What's Wrong With Jesus

What’s Wrong With Jesus

January 27, 2018 Luke 14:25-35 John 6:60-66

If you were to ask some people what’s wrong with Jesus, you might get responses such as 1) He’s too narrow-minded, 2) He can’t be the Son of God), 3) He expects too much of people, 4) He offends people, and 5) He’s no longer relevant for society. People felt the same way about him in the first century.

If you ever decide to get on Facebook, one of the first things Facebook wants you to do is to add more friends. They want you to have as many friends as you can. They will even suggest people who went to high school, college, church, with you or worked with you whom you might want to send a request to become their friend. They will notify you, that people have requested to become your friends, and all you have to do is to accept their request and you become their friend or one of their followers. They can put up things on their face-book page and you will see them right there on your page, without having to look them up.

After a while though, you will notice that some people are not the people you want as your friend. They put up videos, pictures, and stories that are very distasteful. Some are filled with profanity. Some are filled with pornography. Some are filled with slander and gossip about other people. All of this stuff gets attached to your face-book page, so that if someone is looking at your page, to hire you and they see all this stuff, they may change their mind about you. They assume you are approving and enjoying what’s on your page.

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Facebook gives you a couple of options to deal with this problem. You can 1) hide the post. 2) Snooze the Person for 30 Days to give you a break, or 3) Unfollow the person, but remain friends. (they don’t know you have un-followed them.) You can also choose to block a person which keeps them from being able to contact you about anything. You can unfriend them which removes you from their lists of friends. This idea of getting friends, un-following them, un-friending them, and then blocking them can actually be found in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John.

Jesus was at the far side of the Sea of Galilee. People were bringing sick people to him left and right. People were being healed and the Scriptures tell us a great crowd of people followed him because of all the miracles that Jesus was doing. People were sending Jesus friends requests and becoming friends and followers of Jesus on their own version of Facebook. Word had gotten out so fast, an even greater crowd came to Jesus up on a mountainside after he left the place of doing miralces.

So Jesus does another miracle. He takes five loaves of bread and two fish and feed 5000 men and probably another 10,000 women and children. This was a buffet meal where you could eat all that you wanted to eat. The food was so good, so abundant and so free, that the people wanted to make Jesus, King right there on the spot. Jesus withdrew again up the mountain to slip away from them.

Later that evening, the disciples head across the Sea of Galilee to get to Capernaum. They run into a midnight storm that threatens to sink the boat. Jesus ends up walking on the water and calming the raging sea. Once he got in the boat, the boat went so fast it immediately reached the shore where they were headed. The word had spread about the bread, so a new group of people landed where Jesus had fed the 5,000 men, but when they saw Jesus had left, they headed for Capernaum. They were shocked to find Jesus was there because they knew he had not gotten in the one boat that had been at the feeding of the crowd.

Jesus was at the top of his game in the eyes of the people. If it were the NBA All Star Game, Jesus would have been named Captain of the Team and MVP after it was all over. Nobody was more popular in the country than was Jesus.

In less than two years, he has a congregation of some 20,000 people. If the goal of the church is to get as many people in the doors as possible, then Jesus was on his way. But Jesus did not come to get as many people on his friend’s lists as he could. He didn’t come to see how many likes and thumbs ups that he could get. He wasn’t even keeping attendance records. Jesus came to get people to follow after Him so that He could lead them to God.