This Jesus

The Jesus of the Gospels amazes me. For the past 5 weeks our church community has been looking at various parables Jesus told about the Kingdom of God. The people of Jesus’ day had certain expectations about the Kingdom and what it would look like when God would send his Messiah-Deliverer. God did send the Deliverer, but he came in a very different package than what they expected and he preached about a different kind of Kingdom. To help the people understand the nature of this Kingdom, Jesus used parables, i.e., short stories using metaphor to make a point.

One of the things I tried to focus on during the sermon series was the historical context of these stories. How did the people in that day hear and understand what Jesus was saying? How does this affect our understanding of who Jesus is and what he was communicating about his Kingdom? Catholic author, Gary Wills, writes in What Jesus Meant:

To read the gospels in the spirit with which they were written, it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said. We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange deeds and words. He intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show us that he is the only-begotten Son of that Father. What he signified is always more challenging that we expect, outrageous, more egregious. That is why the Catholic novelist Fancois Mauriac calls him “of all the great characters history places before us, the least logical.” Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew this when he reproached Christ for puzzling men by being “exceptional, vague and enigmatic.”

The more I study and think about Jesus’ actions and the words he said, the greater the appreciation I have for who he was and is. How he responded to both religious and irreligious people astounds me. This Jesus of the Gospels revealed God’s love for insiders and outsiders. He honors a woman identified as someone with “questionable morals” making her out to be a hero right in front of those who saw her as a disgrace. He invited God’s chosen people to embrace what God was doing in their midst knowing full well that they were going to reject him. He graciously opened the doors wide open to the least and lost of that society making sure they knew there was a place at his table for them. This Jesus challenges and convicts me. This Jesus, I love. I want to be more like him.