JESUS OF NAZARETH:
THE MESSIAH (CHRIST)

(ca. 5 BC to 30 AD)

CONTENTS
GO TOJesus:  An Overview
GO TOHis Life and Works
GO TOHis Major Ideas
GO TOBiographical Sources:  The Gospels

JESUS:  AN OVERVIEW

Jesus is one whose life is shrouded in mystery--great mystery--as is befitting one whom millions of people have attested through the ages to be the living Christ, the Son of God.
Jesus is a figure that is almost impossible to pin down historically.  It is faith--not facts--that seems to define him as a historical personage.  True, we do have the accounts of his brief (3-year?) ministry contained in the 4 gospels.  But these appear to be more the testimonies of faith about his very nature or being than true "history" as we think of it today.  The apostle Paul, whose Christian writings seem to be the earliest we have on record, was almost totally silent about the actual life of Jesus.  Also, little attention to or understanding of him was made by the larger Roman world until centuries after Jesus had come and gone.

We have virtually no "facts" about Jesus that stand apart from the testimonies of his own faithful followers and their disciples.  But certainly something did happen that caused a group of most common folk to become most un-common in their awesome and fearless support of Jesus' Messianic and Divine claim.  These people were willing to brave cruel rejection, pain, even death so firm was their belief in the truth of their claims about Jesus.  This is faith speaking--not science.  Yet faith comes to truth in its own way and in the end may be the most valid claim for truth of all.

HIS LIFE AND WORKS

The Birth of Jesus

Again: fact is difficult to come by concerning the birth of Jesus.  His birth to a virgin through the work of God's Spirit is an amazing claim--one that the earliest of the Christian writers, Paul, fails to take note of.  But then Paul makes almost no mention in his many letters about the actual life/ministry of Jesus.  Reading his letters, one would in fact get almost no historical knowledge about Jesus except that he was crucified (put to death on a Roman cross) and raised from the dead to appear through some form of  self-manifestation to many (500+) of his followers.  But Mark and John, specifically writing in witness to the life and death of Jesus, also make no mention of his most unusual birth in their respective gospels.

The Gospel writer, Luke, writing a history from the recordings of unspecified primary sources, depicts Jesus as born to a Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, who were forced because of a Roman census to travel (Mary near-term in her pregnancy by the Holy Spirit) across Palestine to Bethlehem.  They had to make this trip because they were of the descent of the ancient Israelite king, David, and because therefore Bethlehem (City of David) was their ancestral home, where they needed to go to be counted in the census.  Here in Bethlehem Mary quietly and humbly gave birth to her first-born son, Jesus, and she and Joseph brought him to Jerusalem a week later to be covenanted in accordance with Jewish customs.  The presumption is that they eventually returned to Nazareth, where Jesus grew up alongside his carpenter father--who passed from the picture sometime before Jesus began his ministry as an adult.

The remaining historian, Matthew, comes in on the story of Jesus' birth from a different angle--focusing more fully on how the ancient promise of an Anointed One (Messiah or Christ) from the line of David was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus (again--by the work of the Holy Spirit).  Matthew does not mention the Roman political underpinning of the birth story--but instead focuses his story on the treachery of Jewish royal politics under King Herod.  Indeed, in Matthew there is no mention of Mary and Joseph's original Nazareth connections--and the painful trip to Bethlehem.  Nazareth gets brought into the story only later as a place of refuge away from potential persecution by the Herodians.

Jesus's Date of Birth

When was Jesus born?  A medieval monk sat down and counted the years back from his time to the time he felt that Jesus had to have been born--and that then became to him and to the Christian world since then:  Year 1.  But more recent scholarship has shown that he miscalculated a bit, for Herod died several years before this Year 1--and if Jesus had been born before Herod died (as Matthew tells us) then Jesus might have been born 4 or 5, or more, years prior to Year 1.

Jesus's Youth

Except for a brief story told in Luke of Jesus' visit in his 12th year to the temple in Jerusalem, none of the historians (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) make mention of him again in their respective stories until the time of his baptism by the highly esteemed prophet John the Baptist.  We do not know exactly that Jesus was himself a carpenter for the mention of carpentry is ambiguously assigned to him either as the carpenter, the son of Joseph or as the son of the carpenter Joseph.  Probably both are true--father and son alike probably were occupied in the trade of carpentry.

