Jesus Was a Poor Salesman

    Sometimes I wonder how Jesus would have fared in this day of mass media and high-tech ministry. I can't picture him worrying about the details of running a large organization. I can't see him letting some make-up artist improve his looks before a TV appearance. And I have a hard time imagining the fundraising letters Jesus might write.
      Investigative reporters on television like to do exposes of evangelists who claim powers of supernatural healing with little evidence to back them up. In direct contrast, Jesus, who had manifest supernatural powers, tended to downplay them. Seven times in Mark's Gospel he told a healed person, "Tell no one!" When crowds pressed around him, he fled to solitude or rowed across a lake.
     We sometimes use the term "Savior complex" to describe an unhealthy syndrome of obsession over solving others' problems. Ironically, the true Savior seemed remarkably free of such a complex. He had no compulsion to convert the entire world in his lifetime or to cure people who were not ready to be cured.
      I never sensed Jesus twisting a person's arm. Rather, he stated the consequences of choice, then threw the decision back to the other party. For example, he once answered a wealthy man's question with uncompromising words, then let him walk away. Mark pointedly adds this comment about the man who rejected Jesus' advice: "Jesus looked at him and loved him"(Mark 10:21).
     In short, Jesus showed an incredible respect for human freedom. Those of us in ministry need the kind of "Savior complex" that Jesus demonstrated. As Elton Trueblood has observed, the major symbols of invitation that Jesus used had a severe, even offensive quality: the yoke of burden, the cup of suffereing, the towel of servanthood. "Take up your cross and follow me," he said, in the least manipulative invitation that has ever been given (see Mark 8:34).