Does Jesus Hate Bedside Manner?

Imagine that you are sitting in the doctor’s office waiting to speak with him.  You’ve been having some very strange things happening.  You’ve had moments where you’ve lost motor skills completely.  You’ve had the complete loss of verbal skills for short periods of time.  You’ve awoken from sleeping and you’ve been unable to see.  You went to your doctor and he did a battery of tests.  He also brought in a few specialists to do some additional testing.  And now you are sitting in the doctor’s office awaiting the results.

The doctor walks in, doesn’t even sit down and says very bluntly, ‘You’re terminal with brain tumors.  I pity you.’  And then walks out of the room.

The truth that the doctor shared was a hard truth.  So was the doctor’s delivery of that truth.  If you’ve ever had a doctor who has lousy bedside manner, you understand that how you say something has a great impact on your understanding of what is being said.  Either way, the same truth gets shared.  But how you feel about that truth can be very different.

I find that oftentimes Christians have lousy bedside manner. I’ve seen this very clearly recently with how Christians deal with homosexuality and gay marriage.  On Christian blog sites, if you propose that you want to share the same truth but in a way that isn’t aggressive or just plain obnoxious, you are painted as being soft on sin.  It’s as if Jesus hates bedsise manner.

This came into further focus for me recently as I posted a blog on Facebook about the Perez Hilton and Miss CA gay marriage media happening.  Now, and I say this simply by way of background, I have over 1000 friends on Facebook and I would say that I know 95% of the people.  The other 5% are friends of friends or spouses of friends.  In many ways, my friends are all over the map.  I didn’t grow up a Christian and 2/3 of my life was decidedly rebellious to God.  I would say 85% of my Facebook friends are not Christian.  But I watched in somewhat horror as my Christian friends shared Biblical truth in a way that although not trying to be harsh and malicious, really showed lousy bedside manner.  Because of this I was de-friended by a few folks.  But I don’t think that I was defriended because of the truth, but because of how the truth was portrayed.

As I’ve reflected on this, I realized that some of the truths of the Bible are hard truths.  They are hard even now for me and I’ve been walking with the Lord for 12 years.  But as I think back to my life before Christ, those hard truths were even harder because I wasn’t aware of the manifold perfections of God.  You can share the same hard truth in two vastly different ways.  One way is cold, hard, and uncaring.  Another way is tender, nurturing, and still very truthful and Biblically strident.  

I somehow have the feeling that comments on this thread could get ugly (thus probably further enforcing my thoughts) and my prayer is that made some good can come from these thoughts.  I am simply encouraging the Body of Christ to seek to develop some sort of bedside manner.  I’m not advocating, in any way, not telling the truth.  On the contrary, I am advocating what Paul exhorted the Ephesian church, to speak the truth in love.  I read John Stott who said, “Love without truth is hypocrisy and the truth without love is brutality.”  I am not advocating hypocrisy.  But I am also quickly tiring of the brutality in the name of Biblical stridency.

 The difference between good and bad bedside manner is simply this, does the doctor love the patient enough to share the hard truth in such a way as to not make the truth hurt more than it already does.  We’ve become very good at sharing the truth.  But oftentimes we don’t love people who either disagree with us or live lifestyles that are divergent from Biblical reality.  Jesus sat with tax collectors and sinners and he no doubt shared the truth with them.  But they didn’t seem to abhor Jesus or think him to be rude, obnoxious and distasteful.  Could it be that Jesus, in dealing with the unbelieving crowds, showed a modicum of bedside manner.  Now I must acknowledge that His dealings with the religious folks of His day, the believers, was much more aggressive.  

I think Christians struggle so much in this department is that we have become so used to having fights on these topics that we go into every discussion with our guns drawn.  We go in expecting a fight and thus create one.  I think that this is also exacerbated by the fact that oftentimes Christians have such limited interactions with people who hold, and equally as passionately, divergent views.  This makes for a disaster.

How is our bedside manner in sharing the hard truths?