Jesus and John the Baptist

Did Jesus first serve as a disciple of John the Baptist before he began his own ministry?  Some suggest that his baptism by John implies this.  But maybe not.  Many who were not his disciples were nonetheless baptized by John.  Certainly their relationship is important--though not clear. Luke tells us that they were kinsmen through their mothers.  But the relationship that would have meant most to them would have been with respect to their particular calling from God.  This might at first glance appear to be a fairly straightforward matter in the way that John defers to Jesus at Jesus' baptism.  But the searching questions that John later has for Jesus seem to make this relationship less clear.  Then too, Jesus seems not to have really launched his ministry until after the arrest of John.  Was there any significance in this timing?

Jesus's Early Ministry

From Matthew, Mark and Luke – writers of the "Synoptic" Gospels … meaning, seen through the same eye or perspective – we get a picture of Jesus' ministry that seems to follow a fairly closely scripted scenario:  Jesus' ministry lasted only a single year, in and around Galilee--and his journey to Jerusalem was the closing of that ministry.  It is from John we get the idea that Jesus' ministry lasted over two years--on the basis of his many trips to Jerusalem to be present at the important Jewish festivals.

Matthew, Mark and Luke mention Satan's wilderness testing of Jesus' in  his resolve to be God's true Son--not seduced into following the agenda of the quite unspiritual "world" around him.  In his follow-up to this episode Luke tells of Jesus' early conflict in Nazareth over serving God versus serving the expectations of his own hometown folks--just to drive this point home.

In thosae Synoptic Gospels, Jesus seems more "human" ... as in his discipline of daily prayer with God, whom he knew as "Father" (Abba).  As a man, Jesus needed to move and shift his work as he was led forward by this prayerful relationship he had with the Heavenly Abba.

The Signs and Miracles of Jesus

Jesus's ministry included healings of the sick, raisings of the dead, feedings of the multitudes from virtually no real resources, controlling even nature and its processes.  In all four gospels these were all given as "signs" of the power of God the Father working in Jesus – through the anointing of his son Jesus by the Holy Spirit, the latter who descended upon Jesus "like a dove" at his baptism by John.   Thus God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit completed the "Trinitarian" power behind these signs and wonders … operating ultimately not only in Jesus but also on those who would – by pure faith – receive God as their own Father, Jesus as their Savior, and the Holy Spirit as their empowerment, directing them in taking up the Christian call to "evangelize" the rest of the world … that is, to spread the gospel ("good news") of our salvation in Christ Jesus – through their own teachings and miraculous works empowered directly by God himself.

In the Gospel of John these signs and miracles take on an added importance.  In fact the Gospel of John, rather than being a true history, is really a story about these signs and miracles.  In this Gospel, these signs and miracles have one purpose--to testify to the divinity of Jesus.  Here human faith plays a lesser role than the sheer ability of Jesus to work these miracles on behalf of a needful people.

A shift in his agenda: Atoning for the sins of the world

It seems, according to the synoptic gospels, that in the early stages of his ministry Jesus assumed (sharing the same vision as John the Baptist) that his primary mission was to bring the Jews to repentance, for repentance was necessary to prepare the people for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the arrival of the Son of Man, all of which would be accompanied by Divine judgment — a terrible event for those unrepentant individuals still tainted by sin. 

But even though Jesus never lost sight of this goal, it would appear from the account of the synoptic gospels that as he progressed through his ministry another agenda seemed to loom into ever grander view for Jesus:  to be the Suffering Servant who would die in atonement for the sins of others.  Jesus began to speak more frequently about his impending death in Jerusalem at the hands of the religious authorities, even specifically of death on the cross. 

Several sections of Isaiah in the Hebrew Scriptures spoke specifically concerning such a self-sacrifice of God's Anointed One.  But it seems that only Jesus in his own lifetime understood that his work was to be completed not with Israel's repentance, but with his own atoning death for the salvation of the people.  This was to be his messianic call:  being the Suffering Servant. 

Rejection by "mainline" Judaism

Rabbinical Judaism fiercely rejected any kind of messianic claim on the part of Jesus.  True, most Jews were indeed expecting a Messiah — but the majority were expecting one who would come as a military liberator after the fashion of David, the ancient and much revered king.  When Jesus came more as a prophet — more as an Isaiah than a David — this became problematic for much of the Jewish community. 

