"The Gospel of Mark, for example, revealed a Jesus who was antithetical to the 'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' sung about in Wesley's famous hymn… In the first chapter of Mark, Jesus starts off by yelling at complete strangers to repent of their sin, like the wingnuts with billboards who occasionally show up at shopping centers. Shortly thereafter, Jesus orders some guys to quit their jobs and follow him, and before long Jesus is telling a demon to shut up and healing a leper only to tell him to shut up too. In the second chapter, Jesus picks a fight with some well-mannered religious types and does the equivalent of breaking into a church on a Sunday morning to make a sandwich with the communion bread because he was hungry.
"In the third chapter, Jesus gets angry and also grieves and apparently needs Praxil. Then he ignores his own mom, which threw Focus on the Hebrew Family into a tizzy, so they quickly issued a position paper renouncing his actions. In the fourth chapter, Jesus rebukes the wind, which caused an uproar with the local pantheists. In chapter 5, Jesus kills two thousand pigs, sending the animal rights activist blogosphere into a panic and creating a bacon famine only rivaled by the great Irish potato famine. In chapter 6, Jesus offends some people and apparently needs sensitivity training. In chapter 7, a few religious types have some questions for Jesus, and he cruelly calls them 'hypocrites' and goes on a lengthy tirade about them, which seemed very intolerant of their alternative theological lifesty|e.
"In chapter 8, Jesus sighs in frustration, spits on a handicapped guy, and calls Peter 'Satan," although thankfully no one sued for assault or slander. In chapter 9, Jesus gets sick of folks and asks them, 'How long do I have to put up with you?' That's just before telling some other people to cut off their hands and feet and to gouge out their eyes – a statement which led to picketing from the local body dysmorphic disorder recovery group. In chapter 10, Jesus tells a rich guy to sell all his stuff and give the money to the poor, which put him in bad graces with the local prosperity-theology luncheon for pastors who were hoping for Bling Christ. In chapter 11, he has one of his guys take a donkey without asking like some kleptomaniac donkeylifter, proceeds to curse and kill a fig tree, which really upset the environmental activists who were promoting justification by recycling, and goes on to loot some small businesses and whip some small business leaders who were decent, taxpaying Republicans.
"In chapter 12, Jesus tells people they are wrong and don't know their Bibles, which upset the postmoderns because Jesus was clearly using a narrow modernist epistemology. Jesus also tells some Sunday school teachers they are going to hell, which made the universalistic Emergent folks immediately engage in a conversation about the mythology of hell and fingerpaint about the emotional wounds caused by his words. In chapter 13, Jesus threatens to destroy the temple, which put the nation on heightened security alert that included taking off one's sandals before boarding a camel. In the fourteenth chapter, Jesus actually yells at his friends for taking a nap late at night after running them all over the place for about three years as an obvious workaholic who needed to start drinking decaf and listening to taped sounds of running water while doing aromatherapy so he could learn to relax. In chapter 15, the religious folk killed him for being like that, which seemed perfectly fine to everyone except a few women. The story ends in chapter 16 with him alive again and the trembling, astonished, and frightened disciples getting it and heading out to handle snakes while they go to offend the whole world with the gospel. (Mark Driscoll, Vintage Jesus, pgs 43-44)
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