A Charles Wesley children’s hymn begins: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild”.

The Gospels, of course, show that Jesus was anything but. From the evidence he was a charismatic Jewish preacher and healer but also fiery and concerned only with a mission to his own people, “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt. 15.24).

The gospels record fiery outbursts at King Herod (“that fox”), the Pharisees (“whited sepulchres”) and even Peter (“Get thee behind me, Satan” Mk. 8.33).

And in his work we have several instances of his unwillingness to follow conventional morality.

He refused to condemn the adulterous woman, he healed the man with a withered arm on the Sabbath, against the religious laws, and defended his disciples for picking and eating heads of grain on the Sabbath, an action considered as “work” (Mt. 12. 1-2). Clearly Jesus was no friend of the priestly castes.

Nicolas Harvey (the Catholic priest and theologian), in his book ‘The Morals of Jesus’, calls him a non-violent revolutionary and claims that Jesus was not particularly interested in morality.

He looked rather for the reasons and attitudes behind the conventional moral dictates. He perceived the hypocrisy behind the adulterous woman’s accusers. Were they so sinless that they could accuse her?

He rejected the criticism of doing “work” on the Sabbath when he healed the man with the withered arm, pointing out that his accusers would undoubtedly help livestock in trouble on the Sabbath. It was not that Jesus was against the law ((Mt 5. 17-19); his quarrel was rather with the fitness of those applying it.

So what was conventional morality failing to deal with? Bishop JS Spong, in his book ‘Jesus for the Non-religious’ (HarperCollins 2007), says that Jesus always seems to set humanity above religious laws, where necessary.

And what is humanity? Apart from the general sense of ‘mankind’, it means love and compassion, with compassion at its deepest level meaning “shared suffering”, not just a feeling of sympathy.