Indeed, Jesus had offered spiritual counsel to the multitudes — not military strategy.  In fact he clearly had distanced himself from the fierce mood of Jewish nationalism flaring up in those days against the Roman occupation.  Worse, Jesus had been breezy with the Jewish Law — proposing to replace it with the law of forgiveness, healing and love. 

This made him and his movement totally unacceptable to mainstream Judaism.  Jesus was perceived as a false prophet and his movement as a blasphemous heresy — no minor matter in orthodox Judaism.

Betrayal and death

Sadly even one of his own very close and important disciples, Judas, felt betrayed by Jesus’ failure to live up to the messianic agenda that the Jews all seemed to anticipate.  And thus he agreed to cooperate with the Jewish supreme council (Sanhedrin) in its efforts to remove Jesus from the scene before he and his followers brought on unwanted trouble with the nervous Roman authorities.  Jesus would be turned over to the Roman governor, Pilate, as an insurrectionist — and then the Jews would let Rome take matters from there.  The normal punishment for insurrection was death on a Roman cross — a most horrible form of slow death meant, by its anguished display of a dying criminal just outside the city’s gates, to teach local passers by a lesson about the dangers of attempting to challenge the Roman order.

And so the drama unfolded.  Jesus was crucified (nailed to a Roman cross) and when he finally died, he was removed to the tomb of a Jewish sympathizer.  Guards were posted at the tomb to prevent his body being removed by his followers.  When later some women came to the grave to get permission to give his body the usual ceremonial anointing, they were shocked to find the tomb empty.  The disciples, who were in hiding out of a fear that they would follow their leader’s path to a Roman cross (for the close followers of an insurrectionist usually shared the fate of their leader), were dumbfounded by the women’s news.

Jesus's resurrection appearances

But then reports of mysterious appearances of Jesus – the 'Risen Lord' – began to come forth.  On the 3rd day after his death some women came to the grave to get permission to give his body the usual ceremonial anointing, they were shocked to find the tomb empty.  The disciples, who were in hiding out of a fear that they would follow their leader’s path to a Roman cross (for the close followers of an insurrectionist usually shared the fate of their leader), were dumbfounded by the women’s news.  The disciples came to check it out and also saw that the tomb was empty.  Then Mary Magdalene followed ... and there was confronted by a mysterious appearance of the Lord himself.  Also some other disciples encountered the ‘risen Lord’ on a trip out of Jerusalem.  Then finally Jesus appeared directly to the disciples as they gathered in hiding from the Roman authorities.  Such appearances to his disciples in something other than an earthly format – physically real, yet not fully, was massively shocking.  This was something that none of those affected quite knew what to make of.  Nothing like this was known ever to have happened before in human experience.  They were awed – and transformed – by the experience.

These resurrection appearances were fairly numerous1 – and completely altered the character of the movement.   The sightings were understood as being God's ultimate testimony that indeed Jesus was the Son of God, sent to bring the rest of God's children to a similar life that would not end at the grave.  Jesus was alive in heaven with the Father – for all eternity – as all believers also would be one day.

But these sightings also altered the character of Jesus’ closest followers.  Peter was changed from a cowardly braggart into a strong and truly fearless leader within the movement – fully ready to step forward to take up the ministry where Jesus had left off.  So it was also for the other disciples who had been close to Jesus.  They now became ‘apostles,’ ones ‘sent out’ to confront the world with God’s message or ‘good news’ for all mankind summed up in the life and death of Jesus.

Pentecost and the Holy Spirit

And Jesus's rise to Heaven 40 days later, before the very eyes of his disciples – completed the last stage of Jesus's miraculous ministry on earth.  And in leaving, he directed them to wait in Jerusalem … for there was more to come to all this.  The third member of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit was about to bring a whole new era to human life … starting with a major spiritual transformation of Jesus's disciples themselves.
 
And indeed, the Holy Spirit did come to those disciples (on Pentecost Sunday), transforming them deeply.  For instance, Peter was changed from a cowardly braggart into a strong and truly fearless leader within the movement – fully ready to step forward to take up the ministry where Jesus had left off ...  despite the obvious political dangers this involved.  So it was also for the other disciples who had been close to Jesus.  They now became "apostles," ones "sent out" to confront the world with God's gospel message for all mankind – summed up in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

This change in character was understood to be the result of the very work in them of God himself — just as Jesus had promised would happen once he had completed his earthly mission and had left them to carry on.  Just as God was in Jesus, so through the same God, the One Jesus dared to call Abba, they too would be one with God.  This development would be the work of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Counselor, the Holy Comforter, the very Spirit of God himself – who would continue to teach them and lead them after Jesus was gone.  This Holy Spirit was the third part of the holy union that would link them to God.  This divine link was threefold: 1) the love of God as their true Abba or Father, 2) the continuing leadership or Lordship of God in Jesus as true Messiah or Christ, and 3) the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit, working within them to complete this union with God.  Thus equipped – they were ready to take on the world.


