Driscoll: Jesus Was A Passionate Human

Taken From Chapter 2 (pages 43-44) of Vintage Jesus:

[Referring to the Gospel of Mark] In the third chapter, Jesus gets angry and also grieves and apparently needs paxil. 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 causes 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 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 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 summary, the Jesus of Mark's Gospel is not fitting for old ladies in hats and men in suits like those we see at church. Rather than handing out communion at church, if he were to show up, the men would need cups and the women boxes of tissue and flak jackets because the real Jesus is passionate and nothing like the Lobotomized Lord of the Thomas Kinkade paintings.

YES!

Let me just take this opportunity to go ahead and say that chapter two of the book was just as enjoyable as the first. Driscoll lays his emphasis in a few areas which I appreciated. These included:

1. Jesus was not a woman with a beard. He did not look like a woman with a beard. He was a man's man.
2. "He did the normal things that actual people do, like farting, going to the bathroom, and blowing boogers from his nose."
3. He takes some shots at Creflo Dollar, who apparently overemphasizes Jesus' humanity to the point that he says that Jesus came as a man, not as God.
4. He emphasizes that Jesus was funny, that he joked, and then provides Biblical examples of Jesus' sense of humor. He then takes issue with G.K. Chesterton who, apparently, disagreed with this assessment.
5. He also demonstrates how Jesus struggled with depression, dowerness, unreliable friends, and other things which make this life hard for all of us. Driscoll also emphasizes that "without these insights into Jesus' life, it would be difficult for us to run to him in our time of need because we would be unaware of the similar experiences he had during his life on the earth."

Keep it up, Mark. Keep it up.