The Angry Savior

Patricia Watkins is a minister for Ambassadors for Christ World Outreach Ministries, a Pentecostal church on the South Side of Chicago. She was tired of the violence and drug dealing in the church's neighborhood, so she organized community meetings on the corner of 78th Street and Hermitage Avenue. The church wanted to reclaim the corner by their presence and their prayers.

People from the church pitched a tent, set up chairs, and started talking about the problems and needs of the block. Some nights thirty people showed up, other nights, many more. Ministers from nearby churches led worship services. Adults tutored children in reading and math. Police and prosecutors came out to support the residents, especially when they marched through the streets shouting, "Whose streets? Our streets!"

One evening as a tent meeting was breaking up, a drug boss ordered his crew back to the streets. It was safe. The cops and most of the preachers were gone. But Watkins had not left, and she didn't like what she was seeing. She confronted the boss.

"Son, do you know why we're out here?" she asked. He shrugged. "We're out here trying to save your life," she continued. "How old are you?"

He said he was 17. She replied, "You've got to help us help you."

That's when Watkins says she noticed a car slowly approaching. The driver was looking around nervously. The teenager Watkins had been talking to walked over to the driver. When Watkins realized a drug deal was going on, she grabbed a bullhorn.

"No drugs!" she boomed. "No drugs! No drugs!"

The car sped off, and the young dealer ran—pursued by Watkins, two other pastors, and several women. They chased him for blocks as neighbors on their porches laughed and applauded.

"All we could see was the bottom of his shoes," Watkins later said.

The Chicago Tribune reporter who wrote about this incident concluded the story by saying, "They did not want to arrest him. They wanted to shame him. They wanted to change him. 'He was our son,' Watkins says."

The phrase that caught my attention was this: "They wanted to shame him." It not only called to mind the many warnings I've heard as a parent, pastor, and teacher against shaming people, it also reminded me of Jesus' behavior.

The Mad Messiah

Jesus would not have been able to get a teaching credential anywhere in the country. He regularly used methods that we are trying ever so hard to eliminate today.

For example, we sometimes find Him using shame to motivate: "Those who are ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels" (Mark 8:38, NRSV).

And He sometimes intimidates with threats: "Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send His angels, and they will collect out of His kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matt. 13:40-42).

And once Jesus used physical force to make His point: "In the temple He found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, He drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables" (John 2:14-15).

Not only would Jesus not win teacher of the year, He would probably be arrested for abuse.

We become more uncomfortable as we look at the details of the incident in the temple. The account begins innocently enough, with people going about the commonplace religious business of buying and selling animals to sacrifice in the temple.

To this very ordinary scene, Jesus reacts viscerally. He doesn't calm himself down with self-talk about patience and longsuffering love or remind Himself of the good intentions of these folks—after all, the whole place was designed to facilitate the worship of God. Instead anger rises up like bile—an anger, we should note, He harbors long enough to fashion a whip of cords.

Then suddenly, someone is shouting something about "prayer" and "my Father's house." His voice rages. The crack of the whip resounds again and again as it stings human skin and animal hide. Sheep scatter in all directions. Cattle bolt and run over people. Everyone panics. There are people running this way and that, sellers reaching for their coins as the whip lashes at their hands, parents desperately grabbing children, someone shouting, "Run. There's a demoniac about!"

The incident remained a vivid memory for the disciples for decades—all four Gospel writers include it in their accounts. If these men wanted to portray only the compassionate Jesus, it would have been rather easy to quietly drop the story. Even Luke and John, known for penning Gospels that portray Jesus in an especially loving light, refuse to leave it out.

But this Jesus is so discomforting some commentators try to cut such passages out of their Bibles. We struggle with Jesus in such moments because He so willingly employs shame and fear to motivate people.

The Upside of Fear

A close examination shows that perhaps Jesus knows more about human nature than we do. And our experience confirms Jesus' psychological insights.