1The apostle Paul records that the resurrected Lord appeared before at least 500 people, eventually himself included.

Modern Skepticism about the Recorded Life and Works of Jesus

It's easy to say, as many skeptics do (notably the Jesus Seminar), that the early church found it convenient to read this prophetic voice back into Jesus' ministry after-the-fact, to give rationale for the shameful loss of their beloved leader on a Roman cross.  There are, they say, no "facts" to validate these many Christian claims about Jesus.  But the skeptics themselves can offer no "facts" that validate this opinion.  And the mere coincidence of the self-interest of the church with these aspects of Jesus' life do not "prove" a tampering with the facts as given.  Thus the fact that I might have some kind of self-interest in my report that my oldest daughter, Rachel, just got a 97 on her math homework, does not mean that therefore her "97" is a fiction; it could still be quite true even if it does play to my fatherly ego! 

Preserving the pleasant--and unpleasant--truths.  The fact that the disciples never understood this agenda of atonement during Jesus's lifetime does not flatter these individuals.  They come off looking petty and foolish.  Peter's denial to a woman that he had ever had anything to do with Jesus – while his leader was undergoing humiliating cross examination by the Jewish authorities – was hardly something that anyone later trying to promote the Christian movement would have wanted to be remembered about its leadership.  The way Jesus's disciples had so clearly demonstrated themselves to be utter cowards, nearly all of them abandoning Jesus at the time of his arrest and death, would later be a matter of great shame.  Thus given the opportunity of his followers (now becoming the new leaders of this ongoing messianic religious movement) to clean up these stories at a later time, it seems strange that they let these stories stand in all this unflattering light.  But none of them seemed to have had any interest in "cleaning up" the story.  This attests well to the idea that Jesus was honestly represented by the stories told about him (and about themselves) by his followers.

The testimonies of faith.  Even though some of the stories told of Jesus by his followers seem unbelievable by modern (secular) standards, these stories must be understood as an honest effort of highly transformed people to explain the true source of their new power in life.  These are the truths of faith – not fact.  And powerful truths these are – as powerful as the faith that transformed their lives from slavery under the world's ways to an incredible personal freedom in and through their trust in God through Jesus Christ.  By the gift of this new faith they understood how Jesus was indeed the long-awaited Messiah, the Son of God, the one promised by the prophet Isaiah who would redeem them from their sins, reunite them with God, their true heavenly Father, and bring them into the promised Kingdom.  This was the ultimate Truth of their lives.

The modern bias in seeing "truth" and "fact" as one and the same.  This is not the time and place to get into a huge metaphysical debate about the proper relationship between truth and fact (the issue was heavily debated by the ancient Greeks – and it is still heavily debated today by philosophers and scientists).  We will look at this issue more closely later in this study.  But we certainly have reached the point at which we need to mention that the modern tendency to view fact and truth as one and the same is loaded with logical errors – ones that our secular world blissfully ignores.  Even the great modern Relativity Theorist Einstein – and his Quantum Theorist friends – were very aware of the dangers of assuming that what we view as "fact" is indeed "objective reality." "Reality out there somewhere" is not obtainable without some cultural or "worldview" or "faith" assumptions, which of course means that what we view even as "fact" is a highly interpretative matter.  What we "see" is actually only a mental reconstruction, tremendously affected by the limited ability of our senses (even aided by modern technological devices), and by the way culture has taught us to see things.2

In any case … scripture is simply – but powerfully – the recording of the truth of faith, faith as it functioned in the Palestinian-Hellenistic world of the first century.  But it is the closest witness we have to truth to go by ... and therefore in our quest for Christian truth, best understood in the cultural-historical context in which that witness was originally laid forth. In understanding this first century context, we will best understand the truth of Christianity.

