Jesus' Words on Jesus' Terms--October 23, 2025
"For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, be sober in everything, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully." (2 Timothy 2:3-5)
It is fascinating--and in all honesty, more than a little terrifying--how many times I've heard folks put their own words into Jesus' mouth. And part of the terror, I'll confess, is that when I see it around me from others, it reminds me (with a hard gulp) that I had better check myself for the ways I'm tempted to put my own words, my own wishes, my own pet priorities, and my own agendas into Jesus' mouth, rather than letting his way, his message, and his gospel flow out of mine.
Some examples are obvious, and I bet you've heard some of them, too.
"God helps those who help themselves." (Sorry, that's Ben Franklin, not Jesus.)
"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime." (This one has been attributed to writers as varied as Lao Tzu to Maimonides to Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, but none of them are Jesus.)
"Everything happens for a reason, and God won't give you more than you can handle." (Both of those are really sort of faux-inspirational generalities that could mean anything or nothing, but you won't find Jesus saying either sin the Gospels.)
And of course, deep down, I suspect a lot of us secretly operate with the unspoken assumption that Jesus said, "I hate all the same people you do, and my politics align perfectly with your registered party." But that one's a lie, too--maybe the most insidious of them all.
On the flip side, I've also heard plenty of folks dismiss as dangerous nonsense or unpatriotic subversiveness the actual words of Jesus, and I'll bet you have, too.
"What are we supposed to do when someone wrongs us? Love our enemies? Turn the other cheek?" (Uh, yes, actually.)
"Now you're telling us to share our abundance? What are you, a Marxist?" (No, that's Jesus, quite literally on numerous occasions.)
"Blessed are the poor? And the peacemakers? Well, that won't make for a very fierce military culture or train kids to be ambitious!" (Maybe not, but the question at hand is about what Jesus teaches....)
You get my drift. It seems that a great many of us Respectable Religious Folks want Jesus, but really only as sort of a figurehead--we'd like him to endorse our personal philosophies, political platforms, and economic priorities with his stamp of approval, and we'd like the editorial right to censor out the things we don't care for from his message and way of life. Then, if someone criticizes our opinions, we can tell ourselves "They're attacking Jesus, God, and all that's holy! They're persecuting Christians!" when really, they might just be pointing out the ways we've tried to make Jesus our ventriloquist's dummy.
Well, it's worth noting that this is not a new concern, and ours certainly isn't the first generation of Christians to be tempted to listen only to the messaging we want to hear. That concern is here in the New Testament itself, in this passage that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday. The apostle, speaking to a young pastor-in-training, warns, "For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths." You know, I used to hear these verses like it was some sort of bold and ominous prediction of some distant future (and plenty of TV preachers and self-deputized parachurch spokesmen always seemed to think this was just about the contemporary era, and their preferred targets!). But the more I read the Scriptures, and the more I study history, the more it seems like this is a perennial and pernicious temptation of every age--and we keep wanting to do it! Apparently the early church struggled with the impulse to distort or twist the Gospel into something else other than the audacious message of the grace of God in Christ.
And ever since, each generation has faced new counterfeits: from "Let's make Jesus the official mascot of the Roman Empire!" in the time of Constantine to "Jesus needs us to conquer and take back the Holy Land, so we're going to war in his name!" during the Crusades, to "You can buy your loved ones out of a post-mortem period of suffering in purgatory with sufficient donations to the church" in the era leading up to the Reformation, to "Jesus will rapture away his chosen saints while the rest of the world suffers through misery in the end times" when that notion was invented in the 19th century in England, to "Everything is just going to get better and better until we create the perfect Kingdom of God on earth through the help of good morals and human ingenuity" in the years before the first World War proved that one wrong. Of course, there are plenty of other examples--these are just some easy, low-hanging fruit. The point is that the temptation to listen only to the messages we want to hear, and to selectively cultivate the messengers we want to hear from, has been around basically since the day after Easter Sunday. Heck, even on the day of Jesus' ascension into heaven, some of his disciples were asking him if he was planning on setting up a kingdom on earth right then, and he had to do a last-minute course-correction on the spot!
So what do we do about this "ear-tickling" temptation to self-select only the parts of Jesus' way that we already like or agree with? What do we do, once we have named how often and how easily folks like us, who name the name of Jesus, dress our own agendas and philosophies in a robe, sandals, and fake beard to claim to be Christ-like--assuming, of course, that we don't want to fall into that trap? Well, maybe that's the first thing we need to establish: if we are sincerely seeking to be disciples of Jesus, rather than exploiters of Jesus, then we need to start by agreeing that we are not going to actively try to co-opt Jesus to back our pre-existing political, economic, or personal commitments. It may well be that what I already think turns out to line up with Jesus on X or Y or Z matters, but we don't select which parts of the way of Jesus we like based on what I want to be true, but rather, we let Jesus be the one to shape us, even when that means unlearning old, crooked, unjust, unkind, or ungracious habits and beliefs in order to let Jesus re-form us, as often as he needs to.
Once we can agree on that point, I think the next point is exactly what these verses from 2 Timothy model for us: a commitment to mutual accountability. In other words, we commit to one another to help see the ways that each of us attempts to remake Jesus in our own image, rather than letting him shape us in his way. And when you catch me covering my ears to some part of Jesus' teaching (say, maybe I'm having a hard time with showing kindness to that person who really irritates me, even though Jesus makes love for enemies a clear priority of his way of life), you can step up and help me to hear what I've been ignoring. When you have been confusing your political party's talking points with the Gospel of Jesus, then other disciples may step up and ask you to re-examine where your commitments come from--even just to get you to start raising questions about things you had never thought to ask about. We do this together, back and forth, helping one another to identify the things we couldn't see in ourselves, and helping one another to hear the voice of Jesus more clearly above the other noise competing for our attention. And we do it, not to be mean, or to catch someone else in an embarrassing "gotcha" moment, but so that all of us can more faithfully and authentically follow Jesus.
That's what the goal of all of this is--for all of us, who already claim to be disciples of Jesus, striving to live the Jesus way of life--to more and more fully be formed in his likeness. It's for all of us to come to listen, wholly and fully, to the Gospel's good news, even in the places where that Gospel stretches us, challenges us, and turns our old view of the world upside-down.
Maybe the more we help each other to listen to Jesus on his own terms, the less we'll feel the impulse to put our own words in his mouth. Maybe we will realize we don't have to.
Lord Jesus, give us the courage to listen to you before trying to speak for you.
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