Copyright Ian Ellis-Jones 2005 - All Rights Reserved.

1. WAS JESUS PERFECT?
by IAN ELLIS- JONES
ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE SYDNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
SUNDAY, 10 JULY 2005
Those who reject or cannot accept Jesus Christ as "God" or "Saviour and Lord"
often say, "But he was a good man, as good as they get". However, the Jesus
depicted in the gospels accounts appears to me as a decidedly less than perfect
human being. In my view, that is not a problem, unless you believe in the deity of
Jesus, which Unitarians generally don’t. The supposed doctrine of the
sinlessness of Jesus is, in Samuel Angus’ words, a “negative conception” which
may “even be a non-moral concept”.
Jesus and the Golden Rule
Contrary to his own teaching, he did not always love his enemies and bless
them. Indeed, he would at times call down curses upon the heads of his
enemies. For example, in Luke’s gospel we read:
READING. Lk 11:42-52. “But woe to you Pharisees! For you pay tithe of mint and rue and
every kind of garden herb, and yet disregard justice and the love of God; but these are the
things you should have done without neglecting the others. "Woe to you Pharisees! For you
love the chief seats in the synagogues and the respectful greetings in the market places. "Woe
to you! For you are like concealed tombs, and the people who walk over them are unaware of
it." One of the lawyers said to Him in reply, "Teacher, when You say this, You insult us too."
But He said, "Woe to you lawyers as well! For you weigh men down with burdens hard to bear,
while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers. "Woe to you!
For you build the tombs of the prophets, and it was your fathers who killed them. "So you are
witnesses and approve the deeds of your fathers; because it was they who killed them, and you
build their tombs. "For this reason also the wisdom of God said, 'I will send to them prophets
and apostles, and some of them they will kill and some they will persecute, so that the blood of
all the prophets, shed since the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation,
from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the
house of God; yes, I tell you, it shall be charged against this generation.' "Woe to you lawyers!
For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered
those who were entering."
In his famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to his followers, “Love your
enemies, bless those who curse you, and do good to those who hate you” (Mt
5:43). Great stuff, but did Jesus himself always abide by this rule? I think not.
As Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan wrote in The Real Messiah? (1985):

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But when it came to his own enemies, Jesus declared (Luke 19:27), “Take my
enemies, who would not have me rule over them, bring them here, and kill them
before me.”
Kaplan goes on to write:
Jesus subjected anyone who dared oppose him to the most awful abuse, curses
and threats of divine punishment.
In a similar vein philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his compilation book Why I am
Not a Christian (1957), writes:
Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment,
and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would
not listen to His preaching … .
You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of
vipers, how can ye escape damnation of hell?’ [Mt 23:33] That was said to
people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best
tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. …
Famed Methodist minister Leslie Weatherhead, in his book When the Lamp
Flickers (1948), has made out a strong case that, contrary to what Bertrand
Russell asserts, Jesus did not actually believe in an endless hell. Nevertheless,
he did believe in a day of judgment. For example, we read in John’s gospel:
I come to the world for judgment. I may give sight to the sightless, but I will blind
those who see (Jn 11:39).
On at least one occasion Jesus even employed physical violence against those
whom he regarded as his enemies. In the famous episode of his cleansing of the
temple, we read in John’s gospel:
And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the
sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and
overturned their tables (Jn 2:15).
Jesus could be pompous and sound unnecessarily self-important, and at times
he could even be rude and insensitive. For example, there is the well-known
incident relating to the woman of Canaan mentioned in Mt 15:21-26 and Mk
7:24-27. This woman approached Jesus in great humility and with great
expectation, even falling at his feet. She was not a beggar but apparently sought
only spiritual guidance from him. However, Jesus, according to Matthew’s
gospel said, "It is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs"