2Sadly, modern Christianity itself has fallen into a lot of secularist thinking – to the extent that it has attempted to defend on a factual basis what was recorded in the Christian scriptures.  Both the criticisms of biblical "fact" by the secular world and the "factual" defense of scripture by the Christian world miss the point of scripture entirely.  Fact does not stand apart from faith – and failing to understand the faith basis of first century Christians makes modern factual interpretation absurd ... for both Christianity's skeptical opponents and its misguided defenders.

HIS MAJOR IDEAS

Life under Divine Grace … rather than the Law

The message of Jesus was basically for all people to trust in the goodness of God.  It was the gracious work of God – not the industrious or even moral works of man – that brought truth, goodness and beauty to human life.

Jesus often sniped at the Pharisees' vision of human righteousness arising through strict observance of the Jewish purity laws.  To Jesus, the purity that God sought from his people was an internal disposition – not an external moral discipline undertaken by the religiously rigorous.  Indeed, Jesus saw such rigorism as producing a distancing of the human heart from the power of God's goodness – not a movement towards it.  Jesus saw this rigorism not as a measure of our faith in God – but as a measure of our determination to grasp at righteousness through our own religious controls.
Jesus offered the world a quite different path to righteousness.  If we would let go of our anxieties about life, our grasping natures concerning our own existence, we would discover the real power of life.  Our efforts and pretensions to be in control of life were vain – "vanities of vanities" as ancient Jewish wisdom put it.

Jesus at times put this matter pretty bluntly. We could trust in our own devices – even our own "virtues" to get us through life.  But this was not really going to get us into eternity – into God's Kingdom.  Such worldly achievements, like all earthly treasures, would die with us at the end of our earthly life.  Only surrender of these very self-serving instincts (including the desire to make ourselves moral "superiors") and a willingness to take up truly sacrificial living – living beyond ourselves in our greater care for the welfare of others – would bring us full blessing, joy, peace, and eternal life.

Clearly this message did not sit well with the religiously "accomplished" and "virtuous" citizens of his times.  Apparently Jesus argued frequently with them.  And it seems fairly clear that this was the group responsible for having him put to death as a dangerous trouble maker.

The All-Critical Nature of Faith

While Jesus did not invent the notion that faith is the key to understanding and utilizing the vast powers of the universe, he certainly popularized the notion--and established it as Christianity's greatest insight.

Over and over again, Jesus stressed the role of faith in producing miraculous power in life.  Jesus was a healer.  But so often he coupled his healings with the faith of the one healed or with one who sought healing for a friend or loved one:  the woman with 12-year hemorrhage, two blind men, the Gentile woman seeking healing for her possessed daughter, the Roman centurion seeking healing for his servant, the four friends bringing a paralyzed friend (thorough a roof!) to be healed by Jesus.

Likewise, Jesus often rebuked his own disciples for their lack of faith as they encountered various difficulties:  the fear of a storm on the Sea of Galilee, in not having enough food to feed the hungry 5,000, in not being able to heal a man's possessed son, Peter's failing faith as he tries to duplicate Jesus' feat of walking on water.

Jesus taught that no one should be anxious over the matter of being fed or clothed, for God would provide for all our needs--provided we trusted God.  Jesus told his disciples that if they had faith even as small as a grain of mustard seed, they could tell a mountain or a tree to be moved, and it would do so.

In the Gospel of John, in Jesus' last instructions to his disciples just prior to his death, Jesus told them:
"Truly, truly I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father."  (John 14:12)
Anyway, it's hard to miss the point.  For Jesus, faith in God was the vital ingredient that unlocked the power of life, the power of the universe.  Faith was what God looked for in us.

The Providence of God

We were expected to have this faith--because God had over and over again demonstrated that he could be totally relied upon for all the necessities of life.  God had laid out a perfect universe, had provided for all things as a part of the harmony of the whole.  God had a loving regard for all creation, all creatures within it, great and small.  In his divine consciousness, God was fully able to be lovingly mindful of the needs of every part of creation, from the requirements of the sub-atomic particle to the requirements the galaxies.  Of course these latter examples are modern metaphors.  But there is no question that Jesus understood that God had all things under his loving scrutiny and protection.

Thus Jesus taught :  Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.  For everyone who asks, receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened. . . .  If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!  (Matthew 7:7-11)

Always in Jesus' understanding--it was the gracious work of God, not the industrious or even moral works of Man, that brought truth, goodness and beauty to human life.  If we would let go of our anxieties about life, our grasping natures concerning our own existence, we would discover the real power of life.  Our pretentious to "control" over life were vain--"vanities of vanities" as ancient Jewish wisdom put it.

