My colleague Tim Meadows once told me about hearing a preacher declare, “What we need to hear from pulpits today is less Jesus and more Bible!”

The preacher was obviously reacting to the fact that Jesus makes the Bible so less clear than many want it to be. I mean, Jesus totally screwed up the conventional biblical wisdom when he said stuff like, “You’ve heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ BUT I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.”

Jesus really muddied the waters on that one!

Love my enemies? Eat with tax collectors and sinners? Don’t judge? Christianity would be so much easier if we could do away with all that love, forgiveness, acceptance, turn-the-other-cheek, peacemaking crap.

So I understand how some might feel it would be so much easier if we could just ignore Jesus a little bit in favor of obeying more of the Bible. Why there are even lots of churches that call themselves “Bible churches.” I don’t know of any church that calls itself a “Jesus church.”

On the other side of that coin, I’m also drawn to think, “What we need today is less Bible and more Jesus!” If we could just focus our faith on Jesus and live like he lived we might actually accomplish some good. And we could bypass some of the Bible stuff that makes us nervous – like killing all the men, women, children, dogs, cats and parakeets of the Amalekites and others who got on God’s grumpy side. And not eating shrimp.

And yet the only information we have about Jesus is in the Bible.

So we can’t just ditch it. Or we shouldn’t.

Maybe there’s an alternative to “Less Jesus, More Bible” and “More Jesus, Less Bible.”

How about “More Jesus, More Bible?”

That would require us to do something that’s really hard for many Christians to do.

Grow up.

You see, many of us get connected to the biblical tradition with the totally erroneous idea that the Bible is God’s personal tweet to the world (not withstanding the 140 character limit to a tweet). Our characterization of the Bible as the Word of God somehow morphs itself into a totally non-biblical idea that the Bible is the WORDS of God (sorry about the grammar there, but it works for me). Like some of my friends say, “God said it. I believe it. And that settles it!”

So Saul commits genocide against all those Amalekites because – why? Well, because God told him to do it.

Do you know that if you Google the phrase “God told me to kill” you’ll come up with 82,400,000 + listings? That’s 82 MILLION, 400 THOUSAND!

God seems to be telling people to kill other people all the time.

Or maybe not.

Maybe people kill people and then put those words into God’s mouth to justify themselves. Maybe it’s human nature to legitimize our sin by declaring it to be God’s will.

“God said it. I believe it. And that settles it!”

Or does it?

This is where Jesus crashes the party. When you read his story – as incomplete and redacted by editors as it is – we suddenly are given a lens – a filter – through which we can better understand the nature of God. We can look through that Jesus-lens to more closely examine the biblical text. Does this look, sound and feel like Jesus?

Or is this #82,400,001 in the long list of man-made attempts to explain life, and humanity, and the world, and…God?

Reading the Bible through the Jesus-lens can open up a whole new universe of ideas worth examining. You can finally discover a freedom to say “this is bullshit”, or “this is the real deal!”

In other words, MORE of Jesus gives us MORE of the Bible.

If you dare!