The Bleeding Stinking Mad Shadow of Jesus: Part 2, Madness and Morons

Let's start with "mad." By mad, of course, we don't mean angry, we mean crazy. Like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

We'd like Jesus to be rational and sensible. We'd like Jesus to add up nicely on our Excel spreadsheets. But Jesus is not rational or sensible, at least not by the calculus of the world. There is something foolish and a bit crazy about Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus' sanity was frequently questioned, once leading to a family intervention:

When his family heard about it, they set out to take charge of him, because people were saying, "He's gone mad!" (Mark 3.21)

Of course, this is also one of Paul's great themes in his letters, the foolishness of the cross:

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

The Greek word for "foolish" here is mōrós. The entry for mōrós from the Strong's Greek Dictionary:

Mōrós (the root of the English terms, "moron, moronic") – properly, dull (insipid), flat ("without an edge"); (figuratively) "mentally inert"; dull in understanding; nonsensical ("moronic"), lacking a grip on reality (acting as though "brainless").

In the eyes of the world, followers of Jesus are morons. We are considered nonsensical, dull, lacking a grip on reality, brainless.

Like our leader, we're a bit mad.