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(Mt 15:26). Jesus sent this woman away, having verbally abused her to her face.
It seems Jesus could even be rude to his own mother. Except at his crucifixion
he is reported as reproaching his mother on almost every occasion they met. For
example, in John’s gospel we have the following:
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of
Jesus was there; and both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to Him, "They have no wine."
And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what does that have to do with us? My hour has
not yet come" (Jn 2:1-4).
Similarly in Matthew’s gospel we have this purported utterance of Jesus:
Someone said to Him, "Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are standing
outside seeking to speak to You." But Jesus answered the one who was telling
Him and said, "Who is My mother and who are My brothers?" (Mt 12:47-48)
Conventional Christians often retort that Jesus is not being at all disrespectful to
his mother, that the words that he used are not words of derision or rudeness but
of loving respect, but I beg to differ. There are too many of them for them to be
dismissed so easily.

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Jesus and the Gadarene swine
READING. Mt 8:28-34. When He came to the other side into the country of the Gadarenes,
two men who were demon-possessed met Him as they were coming out of the tombs. They
were so extremely violent that no one could pass by that way. And they cried out, saying,
“What business do we have with each other, Son of God? Have You come here to torment us
before the time?” Now there was a herd of many swine feeding at a distance from them. The
demons began to entreat Him, saying, “If You are going to cast us out, send us into the herd of
swine.” And He said to them, “Go!” And they came out and went into the swine, and the
whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and perished in the waters. The herdsmen
ran away, and went to the city and reported everything, including what had happened to the
demoniacs. And behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus; and when they saw Him, they
implored Him to leave their region. [See also Lk 8:26-39.]
True, the devils asked Jesus to cast them into a herd of pigs, but why punish the
pigs, who ran off into the sea and drowned? Whichever way you splice it, we
here have Jesus being unnecessarily cruel to animals. These animals obviously
belonged to someone, and their wanton destruction would have had adverse
financial and other consequences for their owner.
Bertrand Russell, in Why I am Not a Christian (1957), considered this story to be
evidence of the defective moral character of Jesus. He chastises Jesus for being
“not very kind” to the pigs. For if Jesus was truly omnipotent and
omnibenevolent, he could have found a much more rational and humane way to
dispense with the devils - like just making them go away. Why be so unkind to
the pigs? Gratuitous cruelty to and suffering of animals is not a state of affairs
that we human beings, of any persuasion, can accept nowadays, if we ever
could.

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Jesus curses the fig- tree
READING. Mk 11:12-14, 20-22. The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was
hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig-tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he
reached it he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to
the tree, “May no-one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it. . . . In
the morning as they went along, they saw the fig-tree withered from the roots. Peter
remembered and said to Jesus. “Rabbi, look! The fig-tree you cursed has withered!” “Have
faith in God,” Jesus answered. [See also Mt 21:17-22.]
Now we have Jesus causing wanton destruction to a tree. If someone did that in
this State today, they could be charged with contravening the local council’s tree
preservation order.
The story of Jesus’ cursing of the fig tree poses problems for conventional Bible-
believing Christians who are desperate to believe that Jesus was perfect, that is,
without sin. For non-believers in the deity and sinlessness of Jesus - and that
would include most, if not all, of us here present this morning - the story,
assuming it ever happened, presents us with a very human, even fallible, Jesus.
Someone very much like us.
In Why I am Not a Christian (1957) Bertrand Russell wrote:
This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and
you could really not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter
of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other
people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in
those respects.
Even many professing Christians have also come to the conclusion that this
incident is out of character for the supposed Son of God. For example, T W
Manson, who was Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at
Manchester for over 20 years, writes:
This is a tale of miraculous power wasted in the service of ill temper (for the
supernatural energy employed to blast the unfortunate tree might have been
more usefully expended in forcing a crop of figs out of season); as it stands it is
simply incredible.
Then there’s J B Phillips, the well-known Bible paraphraser and author. He
writes of Jesus "venting his feelings of frustration and despair upon the fig-tree”.
Then there’s the Scottish theologian William Barclay, who writes that Jesus is
guilty of “petulance”. There is also A M Hunter, the famous New Testament

