More Than Stone

Rob Bell quoted Mark Kurlanski’s book, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea,
in a recent sermon.

“If someone were to come along who would not compromise, a rebel, who insisted on taking the only moral path, rejecting violence in all it’s forms. Such a person, would seem too menacing, that he would be killed, and after his death, he would be canonized or deified because a saint is less dangerous than a rebel.”

This book is a secular, historical overview of nonviolence. Wow. Is a saint less dangerous than a rebel? Mark Kurlanski was not referring to any one person, he was simply making a general observation. I just simply can not get past the truth of this statement. Have we lost the “rebel” nature of Jesus? Have we deified and sanitized Jesus until He is simply a really nice guy(God)? Or have we taken His rebel nature and twisted it so that we can justify our own violent natures? Or both?

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