Jesus

Quick Facts

• Role: Central exemplar and theological core of the book’s thesis; not a traditional narrative “character”
• First appearance: Chapter 1, as the standard for a life free from offense and anger
• Function: The perfect illustration of The Choice to Be Unoffendable and the source of Grace and Forgiveness
• Key relationships: Peter, the disciples, Zacchaeus, the “sinners,” and the book’s author
• Physical description: None; Jesus is defined by action—touching lepers, eating with tax collectors, forgiving his executioners

Who They Are

Boldly unoffendable, patient, and relentlessly gracious, Jesus stands as the book’s living argument against self-righteous anger. Hansen presents him as the divine teacher whose life upends religious pride and resets standards of justice around mercy. This Jesus—resting, welcoming, and fiercely kind—embodies The Choice to Be Unoffendable and pours out Grace and Forgiveness where others would demand payback. He consistently sides with the broken over the proud, making his very presence a challenge to the anger many Christians mistake for holiness.

Personality & Traits

Jesus’s traits aren’t abstract virtues; they are expressed in concrete, disarming actions that overturn moral scorekeeping and invite transformation.

• Unshockable and unscandalized: He moves toward moral messes rather than recoiling from them. Hansen notes, “Jesus encountered one moral mess after another, and He was never taken aback by anyone’s morality. Ever” (Chapter 5). This steadiness neutralizes moral panic and opens space for repentance.
• Radically forgiving: From the cross—“Father, forgive them”—to his teaching on debts, Jesus ties our readiness to forgive to the forgiveness we receive from God. Forgiveness becomes not an optional virtue but the oxygen of his kingdom.
• Humble: He embodies Humility vs. Self-Righteousness by serving the lowly and giving his life. This humility is the antidote to the pride that fuels offense, trading moral superiority for self-giving love.
• Patient and loving: He bears with failing disciples and, after their abandonment, cooks them breakfast on the shore. His first instinct is restoration, not retribution.
• Offensive to the self-righteous: His “imbalanced,” “unfair” grace (see the vineyard workers) scandalizes people invested in earning. By breaking tit-for-tat fairness, he exposes how merit-based religion resists mercy.

Character Journey

Jesus does not “develop” within the book; instead, the reader is developed by encountering him. The author dismantles the idea of Jesus as a mascot for “righteous anger” and reveals a Lord whose consistency is mercy. As readers accept his invitation to lay down offense, they let go of the exhaustion produced by The Destructive Nature of Anger and move toward a restful, joy-shaped life. The arc, then, is our perception shifting—from defending an angry God to being defended by a gracious one, and from punishing others to forgiving like him.

Key Relationships

• Jesus and Peter: After predicting Peter’s denials, Jesus doesn’t follow with scolding but with comfort—“Let not your heart be troubled… I go to prepare a place for you” (Chapter 4). He names Peter’s collapse and simultaneously promises future belonging, extending grace before the sin has even happened.
• Jesus and His Disciples: Post-resurrection, he serves breakfast to the very friends who fled him. This ordinary act of hospitality is a theological statement: relationship outranks resentment, and failures become scenes of recommissioning.
• Jesus and Zacchaeus: Choosing dinner over moral distance, Jesus refuses to be alienated by a tax collector’s corruption (Chapter 11). Acceptance catalyzes Zacchaeus’s transformation, proving grace does more than shame ever could.
• Jesus and the “Sinners”: Prostitutes, lepers, and the woman caught in adultery encounter welcome rather than contempt. He runs toward the mess, enacting a love that heals without minimizing sin and refuses to write anyone off.
• Jesus and Brant Hansen: As author and interpreter, Hansen sets Jesus as the controlling image of unoffendable love. Their “relationship” is hermeneutical: Hansen’s thesis lives or dies on whether Jesus’s life truly displaces anger with mercy.

Defining Moments

Hansen returns to a handful of Gospel moments to show how Jesus collapses the logic of offense and insists on grace.

• The Sermon on the Mount (Chapter 9): By equating anger with murder and lust with adultery, Jesus levels the field so no one can claim moral high ground. Significance: If everyone is guilty, self-righteous offense has no footing.
• The Crucifixion (Chapter 2): “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” Significance: At the site of ultimate injustice, he refuses retaliation and sets forgiveness as the final word.
• The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Chapter 9): Our forgiven debt dwarfs anything owed to us. Significance: Clinging to grievance becomes hypocrisy—and spiritually dangerous—when we’ve been spared infinitely more.
• The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Chapter 20): God’s generosity appears “unfair” to earners. Significance: Grace offends entitlement, revealing that divine justice operates by mercy, not wages.

Essential Quotes

And yet, remarkably, in Jesus’ teaching, there is no allowance for “Okay, well, if someone really is a jerk, then yeah—you need to be offended.” We’re flat-out told to forgive, even—especially!—the very stuff that’s understandably maddening and legitimately offensive. (Chapter 1)

This frames the book’s thesis: offense is not a right to be defended but a burden to be dropped. Jesus’s command recalibrates our instincts, treating forgiveness as obedience rather than optional nobility.

And yet, there Jesus is, on the cross, saying, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” A fair question, then: Is that same Jesus living in and through me, still saying that? (Chapter 2)

Hansen grounds application in Christ’s own posture under injustice. The question shifts the reader from admiring Jesus to embodying him, turning forgiveness from doctrine into daily practice.

Jesus is this way with the most morally embarrassing people. You can’t find a single story in the Bible where He’s so disgusted, so scandalized by someone’s moral behavior, that He writes him off. It just doesn’t happen. (Chapter 4)

Here, Jesus’s unshockability is not lenience but love that refuses contempt. By never writing people off, he de-escalates shame and opens the door to genuine change.

Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Chapter 16)

Faith and honesty coexist in Jesus’s presence. The admission of “unbelief” is not punished but welcomed, illustrating how grace invites imperfect people into trust rather than demanding flawless certainty.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Chapter 17)

Love is Jesus’s apologetic for the church. By making his own love the measure, he removes offense as a marker of zeal and replaces it with visible, sacrificial care for others.