Jesus was highly confrontational. Every aspect of His ministry was filled with confrontation. He confronted individuals’ complacency with sin, their misunderstandings about God, and their attitudes toward each other. He also took every opportunity to confront the corruption of the ruling elite. 

One of my favorite vignettes from the New Testament is a confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees. They wanted Him to silence His followers, who were hailing Him as the Messiah. Jesus refused. “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

Jesus then just moved along, no doubt leaving the Pharisees sputtering in anger.

That occurred in the final days before His crucification, but for me it echoes an incident earlier in His ministry. During a different trip to Jerusalem, Jesus healed a man who had been paralyzed for 38 years. 

The Gospel of John tells us that this paralytic man lived in a particularly nasty personal torment. Local myth had it that when the waters of the Bethesda pool were disturbed, the first person in would be healed of their malady. While the paralyzed man sat each day near the pool, he had no one to help him move to the water.

The establishment political and religious leaders certainly weren’t going to waste their time helping him.

So Jesus did. Jesus healed the man without making him so much as get his fingertips wet. But when the man picked up his things to leave—he was healed!—the establishment’s shrill response was predictable: Sit down and be quiet. They had their regulations, after all.

For the establishment elite, neither the Sabbath nor the Law was about honoring God and loving their neighbor. The laws and customs around it had become a tool for enriching themselves and enabling their self-decreed importance as cultural regulators.

The former paralytic man was having none of it. We’re told he “went away” and told people what Jesus had done for him.

When confronting the self-important establishment and their shrill regulators today, we should follow that healed man’s lead. As citizens in this self-governing republic, we have an obligation to keep moving, loudly proclaiming what is true, no matter how inconvenient it is to those in power.