Then the assembly rose as a body and brought Jesus before Pilate. They began to accuse him, saying, “We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king.” Then Pilate asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, “I find no basis for an accusation against this man.” But they were insistent and said, “He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place.”
The opponents of Jesus brought accusations against him to Pontius Pilate, in the hope that he would be executed. Though several of their claims against Jesus were exaggerated or false, one was accurate. Jesus did indeed “stir up the people” from Galilee, where Jesus began his ministry, to Jerusalem, where it was soon to end. The Jesus who stirs things up in a major way, therefore, is rather like a big giant spoon. Will we allow Jesus to stir us up, to challenge our complacencies, and call us to a whole new way of living?
Had the leaders in Jerusalem heard that man’s talk on metaphors, they might have called Jesus a big giant spoon. And, actually, that would have been a fair description. Many of their accusations against Jesus were not accurate, such as that Jesus had forbidden people to pay taxes to the emperor. And Jesus had never actually said he was the king in the sense of a political competitor to Caesar. But it was fair to say that he “stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place” (Luke 23:5).
How did Jesus stir up the people? Certainly, his ability to do miracles, especially to heal people, awakened popular curiosity and drew the crowds. But it was Jesus’s message that seemed to have the most impact. When Jesus was teaching in the temple in Luke 19, for example, the leaders were trying to find a way to kill him “but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard” (Luke 19:47-48). The religious leaders were, in fact, “afraid of the people” because Jesus had stirred them up so much (Luke 22:2). So, when making their accusations to Pontius Pilate, the authorities could have said, metaphorically, Jesus is a great big spoon.
If we were to take seriously the teaching and example of Jesus, I suggest he’d be a great big spoon today. Through his faithful disciples he would stir things up, that’s for sure. He’d unsettle our own personal complacency and comfort, calling us to imitate his sacrificial service and even to love our enemies. Jesus would stir up things in our society with his proclamation of God’s kingdom, mercy, love, and justice (see, for example, Luke 4:16-30). Jesus would also stir up the church, calling us to care less about our personal preferences and privilege and more about serving “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40) and reaching out with grace to the lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7).
We have the opportunity to ask the Lord if he’d like to stir up something in us. Yes, Jesus is the one who offers peace. But that doesn’t mean we will always feel comfortable around him. The real Jesus will expand our horizons, challenge our biases, disrupt our comfortable assumptions, and call us into his counter-cultural kingdom. He will stir up within us new compassion for the hurting and zeal for his holiness. So, if you’ll allow for the metaphor, will you let Jesus be a big giant spoon in your life?
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