The Life of Jesus Christ

The raising of Lazarus within a few miles of Jerusalem was no chance miracle, and few miracles are set up with such detail.  As a result of it, the high priest proclaimed that “Jesus must die for the nation of Israel,” and the Sadducees joined the Pharisees in plotting how to bring that death about.
    In all his parables, Jesus had named only one character:  Lazarus, who “died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom.”  A rich man died also and was buried in hell.  After learning that there could be no relief for his anguish, the rich man begged Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them, “lest they also come into this place of torment.”  Abraham refused.  They would not believe, Abraham said, even if Lazarus should rise from the dead.
    Jesus, returning to Bethany, was about to provide literal proof of Abraham’s assertion. 

“I and the Father are one,” Jesus said in the portico of Solomon.  The Greek word one is gender neutral.  A better translation might be, “I and the Father are one thing.”  However puzzling the statement might have been, it was a clear claim of divinity, blasphemy to the Jewish mind.  To us the words establish an important element of the doctrine of the Trinity.  The Son and the Father are two Persons, but one Substance.  Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…one in Being with the Father.”
    It was too much.  The temple leaders tried to stone him — again — and Jesus walked away.  His intention, he said, was to lay down his life for his sheep, but not then and not by stoning.  He was saving himself for a more terrible death.  His time was not yet come. 
    To fulfill his destiny, it was necessary for him to leave Judea.  Curiously, his summons to return came with a message of human need.  A friend whom he loved had fallen ill and had taken to his deathbed.  “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  In returning to Bethany, Jesus gave us not just words to obey, but an example to inspire us.

With the healing of the man who had been blind from birth, Jesus brought his challenge to the temple itself.  Not only was he healing, drawing the crowds to him, but he was doing it on the Sabbath.  He was breaking the law, as the Pharisees saw it – even, it was rumored, claiming to be master of the law.  The miracle could not have been done with divine power, they knew; God himself rested on the Sabbath.  For the first time, the Pharisees set out to disprove one of his miracles.
    Jesus was in the temple, calling himself the light of the world.  None of those who disbelieved this claim called him a good man or a wise teacher, as so many unbelievers do today.  A human being who believed such claims about himself would be diabolical or insane, at the very least a megalomaniac.  A human being who made such claims without believing them would be a corrupt demagogue, manipulating the crowd for his own purposes.  Clearly Jesus was one or the other, the scribes and Pharisees knew, but there was the nagging problem of the so-called miracle.
    John’s gospel manages to capture the personality of the blind man.  He is too delighted with his sight and with Jesus to be at all intimidated by the learned Pharisees.  His encounter with Jesus had put worldly powers into perspective.  “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Tax collectors responded to Jesus, though they were both worldly and corrupt.  Pharisees, who established the synagogue system to provide religious instruction, who worked to apply God’s law to every aspect of life, did not. 
    The tax collectors knew there was something missing from their lives.  Having both money and privilege, they knew too well that neither could provide any lasting satisfaction.  In Jesus, they found the water to quench their spiritual thirst, the bread to feed their spiritual hunger.  Poor in spirit, theirs was the kingdom of heaven.
    The Pharisees, familiar with the scriptures and devoted to the law, knew no such emptiness.  The law had, perhaps, become joyless, and the Word had lost its life-giving force, but, as a dead virus has the power to inoculate us against the living disease, they were enough to inoculate the Pharisees against the Living Word.  Dead religion is worse than no religion at all.  When Jesus appeared to John on Patmos, the message Jesus gave him for the Christian church in Laodicea was, “Would that you were cold or hot!  So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.”
    It is God who redeems us, not church attendance or even Bible reading.  Our relationship with Him must remain fresh and vital.

Jesus’ disciples never seemed to grasp the nature of the kingdom he was constantly telling them about.  They were expecting a messiah to throw off the yoke of Rome and restore the Davidic kingdom of old.  Even at the end, just before the Ascension, they asked, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
    It mattered a lot to them what would be their place in the kingdom, both collectively and individually.  They argued about who would be the greatest among them, about who would sit at Jesus’ right and who at his left.  They were still arguing about it on the night before his crucifixion. 
    When Jesus asked James and John whether they could drink the cup he drank or be baptized with the baptism he was baptized with, their answer was a firm yes.  John and his mother Salome would be at Calvary to see who occupied those coveted places to Jesus’ left and right.  Though James and John didn’t drink of the cup at that time, the cup was coming for both of them.  James would be beheaded by Herod Agrippa.  John would be boiled in oil and exiled to the island of Patmos, where he would receive his apocalyptic Revelation. 
    Both were to be great in the kingdom, but it was not the sort of greatness that either could have expected.

