read one or all of the gospels through the eyes of a Pharisee, Sadducee, or any other of the many opponents Jesus accumulated during His ministry in Judea. You’ll find a troublemaker, an iconoclast, and – above all – serious threat to the lives of the comfortable. You’ll be disturbed. That’s Jesus: disturbing the comfortable, comforting the disturbed.

Next: Jesus the Holy Irritation, Part One


2 Cor 1:13