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critical scholar, who finds the whole story "one of the most perplexing in the
Gospels". Finally, we have the Christian evangelical poet and hymn writer
William Cowper, who poignantly wrote that “the parable of the barren fig-tree was
to me an inconceivable source of anguish”. He went on, saying, “I applied it to
myself, with a strong persuasion in my mind, that when our Saviour pronounced
a curse upon it, he had me in his eye, and pointed that curse directly at me."
Why did Jesus smite the fig-tree? Even if it was not laden with figs, it was still,
we are told, leafy. Besides that, it was still a living thing that had a right to exist
and that might even have afforded some beauty as well as shade. Rabbi Aryeh
Kaplan, writing in The Real Messiah? (1985), asks:
Did this innocent tree deserve such cruel punishment? It was not even the
season for figs, and the tree was merely fulfilling its nature. If Jesus wanted to
show his miraculous powers, as the gospel seems to indicate, why did he not
command the tree to bring forth fruit? … Instead, he chose to display his
vindictiveness.
So why did Jesus destroy a living part of nature? Bible-believing Christians say,
“Let’s not be too hard on Jesus. This was simply an object lesson, “Christ’s only
miracle of judgment, performed ‘in mercy to man, on an inanimate object, to
teach a moral lesson’” (The New Bible Commentary, citing T M Lindsay). Just
inanimate? Really? Even the ordinarily enlightened Leslie Weatherhead of
London’s City Temple, writing in When the Lamp Flickers (1948), lets Jesus off-
the-hook by saying:
I do not myself believe that Jesus was the kind of person who would curse a tree;
this Christ of beauty Who loved the flowers and praised the trees. But when He
saw all those leaves and could not even find those first ripe figs or the flower-
buds eaten by the poor; when He found nothing but a great show of leaves, He
cursed the thing of which it is a picture. The situation offered Him a dramatic
parable such as His soul revelled in.
I find that most unsatisfactory. Object lesson or not, the supposed moral lesson
(in Weatherhead’s words, “the futility of a religion that is pretence”) comes at too
high a price, namely, the destruction of an integral part of nature. In today’s
world, especially, that sort of conduct - wanton destruction of trees and
vegetation - is morally unacceptable, in the same way that we have now come to
judge severely those in high places who appear to condone various forms of
abuse against humans, especially minors. The incident regarding the fig-tree is,

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in my opinion, a serious moral wrong, and I don’t think we should account it as
being anything less than that.
As I read this story I am compelled to conclude that Jesus could at times act
petulantly, childishly and even vindictively.
Jesus’ ultimate moral greatness
Do these examples of Jesus’ human foibles really matter? Only to those who
seek to portray him as forever perfect. For the rest of us more sensible and
realistic folk, we can rejoice in the fact that Jesus was human just like we are.
He could get hurt and angry, and he could even be vengeful and vindictive at
times. So be it. However, he also knew the path that leads to righteousness,
and he ultimately went fully down that path, in selfless love and obedience, even
unto death on a cross.
Unitarians have traditionally rejected the view that Jesus was God - for good
reason - for such a view demeans Jesus’ teachings as a human being,
undermines his achievements as a human being, refuses to acknowledge his
human frailties and foibles, and is contrary to what he himself said about God:
“Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone?” (Mk 10:18)
Many Unitarians who seek to follow in Jesus’ steps (see 1 Pt 2:21) would identify
with what the Presbyterian Samuel Angus wrote in his Jesus in the Lives of Men
(1933):
Jesus is not accredited to us today by his miracles, or by a virgin birth, or by a
resurrection from an underworld, or by a reanimation of his body from the grave,
or by fulfillment of prophecies; he is accredited by his long train of conquests
over the loyalties of men, and chiefly by the immediate, intimate and inevitable
appeal made by him to everything that is best and God-like in each of us, and by
his ability to “make men fall in love with him”, and “to win the world to his fair
sanctities”.
Jesus is the Way-Shower, not because he was God, but because was the one
typical, comprehensive, universal, all-inclusive human being. Dr Robert Killam,
an outstanding Unitarian Universalist leader in his day, said, “We believe in him,
not because he was God, but because he was man, at man’s best.”

