The Puzzle of Christianity

Jesus then embarked on His ministry which, as we have seen, lasted one to three years. He had no settled home, did not marry and depended on the generosity of women and others who supported Him and His followers. Women played a vital part in His ministry and were some of His closest friends. Jesus remained all His life within a fairly narrow area of Palestine, teaching and talking to people and showing them, through stories or parables, the nature of God’s love and of God’s coming kingdom even if, as we shall see, this love and this promised kingdom were very different from those people’s expectations.

Initially it appears that Jesus preached only to Jews and saw His message as concerning only them, but He came to realise that the message He had to bring was universal. There is an important point here that divides Christians. Some Christians, influenced particularly by the Gospel of John, see Jesus as always being aware of His divine nature and always preaching both to Jews and Gentiles. However, many mainstream Christians see Jesus’ teaching as developing over time and Him coming to realise that God’s message was for all human beings and not simply the Jews.

One of the most extraordinary and well attested aspects of Jesus’ life was that He mixed with everyone; and for a Jew this was really surprising. Devout, God-fearing Jews kept themselves to themselves. They had nothing to do with the Romans unless this was strictly necessary; they did not mix with Samaritans (the group of Jews descended from those who remained behind in Israel after the Babylonian captivity and who were despised by mainstream Jews); they looked down on those who collected taxes for the Romans; they despised those who did not keep to the strict purity rules laid down in the Hebrew Scriptures; they tended not to talk to or mix with women outside their families and certainly would not be touched by them; they considered that women were impure during their periods and should keep to their houses; and they condemned and despised those who committed ethical failings such as adultery. Jesus, by contrast, kept company with all kinds of people; he talked to Romans and Samaritans; women were His constant companions; a devout woman massaged His feet and wiped away her tears from them with her hair (a very intimate thing to do); a former tax collector was one of His closest friends; and He was most critical of all of those who thought themselves holy and ‘good’. He seemed to find God more readily in those who were outcasts from respectable society than in the wealthy and those whom others considered to be righteous and good. It was not surprising that He became both exceedingly popular with ordinary people and exceedingly unpopular with the priests and those in power and authority.

In many ways Jesus was a scandalous figure, an outsider who challenged the complacency of the supposedly religious society in which He lived and who had little time for those who were pleased with themselves because they had ‘kept the rules’ and were convinced that this made them righteous in God’s eyes. He was, at one level, a simple person because His message could be understood by everyone, whatever their background, but He was also expressing the most profound theological truths with a simplicity that no one has ever achieved before or since. Nevertheless, many Jews today would see the essential nature of Jesus’ teaching as being entirely in accordance with the best rabbinic teaching tradition.

In the next chapter we will look at the message that Jesus came to bring although, in many ways, Jesus’ life and message are inseparable. He preached about the love of God and the need for forgiveness and drew huge crowds. He ate in different people’s houses, attended weddings and was in the middle of life in first-century Palestine. His reputation and fame grew as well as His ability to perform the most extraordinary miracles: healing people of many diseases including leprosy; restoring sight to people who were blind; enabling people who were paralysed to walk; curing a woman with a permanent period; turning water into wine; walking on water; and raising someone from the dead. Jesus never performed miracles to prove His power but always out of compassion and, in a number of cases, told the people who had been cured to say nothing about what had been done (Christians hold that the Hebrew Scriptures prophesied that the Messiah would perform miracles; see Isaiah 35:4–6). Nevertheless, as His fame spread He was constantly surrounded by thousands of people who wanted to listen to Him, and He felt physically tired and drained. He also knew that His growing reputation, as well as His message, was unacceptable to the Jewish authorities. His attacks on the priests and those in positions of wealth and influence were popular amongst ordinary people but were unacceptable to those He spoke out against who, it must be said, had a hard task maintaining Jewish religious freedom in the face of the might of the occupying power of Rome.

Shortly before His death, Jesus went to Jerusalem to the Temple with thousands of people around Him shouting His name. It was a triumphal procession with people cutting down palms from the trees along the route to lay in front of Him. He rode on a donkey which, for a pious Jew, had a symbolism drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures (Zechariah 9:9) and was an effective way of proclaiming that He was the promised Messiah, as it had been prophesied that this was what the Messiah would do. Jesus knew what He was doing and knew that He had gone too far and that the Temple authorities had to take action. He had become a major cult figure and this threatened the stability of the relationship that the leading Jews had established with the Romans. Whatever Jesus Himself may have taught, He was now perceived as a dangerous rabble-rouser by those in authority, a threat to the established social order and therefore, potentially, a threat to the very existence of the Jewish Temple and the freedom Jews had to worship. If support for Jesus got out of hand, the Romans might crack down and all the hard-won, albeit limited, freedoms that the Jews possessed might be taken away. Their fears were not groundless. Less than forty years later, in AD 70, the Romans utterly destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, and there was to be no Jewish state until 1948.

Jesus had a last meal with His twelve closest friends in Jerusalem and performed an extraordinary action in washing the feet of His disciples. This would have been a task that a servant of a wealthy man might perform for an important visitor, yet Jesus, the acclaimed prophet and hero of the hour, did this to His disciples. It was an inversion of every normal expectation and challenged, once again, their perceptions of what it meant to be a leader amongst a people dedicated to the service of God.

