Almost 2000 years ago, a Jewish carpenter began to preach, and he caused an enormous stir that still hasn't died down. The message was so startling, so different, that it got him into trouble with the authorities. What was the message that caused such a fuss?

He called it good news — good news about God — but the religious leaders were so hostile to this message that they arranged for this guy to be silenced. They hated the message. And again I ask, what was so troubling about his message? What did Jesus say that made religious people hate him?

Jesus preached about the kingdom of God — but that was perfectly normal. First-century Jews believed in the kingdom of God. They believed that God would intervene and rule the nation and bring it peace and prosperity. If that's all that Jesus was preaching, they wouldn't have cared. That was normal stuff. They would not have felt there was any great need to kill this guy.

They might have been jealous, but not so much that they would actually murder him. There was something more than jealousy here — something that made the religious leaders angry, seriously angry, angry enough to cooperate with the Romans, angry enough to risk a riot, angry enough to busy themselves with this pest on the day before Passover.

Jesus himself was a rather harmless guy. He didn't carry any swords or spears. He didn't have an army behind him. His only weapon was his mouth, and it was his message that got him into trouble.

What was his message? Most people think it was a message about peace and love and being nice — but that is not the kind of message that is going to make anybody mad enough to kill him. If our concept of Jesus' message is a harmless message, then it will not make sense out of why the religious authorities wanted to kill him.

In fact, that is one of the problems that the Jesus Seminar has, this group of liberal scholars who votes on whether Jesus said this or that, and what he was really like. They end up with a pablum Jesus, a meek and mild guy who had a few witty and wise sayings. But the problem is that this kind of guy is not worth murdering. It fails to do justice to the historical facts, that Jesus was killed because the religious leaders hated his message.

The fact that the leaders wanted to kill Jesus shows that his message was seen not just as wrong, not just as foolish, but as downright dangerous. It was subversive. It threatened to damage the social world of Judaism. What kind of message could make the religious leaders that angry, that they would kill the preacher?

I think one idea that would really tick off the religious leaders is found in Matthew 9:13: I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners. Jesus had a message of good news for sinners, but the people who thought they were already good, they thought that Jesus' message was really bad news.

Jesus had good news for bad people, but he had bad news for good people — and that is still true today. Do you consider yourself a good person, or a bad person? Jesus has good news for bad people, and good people get mad when they hear it.

Jesus is inviting the prostitutes and the pimps into the kingdom of God, and the good people don't like that. That's not fair, they say. We have been working hard to be good, and how come they can get into the kingdom without working hard? It isn't fair!

And I agree. It is not fair. In fact, that statement probably puts the finger on why the religious leaders were so angry at Jesus: He was preaching that God is not fair.

Even today, people don't like to hear the idea that God isn't fair. Good Christian people still don't like that idea. They want God to be fair, but he isn't. God is not fair.

You see, our ideas about what is fair require equal treatment for everybody, and God simply doesn't treat everybody equally. He chooses to call Abraham instead of other pagans. He chooses to call Jacob and not Esau, even before they were born and had done anything good or bad. He chooses one nation and not others. He chooses one woman to mother the Messiah, and not others. He chooses to call some people and not others. He chooses to give some spiritual gifts to some people, and different gifts to others. God simply doesn't treat everybody the same.

Look around us — everybody isn't exactly alike. Some people are better looking than others, some people are smarter than others, some people are richer than others, some people can see, and other people can't. Some people can walk, and others can't. God doesn't treat everybody the same, and that isn't "fair."

Now, God certainly has the right to treat different people differently. It is right and good, but we cannot call it fair, because the word "fair" implies that everybody has to be treated the same. If we give out ice cream to our kids, everybody has to get exactly the same amount, or else they'll say "It's not fair."

But it is always the kid who got less who complains. The one who got a bigger scoop of ice cream never says, "Hey, that's not fair. I got too much ice cream." No, they don't seem to complain about that. But it is just as unfair for us to get more, than it is for others to get less.

And the fact is, some people do get more, and some people do get less, and God does not treat everybody the same. He is not fair.

But let me assure you that God is always more than fair. He always gives us more than we deserve — never less. Some people get a little bit more, and some people get a lot more.

None of us deserves any ice cream, to use that as an example, but we all get some. Some people get one scoop, and some people get two, and some people, it seems, get a lot more than they need — but the fact is that we are all given more than we deserve — more than we had to start with, which is zero.

So God does not treat everybody exactly alike. He is not fair — he is more than fair. He is always generous, always full of grace, always full of mercy, always willing to love us even though we don't deserve his love. He always gives us more than we deserve, sometimes a little bit more, often a lot more than we deserve.

Now, that kind of message is really disturbing for religious leaders, for anybody who says that the harder you work, the more you will get. If you behave better, you will get a better reward. Religious leaders like to have that kind of message, because it makes it easy to motivate people to work hard, to do right, to live right.

And along comes Jesus and says, It ain't necessarily so.

If you have dug a really deep pit for yourself, if you have messed up time and time again, if you have been the worst sort of sinner, you don't have to work your way out of that pit. You can simply be forgiven, by God's grace. You don't have to deserve it, it can simply be done. Your million-dollar debt is removed from the record.

This is really good news for bad people.

But is seems that good people are really dismayed at this kind of news. Look, I've been working really hard to get out of the pit, and I am almost out. You mean to tell me that that scum, that low-life person is pulled out of the pit [snap] just like that, without having to do any work at all? That's not fair!

No, grace is not fair — it is grace — it is a gift that we did not deserve. God can be generous to whoever he wants to be generous to, and the good news is that he offers that gift to everyone. It is fair in the sense that he offers to forgive everyone, but it is not fair in the sense that he offers to forgive each person no matter how big or small the debt is, no matter how hard they have worked.

In Matthew 20 is the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Some guys worked all day long in the heat of the day. Some guys worked only half a day, and some guys worked only one hour, but they all got paid the same amount, a day's wage. Some got exactly what they deserved, and others got more, and the guys who worked all day long said, Hey, that's not fair. We worked all day long, and it's not fair to pay us the same as those who didn't work as much.

But the guys who worked all day got exactly what they deserved — the only reason they got mad was because other people got more than they deserved. And what did the paymaster say? He said, "Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?'"

You see, the same thing was happening in Jesus' ministry. He said that God was going to give salvation to people who hadn't worked very hard, and the religious leaders said, Hey, that's not fair. You can't be generous to them. We've been working hard, and they have hardly been working.

And Jesus replied, I am bringing good news to sinners, not to the righteous. And this message made them mad — it made them so mad that they killed him. Jesus died because he had a message of good news for bad people.