Recently, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island wrote an article entitled “Jesus Wasn’t Always Nice.” The purpose of the article was to address critics of his who didn’t like an article he wrote a while back criticizing President Obama. Bishop Tobin reminds us that the real Jesus is often not like the Jesus of popular imagination; he can be harshly critical of others and does not shy away from challenging those who contradict his teachings.

One the primary reasons I am writing Who Do You Say That I Am? is to counteract the false images of Jesus that permeate our culture – including our churches. In reality, these false images have often become false idols that we set up to give us a Jesus who will agree with us and accept our faults and sins. But the real Jesus loves us too much to simply “accept us where we are” – he want us to be where he is.

If you read the Gospels carefully, you see that Christ’s contemporaries did not have such a limited view of him. They often saw him as a prophet in the mold of Elijah, Jeremiah or John the Baptist. When we think of those figures, we think of harsh men who challenged their people and called them to repentance. If Jesus was compared to them by those who knew him, isn’t it likely that he too was such a prophet?