This week’s issue of MinistryMatters wrestles with this issue:
“Our concern is not only people who admire Jesus without following him, but people who claim to believe in Christ while behaving in ways that are a bold-faced contradiction of what Jesus taught and the way he lived.”
Taking Jesus seriously
May 5, 2026
by Jim Harnish
Writing from a Nazi prison, Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “What keeps gnawing at me is the question, Who is Christ actually for us today?”. The question continues to gnaw at the soul of anyone who takes Jesus seriously.
Harry Emerson Fosdick wrestled with a similar issue when he lamented, “Many people have pretty much reduced their Christianity to admiration of Jesus.” But he declared, “In these desperate days it is evident that that is not enough.” He warned that Jesus is “the most disturbing personality we ever face … Give him his way and it means the upset of our world.” (A Great Time To Be Alive p. 71-72)
Jesus put the issue squarely before his disciples during his farewell supper when he said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments … You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (Jn 14:15) He was reiterating his concluding challenge in the Sermon on the Mount, “Not everybody who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will get into the kingdom of heaven. Only those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter.” (Matt 6:21). **
The Risen Christ repeated his imperative to Peter during their breakfast on the beach. He asked Peter, haunted by the memory of his triple denial of his Lord, the same question three times, “Simon, do you love me?” He replied, each time more emphatically, “Lord, you know I love you!” Jesus repeated the command, “Feed my sheep.” He concluded with the words with which he initially called Peter, “Follow me.” (John 21:15-19).
Jesus was consistently and disturbingly clear. He was not looking for admirers who would observe what he was doing from a safe distance; he was calling disciples who would allow his way to become the way they lived. He was not inviting curious onlookers to nod in agreement with the Sermon on the Mount; he expected his followers to put his words into practice.
The resurrection not only celebrates the way God raised the dead Jesus to life in the past; it calls us to follow the living Jesus in the present and to allow the hope of resurrection to shape our vision of the future. “Practicing resurrection” is not admiring Jesus but actualizing his life in our own. It is not only what we affirm, but what we do. It’s not simply what we believe; it’s how we behave. And that’s the challenge!
Senator Raphael Warnock, the heir of Martin Luther King’s pulpit in Atlanta, defined our challenge today when he called Jesus “the biggest victim of identity theft in American history.” He declared, “The version of Jesus that’s presented doesn’t look much like the one we meet in the Gospels.”
Our concern is not only people who admire Jesus without following him, but people who claim to believe in Christ while behaving in ways that are a bold-faced contradiction of what Jesus taught and the way he lived. We see preachers and politicians wave the Bible in the air but show little evidence that they have read the Old Testament prophets or the gospels when it comes to dealing with racism, economic injustice, or the basic human rights affirmed in our Constitution. John Pavlovitz critiqued “MAGA’s Heretical, Heartless, Jesus-Less Christianity.” He described “performative piety and finger-wagging condescension, while justifying the harboring of pedophiles, the rolling back of human rights, and the indiscriminate assaults of brown-skinned people by government-funded, masked mercenaries.”
Bonhoeffer confronted similar issues. I discovered The Cost of Discipleship during my senior year in college. My well-worn, heavily underlined paperback copy is held together with more than one layer of tape along the spine. I was inspired by his firm rejection of “cheap grace” and continue to be challenged by his call to costly discipleship. I still read it as a call for personal spiritual discipline. But in 1980 I became involved in a city-wide, inter-faith recognition of the Holocaust. It opened my eyes to the “Church Struggle” in 1930’s Germany. We can hear echoes of that struggle in our own time.
Bonhoeffer wrote Discipleship for young pastors in an illegal seminary who were part of the Confessing Church. The movement declared in the Barmen Declaration (1934) that Jesus Christ – not Hitler – was Lord. Discipleship was more than an invitation to personal spiritual discipline. It was a counter-cultural call for an exclusive commitment to Jesus Christ that surpassed loyalty to any party, race, nation or leader. “Cheap grace” was not only a description of a shallow faith; it was a ruthlessly honest diagnosis critique of the German church that was falling in line with the Nazi regime.
In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer focused attention on the Sermon on the Mount which is largely absent from political conversations today. Bonhoeffer won’t let us settle for Jesus’ words as an individualistic ideal or a devotional guide for personal virtue. He proclaimed the Kingdom of God as the all-encompassing design for life as God intends it. In his day as in ours, taking Jesus seriously means allowing the words Jesus spoke and way Jesus lived to become the frame through which we view the political, economic, and social arenas in which we work and live.
In Life Together Bonhoeffer underscored the way our discipleship is nurtured and sustained in Christian community, particularly when taking Jesus seriously puts us in tension with the culture around us. The first readers of the Epistles of Peter were experiencing that kind of tension when they read, “Don’t give the opposition a second thought. Through thick and thin, keep your hearts at attention, in adoration before Christ, your Master.” (1 Peter 3:13-14 The Message)
The question still gnaws at our souls: Who is Christ actually for us today? Will we take Jesus seriously?
Fosdick concluded, “If Christ were only a teacher, telling us what we ought to do, if he were only an individual ideal, telling us to be like himself, then we would be discouraged. But he is more than that. What he did we never could have done, but now that he has done it we can share in it and play our part in its coming triumph. That is not discouraging. That is a great gospel.” (GTBA p.71-78).
Prayer
Eternal Spirit, whom we could not seek unless you had first sought us … We pray you will make Christianity more Christian. Baptize us with the Spirit of our Founder, touch us again with the contagion of his loveliness, send forth men and women into government to do there what Christ would have done, send them out into industry and into family life to be there what Christ would have been, that the whole world may be redeemed to fraternity and peace … Say to each of us that we matter, that the way we handle our lives, dedicate our strength, control our desires, love our fellows, and live honestly with them and with you, matters to your Kingdom. In the Spirit of Christ, we pray. Amen. (Harry Emerson Fosdick, Prayers p. 67)
Jim Harnish 