Recently I was teasingly griping about my wife to a group of her friends at a church picnic when one of them said, "Don't you ever say anything nice about Barb?" I felt a flood of embarrassment, especially in front of these women, because I pride myself in at least appearing to be a loving husband! But as I thought about that comment later, I realized I had gotten into a bad habit of joking about my wife's flaws and rarely bragging about her gifts. I immediately set about changing my talk. I was shamed into better behavior.

The young man that Patricia Watkins publicly humiliated was so ashamed he didn't show his face for three months. But then one night he returned to the tent. He apologized and said he was trying to turn his life around. And he asked Watkins to pray for him.

Shame is a blessed gift sometimes because it can prompt us into better behavior. Fear is a gift as well.

My foster son had been indifferent about religion until he saw the movie "Left Behind" at a friend's house. The movie is about the rapture and God's subsequent judgment. He later asked me if the movie was true. I replied that though Christians differ about the details of the end times, we agree on this: Christ will come again, and there will be a judgment. This was a sobering thought for this teenager, and it wasn't long before he committed his life to Christ and was baptized.

Fear, too, can be a blessed gift. And so is physical coercion, which is the reason Christians have respected the authority of government, whose chief agents of justice are its police force and the military.

And so the psychology of Jesus seems to suggest that shaming may be loving, and intimidation and physical force may be acts of mercy.

And this with a Jesus whom we can assume inspired one of His disciples to write, "Perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). So how are we to understand Jesus' use of these "negative motivators"?

Here the church father Augustine may be of some help. John Charles Selner's book, The Teaching of St. Augustine on Fear as a Religious Motive, summarizes the great fourth-century theologian's insights on fear, which apply across the board. Augustine taught that human beings are designed to love, and the goal of life is to order one's love so that it has a worthy object: God. There are four principle emotions that shape us as we pursue love: Desire attracts us to what we love. Joy accompanies the experience of love. Grief is what we feel when we lose love. Fear is the emotion we experience when we believe we may lose love.

Thus fear is far from a negative emotion for Augustine. It is a God-given emotion to prompt us to love truly.

To be motivated merely by fear, however, is to remain in our sins, even if we obey God's law perfectly—because then our ultimate desire is not God but to avoid the pain of judgment. This is why the law cannot save. Though it can temporarily prevent us from fulfilling wrong desires, it cannot fill us with the love of God and the desire to please Him. Only the grace of God can do that.

The problem with legalistic religion is not the use of fear and shame—all truly religious, truly loving people, like Jesus, employ fear and shame from time to time. The problem is that legalistic religion is shame-based and fear-based. Fear and shame are the primary tools used to motivate behavior. Love comes in a distant second, if it comes in at all.

The problem with lackadaisical religion is that it completely repudiates fear and assumes there is nothing to be afraid of in this life or the next. Jesus apparently didn't agree, and He regularly told His listeners to fear those things worth fearing—especially the judgment of God. Ironically, a religion without fear, like the fear-based religion, has little love because it fails to be honest with people about the real spiritual dangers we face. It is more interested in making people feel good than in helping them.

As Augustine notes, given human nature, fear generally comes before love. To put it positively, fear is the tutor for love. As a tutor, it must eventually leave and make way for the master teacher, love. But this is not something that happens instantaneously. While we are praying to learn to love God for Himself, fear can motivate us to break with evil, to correct ourselves, to watch for the enemy, to begin to live the interior life. The closer we grow to Jesus, of course, the more we will be motivated only by love.

Dangerous Blessings

Despite the explanation above, the idea that fear and shame and even physical intimidation can be used for good and loving ends remains an unnerving and frankly dangerous idea. We are wise to be cautious and to use them rarely, and only after getting counsel from others. Indeed, there has been too much abuse in the name of religion. Jesus spews such abusers out of His mouth. The scalpel is an essential tool of healing in the hand of a surgeon. It can be a dangerous object in the hands of a child or a killer.

Every gift of God is both dangerous and full of potential to bless. Just ask that young man, the former Chicago drug dealer, who finally sought the healing power of Jesus because someone loved him enough to shame him.

Adapted from Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God, © 2006. Used by permission of Baker Books. Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today magazine.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Today's Christian magazine.
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