Christianity is Weird.
I pray you are having a holy Lent.
I've been thinking about the weirdness of Christianity lately—the glorious, upside-down, completely baffling weirdness of it all. Thanks be to God.
This Lent, I’ve been practicing daily Lectio Divina on the Sermon on the Mount, sitting with Jesus’ words and letting their strangeness sink in. And the more I meditate on them, the more I see: Christianity is wonderfully weird. Gloriously, unapologetically strange. It’s a kingdom where the last are first, the meek inherit the earth, and loving your enemy isn’t just encouraged—it’s a survival strategy. You die to yourself in order to truly live—an idea that, if shared too enthusiastically in a Starbucks, might politely get you asked to leave.
It doesn’t fit into the world’s categories. Success? Redefined. Power? Surrendered. Happiness? Secondary to holiness. It’s a faith full of people who claim to follow the most perfect being in history—and yet, those same people will cut you off in traffic (maybe give you the finger) and throw a small tantrum at the self-checkout machine. Hypocrites? Absolutely. Failures? Of course. But that’s the point. Christianity isn’t a performance; it’s a surrender. Surrender is difficult. How weird and sobering are these words of Jesus: “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
And here’s the weirdest part: it makes sense. The world promises happiness through self-fulfillment, material gain, and romantic conquest. These seem logical. But follow them long enough, and you end up exhausted, disillusioned, and vaguely creeped out by your own Google search history.
Failing at the world’s promises feels like losing—but somehow, it’s the only way to win. Christianity is the anti-trend, the paradox that persists, the thing that shouldn’t work but does. It’s weird. But then again, truth always is.
This paradox—the idea that surrender leads to true life—has always been difficult to grasp, which is why artists (and theologians) alike have wrestled with its mystery. Few have captured this tension more vividly than Hieronymus Bosch in his painting on the Temptation of St. Anthony. Bosch’s paintings are incredibly weird and, somehow, incredibly inspiring. His chaotic, surreal visions reflect the strangeness of faith, the battle between temptation and grace, and the mystery of a kingdom that upends all expectations. Like Bosch’s world, faith is not about control but about surrender—letting go of certainty, embracing the paradox—the weirdness, and trusting that the upside-down kingdom is, in fact, the only way to truly live.
© 2025, Lawain McNeil, Mission Surrender, LLC.
Simply paradoxical