Ten
Things We Forgot About Jesus
When I was a kid growing up in the church, we sang a hymn
that described Jesus as “gentle Jesus — meek and mild.” It
left me with the conception of Jesus as a cooperative, compliant, docile,
passive, and largely timid figure. Now that I think about it, projecting this
image of Jesus was probably part of some strategy to teach ten-year-old me how
to behave.
Be well-manned and nice.
Jesus was nothing like that.
In fact, Jesus was — in a cultural, social, and religious
sense — a real trouble maker. Do yourself a favor. Open the Bible and discover
who the real Jesus actually was. You might just have some misconceptions
destroyed.
You see, somewhere along the line, we create a ‘Jesus’ in
our own image and began to impart that image to the world. But, unfortunately,
the reality is that the Jesus you learned about in Sunday School probably
doesn’t exist.
If you grew up in the church, then I can’t speak for your
experience. But, here are ten things that they didn’t teach me about Jesus in
Sunday School — that have reformed my understanding of who Jesus actually was:
1.
Jesus was not white
I want you to do an experiment for me. Go to google and
do an image search on “Jesus.” The pictures that appear in your search results
represent what people think Jesus might have looked like. What do you notice?
Yes, that’s right!
More often than that, Jesus is imagined as a
blond-haired, blue-eyed, white guy who, to be honest, would comfortably fit the
physical requirements of Hitler’s Aryan race.
Except he was a Jew.
Awkward.
And because Jesus was a Jew, he almost certainly had
Jewish features, such as olive skin, brown eyes, and black hair. Yes, Jesus
probably looked more like that Middle-eastern man who lives in your
neighborhood — you know the one who you treat as an object of suspicion and
scorn — the one you speak of when you complain to your other white Christian
friends about how Arabs are overrunning the country. Yeah, that guy — he looks
more like Jesus than you do.
2. Jesus was a common name
If you walked through the streets of Jerusalem in 30AD
looking for Jesus and decided to do that by yelling out his name at the top of
your lungs — “Jesus! I’m looking for Jesus! Has anyone seen Jesus!” — chances
are you would find a Jesus, but maybe not the one you were looking for.
Many people shared the name. Jesus’s given name, commonly
Romanized as Yeshua, was quite common in first-century Galilee. In
fact, archaeologists have unearthed the tombs of 71 Yeshuas from the period of
Jesus’ death. The name also appears 30 times in the Old Testament in
reference to four separate characters — including a descendent of Aaron who
helped distribute grain offerings (2
Chronicles 31:15) and a man who accompanied former captives of
Nebuchadnezzar back to Jerusalem (Ezra
2:2).
What is more, Yeshua is better translated into English as
“Joshua.” How many Joshuas do you know? Probably lots!
3.
Jesus was a refugee
I don’t know how refugees are treated in your country,
but in my home country — much to our shame — we tend to lock them up in
detention centers for months on end until we establish whether or not they have
a good reason for claiming refugee status. If not, we send them back to their
own war-torn country.
Yet
Jesus was a refugee.
Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, had to flee the
nation of Israel to the relative safety of Egypt because of state-sanction
infanticide. The whole gruesome episode can be found in Matthew
2:13–15:
“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a
dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt.
Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill
him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for
Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.”
King Herod, who was about as crazy as they come, killed
every child under the age of two, just in case one of them might happen to one
day threaten his own rule. Jesus — and presumably some other — managed to
escape.
4. Jesus had a day job
After the death of King Herod, Jesus and his family
finally returned to Israel where Jesus did what other young men in
first-century Palestine did — he became an apprentice in the same trade as his
father — starting at the age of thirteen (the age when Jewish boys were
considered to be men).
Since Jesus didn’t start his public ministry until he was
thirty, that means that Jesus spent a good 17 years working in an ordinary
dawn-til-dusk day job. He became a carpenter. You could imagine he became very
good at making things after so long in the trade, and perhaps it would not be
uncommon to find some “Joseph and Sons” furniture somewhere in
Jerusalem.
Needless to say, by the time he steps into public life,
Jesus was well and truly ready for some long-service leave.
5. Jesus had brothers and sisters
Yes, Jesus was part of a family unit. Although he was the
first-born child, Mary and Joseph would go on to have other children as well.
We do not know exactly how many, but the Bible mentions four brothers named
James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon, as well as an undisclosed amount of sisters (Matthew
13:53–56).
If you thought the dynamic in your family was difficult,
can you imagine what it must have been like for Mary and Joseph with one of
their children claiming to be the Son of God? Needless to say, Jesus was viewed
as the black sheep of the family, and on at least one occasion, Jesus’s Mother
and Brother rock up to where Jesus is teaching to try to pull him into line. (Mark
3:31–35).
Make no mistake, Jesus’s siblings were a little
embarrassed by Jesus’s antics, and, as far as we know, none of them followed or
believed in him while he was alive. However, all of them became believers after
his death, which argues the case well for a resurrected Jesus. Jesus’s brother,
James, was particularly scathing of Jesus in his life, but then went on to
become the first bishop of Jerusalem, wrote the Epistle of James, and
eventually surrendered his body as a martyr for the faith. That’s quite a
transformation!
6.
Jesus liked to party
No doubt, part of the embarrassment that Jesus’s siblings
felt towards him was related to the company that he kept and the events that he
attended. Jesus was known as a man who enjoyed a drink, especially in the
company of those who others thought a bit disreputable.
Matthew
11:19 says, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and
people say, ‘Look at him! He eats too much and drinks too much wine. He’s a
friend of tax collectors and other sinners.”
