Jesus The Hater

By our culture's standards, Jesus would have been considered hateful.

Just imagine! You’ve come to the temple to make sacrifices to God. You’re poor, so you can only afford to buy a couple small pigeons, which is the lawful sacrifice. You make your way through the crowd hoping to find a bird seller. As you move about, the scene looks more like a farmers market than a place of worship, but this is what you’ve come to expect. You’ve experienced it year after year. It is what it is! 

There they are. You see, a few tables away, next to some money changers, a man holding a small cage with a bird inside. On top of his table is a larger cage with several pigeons pecking at the seed he’s thrown on the floor.  You walk up and let him know you’d like to purchase two birds. The man tells you the price and you make the exchange, a few small coins for two small birds.

As you walk away, your birds in hand, you notice a commotion just twenty yards away. You see a man wildly swinging what looks to be a whip. You’re shocked by the unexpectedness of the sight! Buyers and sellers are covering their faces, dropping to the ground, crawling under tables for cover. As the people closest to the man hit the deck, you have a clear view of the whole scene. 

Is that Jesus? You recognize him because he’s been teaching around town and in the temple for several days, saying some amazing and provocative things, teaching in a way you’ve never heard before.  But now, he appears to have completely lost his mind! What in the world!?

As you watch, Jesus focuses his attention on tables closest to him, the ones full of coins. He slings the whip and you see the small objects flying through the air, glistening in the sun. There are hundreds, even thousands of them. Then you hear the sound of metal hitting and rolling the brick below.

All of a sudden, it’s not just coins flying through the air, but entire tables and chairs! Now people aren’t just ducking for cover, they are running for their lives! Everyone’s yelling and screaming. And then, you hear Jesus yelling too, something about his Father’s house, something about robbers. 

A few money changers are creeping along the ground, trying to retrieve as many coins as they can, and there are animals running and flying free all over the place. It’s absolute chaos!! Definitely not the morning you expected when you rolled out of bed.

And then you lock eyes. Jesus is just a few feet away. His eyes go from your eyes down to your hands where you are holding the two birds. “Let them go!” Jesus demands! “Drop everything! Everyone!! Drop it all!!!” (Mark 11:15-19) Out of complete fear, you and everyone else carrying things releases them. The birds you just paid for fly away, and you forget about why you were even there in the first place.

It is a wild scene for sure, and completely unexpected; seemingly out of character for the man who welcomes children and teaches about love and the kingdom of God. Or was it?

That night as you sit around the table with your family and a few friends, you share your story with them. They listen intently to your every word and then your neighbor and close friend pipes up. “Why do you think Jesus was being so hateful this morning? Isn’t his message a message of love?”

HATE IS NOT ALWAYS EVIL. SOMETIMES IT'S EVEN BIBLICAL AND GOOD.

If Jesus were alive today and some of the interactions he had in the Gospels took place in the United States, he would be labeled a hateful.

Besides the incredible scene above, consider a few of these other examples.

Jesus told the woman at the well straight up, “You’re right when you say you have no husband. The truth is, you’ve had five husbands and the man you’re living with right now isn’t even your husband.” (John 4:17-18) Essentially, Jesus is calling out her sin right to her face! How hateful!!

He also had an encounter with a rich young man who came to him with a simple question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus' response? “Go sell everything you have, give the money to the poor, and come follow me.” Now, that statement itself might not seem hateful, but what happened next certainly would be by today’s standards. Jesus let the man walk away sad. Jesus didn’t just welcome the man into a relationship with him. He demanded the man essentially give up the things that were most precious to him, give up the way he wanted to live his life, and orient his entire life around Jesus and his mission. (Luke 18:18-23) How hateful!!!

Jesus calls Peter, one of his best friends, Satan! “ (Matthew 16:23) Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”  Dang! 

And then there’s the scene where Jesus literally tells people to hate. Seriously? Yes.  Jesus is speaking to a crowd and he says to them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26-27) What the heck?! 

But did Jesus ever say that he hated specific people? Yep. In Revelation, Chapter 2 Jesus is giving a message to the church of Ephesus and here’s what he says. “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet, this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” (Revelation 2:5-6)

Now, is Jesus saying he hates the Nicolaitans as people? No. But he calls them out by name and points out the virtue of the Ephesian church brothers and sisters who hate whatever it is the Nicolaitans are doing. And, then he says he hates what the Nicolaitans do too.  

What’s more, if Jesus were here right now even his central message would have been considered extremely hateful. That message wasn’t a message of love by the way. Sure he talked about love a lot and even said the greatest commandment is to acknowledge and love God, and to love our neighbors.  However, that wasn’t his central message. Jesus' central message was what we saw in the verses from Revelation above - to repent and believe! Why was repentance the central message? Because repentance is an acknowledgement of our sinfulness - our separation from God - that leads us to an acknowledgment of Jesus’ death and resurrection to save us from our sin and move us from death to life! So, calling people to repentance is actually a loving thing to do, but calling people to repentance in today’s world is labeled hateful.

The truth is, Jesus was way more than a man who told people to be nice, be loving and just go help people. He was actually a man who spoke truth, usually brutal truth. Absolutely, he was gracious, kind and loving. But, he was also radical, in-your-face, and extremely offensive. And that’s our problem! Today offensive things are hateful and repentance is apparently offensive. So, as Christians, we cannot tell people Jesus' central message without being labeled hateful! While that doesn’t scare many of us from speaking truthfully from a biblical worldview, we’ve unfortunately got a lot of Christians afraid of being labeled hateful. They’ve completely given up on telling people about the need for repentance.

I could go on and on with story after story about Jesus doing things that would be considered hateful, but let’s look at the bigger picture. Believe it or not, there is a place for hate in the life of a Jesus-follower. It’s biblical.

In Ecclesiastes, we are told there is a time for love and time for hate and even that there is a time for peace and a time for war. (Ecclesiastes 3:8) What!? 

And, let’s turn to God’s revealed word through the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans. It says, “Let love be genuine.” Great! I think we can all agree with that. But then the next sentence says, “Abhor (also translated hate) what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” (Romans 12:9) So apparently it’s possible to be loving, to hate, and to cling to goodness all at the same time. 

Finally, let’s turn back to Jesus and his letter to the Church of Ephesus in Revelation where he speaks of hating something, because I believe it undeniably relates to us, the church in America, today.

Most scholars believe Nicolas, one of the original deacons appointed by the elders in Acts, had fallen away from the church and begun teaching a different doctrine. People who followed that false doctrine became known as Nicolaitans. 

What was that doctrine that led the Nicolaitans to do things the Ephesian church and even Jesus himself hated?  Most scholars believe it was two things; eating food offered to idols and fornication. So essentially, there was a group of people who claimed to be Christians, who had supported a false doctrine that involved idolatry and sexual sin. The church of Ephesus’ response was to hate their behavior. Jesus not only affirms their hatred, he says he hates it too! 

What to make of it all?