Did Jesus come to start a fear-based religion?

Jesus’ message of love

 By Kim Michaels

 

(This is a small excerpt of a much larger large article I found today that ties in with my last post)

It can be somewhat difficult for a person who has grown up in a modern Christian religion to see Jesus’ message as a love-based message. The reason is, of course, that after Jesus’ time, the Christian religion was indeed turned into a fear-based religion. It is an undeniable historical fact that the Catholic Church of the middle ages was indeed an institution that sought to control people’s minds through fear. Thus, it may take a mental retooling, a new perspective, to see how truly love-based Jesus teachings are.

One of the pillars of a fear-based religion is that it presents God as a remote being who is beyond the reach of most people. The people of Jesus’ time clearly believed that their God could not be reached by them individually, which is why they needed the external religion and its priests to mediate between themselves and God. So how did these people look at the following statement from Jesus:

"And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke, Chapter 17)"

In these short statements Jesus is attacking two of the pillars of a fear-based religion. The people of his time obviously believed that the key to entering the kingdom was to faithfully observe the tenets, the rituals and the rules of the external religion. If you did so, you were pretty much guaranteed to enter the kingdom, which they obviously saw as a location far away from themselves. Yet Jesus is clearly saying that observing an external religion is not enough to get you to the kingdom. And in the second part Jesus is basically saying that we will never find the kingdom of God as long as we are looking for it outside ourselves. This was revolutionary stuff to the people of Jesus’ time.

As modern Christians we now have two basic options. We can either reason that Jesus was wrong and didn’t know the first thing about how to enter the kingdom of God. Or we can use our intuitive faculties to seek a deeper understanding of what is hidden behind these outer words. What was Jesus really trying to tell us here?

Remember, that the basic claim of a fear-based religion is that you cannot enter the kingdom of God by your own, inherent powers. You are somehow fundamentally deficient, and thus you can enter the kingdom only through the external religion. It is only through this belief in your own powerlessness that fear of an external authority comes into the picture. If you believe that you have the powers within yourself to secure your entry into the kingdom, why would you fear other people or an earthly institution? You might still fear that you would not qualify to enter the kingdom, but you would not fear that external forces could keep you out of it.

Now let us look at another basic pillar of a fear-based belief system, namely the idea that God is a judgmental God. Imagine how people who firmly believed in the Old Testament God would have reacted to the following statement by Jesus:

 For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son. (John 5:22)

It seems Jesus is directly challenging the Old Testament image of the angry and judgmental God in the sky, the God who visited plagues upon Pharaoh, who told the Israelites to massacre the men, women and children of their conquered enemies and who threatened to smite people with this or that if they did not obey him. In fact, the angry God of the Old Testament could very well be seen as a being who is seeking to control people through fear. Or perhaps this God is the invention of an institution who is seeking to control people through fear. Yet can one love such a God?

Some modern psychologists say that there are only two basic emotions, namely love and fear and that we cannot truly love something if we also fear it. It is clear that the established religion of Jesus’ time wanted people to fear God, as that fear would naturally be transferred to the institution that had placed itself as the only mediator between the people and their angry God. Yet it is equally clear that Jesus did not want people to fear God. If he did why would he have made the following statement:

"Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment. (Matthew, Chapter 22)"

Can you really love the Old Testament God with all your heart, soul and mind? Yet Jesus clearly do want his followers to love God this way, thus Jesus’s God cannot be the remote, angry being in the sky. Also, if Jesus had preached a fear-based message, why wouldn’t he have said, “Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind?”
Jesus also seems to have wanted people to understand that God’s love for us is not a conditional love but an unconditional one. Otherwise, why would Jesus make the following statement:

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. (Luke 12: 32)

Imagine how revolutionary this statement must have seemed to a person brought up with the Old Testament image of the angry and judgmental God in the sky. What is Jesus actually saying here? Is he not saying that receiving God’s kingdom is not a matter of observing the external, fear-based religion, a religion whose main means for reconciliation with God was animal sacrifices? Instead, of all these external observances, Jesus seems to be saying that God truly wants to give us his kingdom, which means that the only condition we need to fulfill is that we must be able and willing to receive it. Yet this is not an external but an internal condition.
Again, imagine how this must have seemed to the leaders of the established religion of Jesus’ time. If the people had started believing what Jesus was saying, their fear of the external religion would have evaporated as the morning dew under a rising sun. Is it any wonder they started seeing Jesus as a direct threat to their power over the people, a power clearly based on fear?


Source:  http://www.askrealjesus.com/how-we-can-help-jesus/75-help-jesus/897-did-jesus-come-to-start-a-fear-based-religion