When a demon enters a person’s body, it seems to do so through the central nervous system.  In control of that, the demon can control the person’s movements, what he says, what he sees and hears — even, perhaps, the images in his mind.  It is precisely because the nervous system is the point of attack that the symptoms of demonic possession sometimes parallel those of various nervous diseases. 
    Sometimes Jesus treated physical ailments — deafness and dumbness, seizures — as physical ailments only, and sometimes as cases of demonic possession.  We could be mistaken; he could not.  And he no more called on God to cast out demons than he did to heal the sick.  He spoke, and they obeyed.  Jesus’ commands were an irresistible force.
    There were limits to his power, however self-imposed.  Demons could not resist his most casual word.  People could.  When Jesus said, “Follow me,” he exerted no doubt a great power of attraction.  That power, though, could be resisted.  The Bible records one instance in which it was.

Jesus healed the sick, cast out demons, raised the dead, calmed a storm, and walked on water.  All miracles.  All displays of supernatural power.  Still the crowds called on him for a Sign.  What they meant perhaps was a sign from the heavens, where God was, to prove the source of Jesus’ power.  He had fed them with barley loaves; they wanted manna from heaven.  They wanted something spectacular, like the smoke that wreathed Sinai and the thunder and lightning and fire that accompanied the Lord when he came down to Moses. 
    Jesus was to perform such a miracle, but only three of his disciples would be there to see it.

Early in his ministry, Jesus had revealed who he was to the Samaritan woman he met by the well in Sychar.  Many months later, he still had not told his disciples, and they, evidently, had not liked to ask. 
    Nothing in the Jewish religion had prepared them for the incarnation of God, and their Messianic expectations were not expectations that he planned to fulfill.  Ultimately, they would be faced with a new paradigm.  God was not one Person but Three.  As the parable of the sower had suggested, the Jews were not to be taken in a body into the kingdom of God; rather membership in the kingdom would depend on individual response.  As other parables suggested — the one about the great supper, and others — Gentiles would be full members in the kingdom, and the Jewish people would lose their special place.
    But Jesus began his teaching with the inner principles of the kingdom, not with its external structures.  He began with revelations of his character, his personality, and his power.  When the disciples were ready, God the Father would make the necessary revelation.

Before Jesus proclaimed that he was the bread of life, he performed the only miracle found in all four gospels.  The miracle was feeding five thousand (plus women and children) with five barley loaves and two salted fish.  Jesus did not multiply the loaves, which would have been miraculous enough.  Rather, he fed the five thousand with five loaves without multiplying the loaves — and when all had had their fill, what was left was still the same five loaves.  “They gathered them up,” John tells us, “and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves.”  Earlier miracles had shown Jesus’ power; this one suggests something unexpected about time and space.
    Later, at the Last Supper, he would break bread and say to his disciples, “This is my body,” when, of course, his body was sitting right there in front of them, holding the bread.  Again, something unexpected, though it was foreshadowed with the five thousand by the Sea of Galilee.  “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever,” Jesus said to those he had fed with barley loaves.  When we participate in the Lord’s Supper, we share — somehow — in that same promise. 

Why didn’t Jesus tell people straight out that he was God?  Why did he keep telling people who guessed at the truth not to tell anyone?  Why was he so quick to silence demons when they started to name him?
    There were perhaps two reasons.  First, the Jews of first century Palestine had a strong appreciation for the majesty God.  Any claim to Godhood, for those who did not believe, would be such a monstrous blasphemy that it would have to be dealt with.  Those who did believe would fall on their faces and never get up.  Either response would tend to keep those around Jesus from getting to know him.
    The second reason is that the Jews were not prepared theologically to understand the claim.  Jesus was not God the Father come to live among us.  He was not the Holy Spirit.  He was, or he claimed to be, God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity.  For those with no knowledge of the Trinity, those who knew only a solitary God, a claim of Godhood would be misleading or entirely meaningless.