This is permitted me: I was born and raised Catholic. Born into it.
Jesus of Nazareth is annoying, supercilious, hectoring, manipulative; he loves the sound of his own voice, is self-important, power-hungry, and exceedingly puritanical (excuse the anachronism, this trait is elaborated on further down).
JC is intelligent, scholarly and bookish. He is geeky about Jewish history and different traditions within Judaism in a way that's familiar to me. That is, when he talks about King David and different Jewish leaders who came after David, JC sounds like a kid going through the minutia of the Marvel Comic Universe or NBA team rosters.
JC obsesses over John the Baptist. It is clear why. JTB was as hard-core as hard-core can be regarding JC's burning and abiding focus: Bringing the worship of God out of the realm of the pomp and circumstance he perceived among certain elites of his faith and back down to the basics. Back to basics for John the Baptist meant living in the desert and living off of locusts and wild honey. Crunch, crunch.
For JC, it's all about the parables and some of his parables are pretty bizarre. They tend to focus around farming and banquets. JC got a lot of questions about the almost-here arrival of the "Kingdom of Heaven." A representative parable responding to this type of question is detailed below. In it, Yahweh's wedding banquet is the metaphor JC offers for the soon-to-arrive "Kingdom of God."
God the Father is posited as the owner of a vineyard or some other agricultural enterprise. God-as-Landowner is getting married, so he sends his servants out to invite middle-income (non-servant) folks to the wedding banquet. These invitees tell the servants to piss off, that they don't want to go to the wedding! One middle-income villager is annoyed enough with the servants' invitation to whimsically kill one of them. He gone! JC's parables are full of these sudden violent, homicidal outbursts. The effect of these sudden blood blasts is jarring and disorienting on the reader.
The servants go back and tell Landowner Yahweh that the villagers said "no thanks" to the wedding invitation. So Yahweh says, Cool, then you guys are the new wedding guests. The wedding party is about to go off without a hitch, except one of the servants didn't put on nice clothes for the party. Uh-oh. Landowner Yahweh orders a group of properly dressed wedding guest servants to beat the shit out of the poorly dressed wedding guest servant and to bind him up with ropes and kill him.
Shit is like a Scorsese movie, like Joe Pesci playing God in these fucking parables.
Regardless, the point is clear - Get your shit together and worship Yahwheh and - for fuck's sake - be ready to prove your faith when called upon or you're going to be shit-out-of-luck like the villagers who missed the party... or maybe you will even suffer the fate of the servant who didn't dress up for the wedding.
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