Living for "Others"

Jesus also taught that we would be better served to spend more time in the care of others than in the care of "self."  Focus on "self" was merely the mark of how strongly the sin of personal anxiety gripped our lives.  Giving ourselves over to others, on the other hand, was the testimony of how much we had been set free to live by the pure grace of God and his divine provision.

In other words,  if we have our "sufficiency" in the Lord, then we need not ever be anxious about our standing before other people.  We to look to them for neither support nor approval.  The Lord alone is our provider--and our judge.

Further,  being less anxious about others, we can more easily be more sympathetic, empathetic toward them.  They are no longer our competitors or detractors in life.  They are fellow journeymen on this pilgrimage of life.   Thus we can afford to spend more time looking to their needs (rather than our own), serving as a channel, though never "substitute," for the grace of God to these others--just as Jesus showed mercy and grace toward us.

Jesus very clearly tied faith in a providential God with the love of one's neighbor.   They indeed form a single precept for the Christian.

When asked which is the greatest of God's commands to us, Jesus replied:

"You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and and all your mind."  This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it. "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.  (Matthew 22:37-40)

In the Gospel of John, Jesus's counsel to his disciples makes very clear the importance of being able to live for "others":

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.  By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.  (John 13:34-35)

The Eternal or Heavenly Kingdom

Finally, Jesus tied this freedom to live beyond oneself now with the freedom to live eternally as well.  Such freedom in a person's life was the sign of the presence of the true Kingdom of God.  It was a spiritual kingdom--one which transcended mortal existence--and which brought the soul into a highly transcendent and "eternal" existence.  To achieve such eternal existence (everlasting fellowship with God) was to Jesus the goal of all life.

The Importance of the Kingdom. Jesus moved about the countryside preaching the coming of the Kingdom, warning of the need to be prepared for its arrival, stressing the importance or great worth of life in the Kingdom, and illustrating through the performance of signs and miracles the power of the Kingdom.  As Jesus explained when people wanted him to stay with them as their teacher, he had to move on to preach the Kingdom of God to the other cities, for he was sent for this very purpose.

What Is the Kingdom? But the "what, where and when" of this Kingdom as Jesus presented it was/is not entirely clear.  It wasn't clear to his listeners then.  It isn't clear today--even as we read the words he left with his listeners.  Certainly people interpreted this Kingdom in a material sense: some mighty reign of God on earth that would set aside all other governments and authorities--and would last for all eternity.

The thought of this made some people very nervous--especially those in power in those days.  But clearly the Kingdom Jesus was talking about was not of that variety.  He told the Roman Governor Pilate that his Kingdom was not an earthly kind.  He told his followers that the Kingdom was not one that would come with signs which could be observed.  The Kingdom, in fact, was "within" us.

Jesus gave indication to his followers that the Kingdom was something that could be entered only through the very abandonment of the human plotting, scheming, manipulating that was so natural to us sophisticated humans.  One had to be poor in spirit, like a child in innocent faith, in order to enter the Kingdom.  He told Nicodemus that the Kingdom could not even be seen, much less entered, until there was a "rebirth" of a person:  a spiritual rebirth.

The Kingdom as the Reversal of the "Fall."  We may set Jesus's understanding of entry into the Kingdom in contrast to the story of the "Fall" from Paradise of Adam and Eve.  They were ejected from Paradise because they ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree which grew in the center of the Garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Now eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil sounds like a very good idea to most of us.  We set the possession of such knowledge as the highest goal of civilized life.  We do everything in our power to raise our children to have such knowledge.  We continue to seek it for ourselves as the mark of our own goodness.  We preach countless sermons on the need to have such knowledge, and to act accordingly.

Why then was this the cause of the Fall?  Was it just because Adam and Eve disobeyed God, challenging His authority, provoking His wrath, that caused the Fall?

No.  It had to do with the way we took life into our own hands, moved ourselves into the position to be controller of our own destinies, to make life's decisions and evaluations for ourselves.  In so doing, we broke fellowship with God.

Jesus came to restore that broken fellowship--by teaching us to struggle against our very tendencies to advance life through our own self-control.  Jesus proposed that we die to this old self, give it and all that it has accumulated away, and start life over, this time living by pure faith in the cosmic providence of God.