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Further, when one carefully reads the gospels, it would appear to be the case
that Jesus became more and more Godlike towards the end of his life and
ministry, forever containing within himself what we can be like. Leslie
Weatherhead, in his beautiful little book Jesus and Ourselves (1930), writes:
I think Christ’s divinity was not endowed, but achieved by His moral reactions, so
that He climbed to an eminence of character which the word “human” was not big
enough to describe, just as the word “animal,” though true, is not big enough to
connote all that we are.
In another of his books, It Happened in Palestine (1936), Weatherhead
summarises a sentimental “psychological case” taken from a book entitled
Pastoral Psychiatry and Mental Health, written by one Dr John Rathbone Oliver.
The story, which can also be found in Weatherhead’s collection of sermons That
Immortal Sea (1953), is intended to illustrate the spiritual power of Christ’s death
on the cross - the power of suffering love.
The story concerns a seven year old boy who is something of a “problem child”.
All methods of correcting the boy’s behaviour had apparently failed. The boy,
whose only joy in life, it seemed, came from his pet dog, a white-haired terrier,
was one day trying to teach the dog a new trick. The dog was slow to learn, so
the boy lost his temper and kicked the dog in the mouth, causing its mouth to
bleed. The dog licked the blood away, looked up at his little master with a
puzzled expression in its eyes, and then tried one more time to learn the trick
which the boy was trying to teach it. When the boy came nearer to the dog, it put
out its blood-stained tongue and licked its master’s hand. Blinded with tears, the
boy ran, sobbing, to his mother and poured out his confession to her, saying
words to the effect, “I have done an awful thing!” The “message” is how the
power of suffering love can break people down.
In That Immortal Sea Weatherhead writes:
That is only the suffering love of a little dog. The news I have for you is about the
suffering love of God … the greatest energy the universe knows: this divine love
that suffers, but never bullies; which knocks, but never burgles; which waits, but
never breaks down our resistance; and goes on loving and goes on loving, and
goes on loving until frankly there is nothing else you can do but surrender to it. It
is overwhelming, never tiring and utterly convincing. It expresses the highest
values humanity knows.

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Ultimately, Jesus gives us himself. He comes down to where we are, to the very
depths of our being. Unlike some remote and lofty Deity, he remains alongside
each of us, as our elder brother. On the cross he tuned in to all the fear, hatred,
anger and resentment in the race mind and rose above it, for when his hour
finally came he did not think at all of himself nor was he in any way vindictive or
vengeful. On the contrary, he is reported as having said, "Father, forgive them;
for they do not know what they are doing" (Lk 23:34). He did not come down
from the cross. Why was that? In his beautiful Life of Christ (1958) beloved
Catholic archbishop Fulton J Sheen put it this way:
It is human to come down; it is Divine to hang there!
Through his final overcoming of hate and injustice Jesus established a
consciousness of spirit into which all who follow him may enter, in order to be
delivered of their selfishness and self-centeredness and pass over to fullness
and newness of life. The true spiritual life pertains to the mind, the emotions and
the will, and the life of Jesus is appropriated by and through those means. His
self-giving, which is part of the spiritual life of the race by means of the power of
transformative thought, is capable of conferring new life on all who chose to enter
its sphere of influence.
There is nothing supernatural about that. Furthermore, Jesus claimed for us
everything he claimed for himself.
In his wonderful book Truth and Tradition (1934) Dr Angus wrote:
Never, while I remain a teacher of Christianity and profess loyalty to the Galilean,
shall I base anything so relevant to every man’s religion, so priceless and
positive as the Divinity and spiritual splendour of Jesus, upon a foundation so
flimsy and uncertain as the negative dogma of “sinlessness.”
Was Jesus perfect? No, thank God.
-oo0oo-

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