They Said He Was a Crazy Nigger

The Jews answered and said to Him, "Do we not say rightly that You are a Samaritan and have a demon?"

The Jews said to Him, "Now we know that You have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets also; and You say, 'If anyone keeps My word, he will never taste of death.'" (John 8:48, 52)

As I read this today I realized that if we translated this into our common language that we would not say that He had a demon but that He was crazy. That is the way we talk about people that say things too far outside our comfort zone. When people make radical statements that make us uncomfortable and uneasy we usually say they are crazy. What we really mean is that they need to come back more into line with our opinions and our way of viewing things instead of going off on the deep end.

As far as calling Him a Samaritan, this too would translate differently in our culture more along the lines of using racial slurs or whatever deprecations that might be common to the group we belong to. This would for some mean that He would be called a nigger. For others it might mean calling Him a son of a bitch. For more refined intellectuals it might mean using more subtle insinuations about His heritage. But however it is translated, this label was intended to place Him in the most negative light to discredit Him among those who might be inclined to follow Him and accept His teachings.

During all of this discussion these leaders were doing everything they could think of to discredit Jesus and find some way to condemn Him as a fraud and a deceiver. The bold claims of Jesus that emerge in these passages certainly gave them plenty of fuel for their unbelief if they chose to measure everything by the status quo. Truth always has that effect. The plainer the truth becomes the more unbelievable it appears to those who want to cling to tradition and power. The word truth as defined by the counterfeit systems we live under discredits the kind of real truth that comes from heaven.

Humans think they can figure out truth scientifically, even spiritual truth by simply examining facts, using arguments and testing theories. But the problem with this so-called scientific approach is that we very often rely on our own opinions and preconceived beliefs and biases as our standard of measure, the criteria by which we test everything different. But this method of using assumptions and preconceived ideas is fatally flawed from the very start, for if you start with false assumptions about how to measure other things, ideas or people then all the results you get from your examination and testing will be correspondingly inaccurate without you even becoming aware of your mistake.

Jesus Himself was the greatest standard by which truth could be measured that ever existed on this planet. For anyone to attempt to test His words or His example by using any other standard is insanity in the eyes of the rest of the universe. But the real issue for each one of us is how we will choose to relate to Him. Will we try to measure Jesus by our standards and preferences or will we allow God to reveal what is real to us and allow our lives to be shaped by Him into conformity to what is best and be salvaged back into our original function and design?