Not an easy task.  All of us continue to want to hold onto that fruit that gives us the power of the knowledge of good and evil--that permits us to be the judge over our own lives (and the lives of others), that makes us sovereign over our own lives, that makes us "like God."

Apparently, however, as Jesus saw it, it was this very tendency to be "like God" that made us much less like God.  It was this very effort to be in control that stole from us the very image of God within us that makes us true sons and daughters of God.  By becoming "wise" we became fools, losing the true power of humanity.  We traded the fearlessness of faith for the terror of fearing death.  We traded the power and joy of a life spent celebrating creation for the meanness of life lived within the tiny "secure" ghettos of our own making.  We traded the harmony with all life for a defensive reaction to intruders into our existences--the forests, the animals, the seasons, but also even each other.  As our knowledge increased, we accordingly became increasingly expert in the art of destruction, of the environment, of each other, of ourselves.

How Will We Have It? The Kingdom that Jesus preached was a new regime produced through a new relationship with God.  Would we appreciate its importance?  Would we be willing to set our contrived lives aside to enter this Kingdom--or like the rich young ruler, would we turn ourselves aside at the opportunity because it meant having to give up all our entitlements, all our achievements?

For Jesus, this was a most critical matter.  Either we live one way--or we live the other.  There is no way to serve both programs, both "masters."  Jesus offered no middle ground, no way of achieving a compromise between the two.  You couldn't, once you put your hand to the plow, look back--or you would lose out on the Kingdom.  Only the most rigorously dedicated to the search for the Kingdom would be found ready when it came.

And going through the motions--even the religious motions--would not do the trick.  Performing even the greatest of moral deeds was not what this was all about.  Not that Jesus was against being good.  It's just that he came to teach the way back to God.  His advice seemed to boil down to this: first seek the Kingdom of Heaven.  Everything else necessary to life (even human goodness) would come along as a by-product, a gift of grace through faith in God.

Failure, Forgiveness and the Atonement

Human Failure.  Jesus clearly understood that what all of us are up against  in our need to be rejoined with our providential Father is the fallenness of human nature.  We all have the instinct for sin.  We all are children of Adam and Eve, still trying to control things ourselves, still turning our backs on God's providence, plotting and planning our own success (and the failure of our competitors--including even nature as competitor!).
As Jesus saw things, unless we get off this self-centered track, we are fated never to "connect" with the higher realm of life.  Unless we, during this earthly life, get beyond a "fallen" preoccupation with our mortal condition, with our earthly fortunes, we will never reach fellowship with God.  If we fail to refix our gaze on "heavenly" matters, our soul will never become graduated to a spiritual state that abides in the household of God forever.

If all we ever were was just "mortal," no matter how successful we were as mortals, then we shall also die as mortals--never having achieved any another estate as creatures of God.  We will have failed in this all-too-brief venture called life on earth.  Jesus will have failed as a Shepherd.

"For God so loved the world that He gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believed in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."  This comes right out of the conversation that Jesus had one night with Nicodemus, who had come to him to learn about eternal life.  Jesus was pretty clear about the issue:  believe and have everlasting life--or perish.

Jesus, the Determined "Good Shepherd." We think of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the one who gave his all, even his life, that we might be delivered from failure--that we might be "saved" from the bondage of sin.  We think of Jesus as all-loving, all-forgiving, all-concerned about our welfare.  This is all certainly true enough--probably even more than we can imagine.

But we easily confuse these comprehensive traits of Jesus with the added trait of all-accepting. That was one thing he was not!  And he was not all-accepting because he was the all-loving Shepherd.

Jesus understood the possibility of failure in life's enterprise.  It was a very real danger to him, one that gave special urgency to his work.  Jesus was not willing to see any fail.  He was thus not at all tolerant of slackness concerning this matter of getting us back to God.

Forgive, yes--a thousand times "yes"!  But pretend that it was okay to fail:  no, a thousand times "no."  Jesus was determined to get as many sheep up that mountain to good pasturage--and was not going to abide any weak excuses for any of his flock not to get moving in that direction.  That's what made him the Good Shepherd.  Anyone else in charge of the flock would have let them wander over the hillside, merely hoping that by their own free will the sheep would somehow get to this pasturage on their own.  Anyone who thinks that this was also Jesus's program has not studied Jesus very closely.

BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES:  THE GOSPELS

The major works or writings about Jesus:

  Miles H. Hodges