Tax collectors, prostitutes, criminals, and the ancient
equivalent of religious extremists (known as zealots) — they were all part of
Jesus’s inner circle. He was unashamed to be seen with them. He would visit
their homes, share food at their tables and love them without pretense.
7.
Jesus was homeless
Jesus said of himself, “Foxes have holes. Birds
have nests. But the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.” (Matthew
23:10–12). After Jesus stepped away from his day job as a carpenter and
began to teach and ministry, he left behind his home and the creature comforts
thereof.
After that, Jesus relied largely on the hospitality of
others who welcome his message. In his travels, Jesus and His disciples
regularly found lodging in the large home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus at
Bethany, near Jerusalem; and it is apparent from reading the Gospels that many
people offered Jesus the hospitality of their homes. Some Bible scholars
believe Jesus lived in a house at Capernaum with Simon Peter and his family (Matthew.
8:14–15; 17:24–27).
8. Jesus broke social taboos
Jesus did not pay much respect to social, cultural, or
religious traditions. He was much more interested in reaching, serving, and
helping people, and if that meant dispensing with tradition, then so be it.
There are lots of different taboos I could include here.
I have already mentioned the fact that the kinds of people that Jesus
associated with were considered improper for a good Jewish Rabbi. However, his
treatment of women was particularly striking.
In Luke
10, Jesus allows a woman called Mary (there seemed to be so many different
Marys in those days!) to sit at his feet while he taught. On the surface, this
might seem degrading to her, but it was actually the elevated position that a
disciple would sit in, in relation to a Rabbi. She was being treated as an
equal with the men! The fact that many women were part of Jesus’s ‘in-group’ was
culturally ground-breaking.
Then, in Luke
7, a woman comes to Jesus and weeps in repentance at his feet, washing his
feet with her tears and drying them with her hair — in the company of the
Pharisees no less! In those days, women were not even supposed to speak to
Rabbis, let alone touch them. This was scandalous! And yet, Jesus lovingly
picks her up off the floor and restores her.
There in John
4:1–30, there is a story of the brief interaction between Jesus and a
Samaritan woman. Not only is she a woman, but she is also a member of a racial
group that Jews typically despised. Yet, Jesus starts a conversation with her
and treats her with a kind of grace that she would never have experienced
before.
I could go on and on. Jesus never let a cultural
expectation get in the way of an opportunity to love.
9. Jesus was a criminal
Let’s be perfectly clear. Jesus was executed as a
criminal. He managed to achieve that feat by repeatedly and deliberately
breaking the religious laws of the day — at least in the eyes of the religious
leaders. What Jesus actually did was violate the interpretations that
religious leaders had developed around certain biblical commands. To put it
simply, he broke the laws that the Pharisees had invented to make people keep
the laws.
The religious leaders in Jesus's day believed in strict
observance of what was known as the Sabbath Day. God ordained the Sabbath Day
to be a day of rest — a good idea if you ask me.
However, the religious leaders took this good and
life-giving concept and burdened people with many absurd regulations to make
sure that people were truly resting — from how far you were allowed to walk
before it was considered ‘work’ to how much you were allowed to carry to what
food you were allowed to prepare. Even boiling water was outlawed on the
Sabbath.
So, you can imagine the outrage when Jesus broke the
Sabbatical Laws on multiple occasions. In fact, Jesus performed at least 7 of
his miracles on the Sabbath Day. Rather than rejoicing at the fact that people
were being healed, the religious leaders were incensed that Jesus had dared
participate in the ‘work’ of healing people on the sacred day of rest. Jesus
challenged them by saying: “Which
is the right thing to do on the Sabbath day: to do good or to do evil? Is it
right to save a life or to destroy one?” They had no answer for him, but
inwardly they seethed.
Jesus refused to stop doing good just because it was a
particular day of the week — and for that, he was considered a law-breaker.
10.
Jesus was killed by religious people
“Their lives are not good examples for you to
follow. They tell you to do things, but they don’t do those things themselves.
They make strict rules that are hard for people to obey. They try to force
others to obey all their rules. But they themselves will not try to follow any
of those rules.” Matthew
23:3
This was Jesus’s warning to the people about the
religious leaders of his day. It’s a fairly honest and brutal assessment about
the kind of spiritual leaders Jesus was dealing with. It cost him his life.
Jesus was handed over to be executed by the good,
Bible-carrying, church-attending, rule-observing, spiritual leaders of his day
— make no mistake.
Perfectly
human, perfectly God
So, what do we learn about Jesus from these ten things we
forgot? When I look over this list, I am struck by his humanity — his
familiarity with the common struggles of people.
We are talking about a man who, as a child, fled his
homeland as a refugee. We are talking about a man who experienced a difficult
family dynamic and all kinds of sibling rivalry. We are talking about a man
whose hands were calloused by working the tools of his trade for many, many
years. We are talking about a man who knew what it was to be misunderstood,
despised, and rejected. We are talking about a man who knew pain, suffering,
and death. So, ultimately, we are talking about a man who can and does relate
to our lives — even today.
Not only am I struck by Jesus’s humanity, but I am also
amazed at how he managed to navigate all of the challenges of being human in a
way that revealed his divine nature.
He rejected the man-made religious systems and structures
of his day and instead brought a kind of grace and compassion that was truly
divine. He demonstrated an other-worldly ability to heal, forgive, restore,
love, and accept people as they are. If Jesus's chief goal was to reveal the
loving nature of God to humanity, then I dare say he achieved that and more.
WRITTEN BY
Writer, Blogger, Poet: Tackling life, faith, culture, religion, politics, and spirituality. Newsletter:
danfosterwriter.com/subscribe
No comments:
Post a Comment