The Gospels record that, during the last meal with His disciples, one of these friends, Judas, decided to betray Him. It may have been because Judas was disappointed in Jesus and had expected another sort of leader, perhaps one who would lead the people of Israel to military victory over the Romans, or it may have been self-interest. Judas betrayed Jesus to the Temple authorities in return for thirty pieces of silver. The authorities arrested Jesus and placed Him on trial. He was too much of a threat to civil order to be allowed to live, but the Temple leadership did not have the authority to put him to death; this punishment was reserved for the Romans. The High Priest and his followers, therefore, are recorded as taking Him to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, who, after a show trial in which he came to the conclusion that Jesus was innocent, sentenced Him to death. Pilate seems to have acted against his better instincts, but anyone who might purport to be a king would be unacceptable to the Roman Emperor and, therefore, sentencing an insignificant Jew to death probably seemed a politically expedient act. Even then, Pilate tried to let Jesus go free, as it was the custom to allow one prisoner to go free at the time of the main Jewish holiday. Pilate appealed to the crowd, asking them whether they would prefer him to free a robber and thief named Barabbas, or Jesus. Given the popularity of Jesus the week before, and the crowds that surrounded Him, Pilate might well have expected Jesus to be the automatic choice, but the High Priests had got the crowd on their side and their choice fell on Barabbas. Jesus was, therefore, taken off to be crucified.

Figure 3: The crucifixion was a degrading, agonising and humiliating punishment, but Christians see it as their key symbol, representing Jesus sacrificing Himself out of love for all human beings.

Crucifixion was an appalling punishment used routinely by the Romans. The condemned person had to carry their own cross and was then nailed to it (with nails through the wrists and ankles, although medieval art portrays the nails as going through the hands and feet). The cross was then lifted up and it could take up to twenty-four hours for a person to die. The pain was excruciating. Death usually came from asphyxiation, as the person could no longer breathe. In Jesus’ case, however, it was necessary that He should die within three hours as the Jewish holy day, the Sabbath, was about to start, so a soldier put a spear into His side to hasten His death. His mother, Mary, was at the foot of the cross as Jesus died, with one of His closest friends, John. After His death, Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross and He was placed in a tomb owned by a wealthy follower of His – Joseph of Arimathea.

There is another crucial claim associated with the crucifixion of Jesus which is made by Christians, and that is that human beings are in a state of sin, whether because of the sin of Adam and Eve, which affected the whole of humanity, or by individual sin. This sin distorts and undermines what it means to be a human being and deprives people of the chance to fulfil human potential. What is more, given that God is just, this sin requires punishment. Christians believe that God, through the person of Jesus, takes this sin on Himself; God suffers for every human being and, in so doing, releases people from the effects of sin. It is for this reason that Christians call Jesus both their Saviour, because He saves them from the effects of sin, and also their Redeemer, because He redeems people from their sin and atones for the errors both of every individual and also of humankind as a whole. Protestant Christians often refer to Jesus as their personal Saviour, and this is because they see Jesus suffering and dying on the cross out of love for every human being and taking on Himself the effects of their sin. Jesus makes the ultimate sacrifice out of love for His friends (as Christians feel themselves to be).

Figure 4: The statue of Christ the Redeemer towers over Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The outstretched arms represent the redemption of humankind through the crucifixion.

The symbol of Christianity became the cross, which was extraordinary as, for the Roman world, crucifixion was seen as the ultimate symbol of degradation. Yet for Christians, it is the triumph of good over evil, of forgiveness over sin, of love over hatred, of life over death. The cross is where the power of God’s love is shown most clearly.

Three days after being crucified, Jesus rose from the dead. This, of course, is one of the most important Christian claims and is central to Christian belief, so it needs to be dealt with in more detail in the chapter following the next one, which deals with Jesus’ teaching.

FOUR
The Message of Jesus

There is something artificial about separating the message of Jesus from the life of Jesus: the two are so closely related. For the people amongst whom Jesus lived, His life and actions were as important an expression of His message as His teachings. Given that Christians consider that Jesus is God’s Word made flesh, it follows that Jesus’ life and teaching are equally important. This was particularly the case as He often taught in parables. Parables are stories that are intended to be revelatory. They reveal insights and convey truths but they also reveal something about the people who interpret the parables. Parables seldom have a single meaning.

Jesus stands firmly in the Jewish tradition and many Jews today would be happy to see Jesus as a great rabbi or teacher who affirmed what was central in Judaism. However, there are also key differences. Two of the most important are:

1) Jesus did not see Himself as just another rabbi or teacher. He was clear that He was in a unique relationship with God, which Jews found very hard to accept. He referred to Himself as ‘the Son of Man’, but the Gospels indicate that this is a way of emphasising the human side of his nature without in any way undermining His unique status as the incarnate Word of God.

2) Jesus was unequivocal in believing in a life after death, and many of His Jewish contemporaries were far less clear about this. In fact, whether there was a life after death was a major point of dispute between two of the most influential groups of Jews – the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The idea of a life after death had come to prominence in Judaism reasonably late, probably around three centuries before Jesus. Some contemporary scholars see Jewish thinking as having been influenced by the deaths of tens of thousands of young men during what became known as the Maccabean rebellion, which was one of many attempts to achieve independence for Israel after the Babylonian captivity. Given the fidelity of God to God’s chosen people, it was felt that the suffering of so many young men could best be explained by a life after death. However, many Jews did not take this position; Judaism has always been a religion anchored firmly in this world rather than the next and concentration on post-mortem survival has always been somewhat peripheral. Jesus, however, proclaimed a life after death and, more than this, emphasised the fatherhood of God and God’s love for all human beings. The word ‘all’ here is significant, as it became clear to Jesus during His ministry that life after death and fellowship with God were open to all human beings and not just the Jews. This was a crucial new insight. It is not clear that Jesus always realised this; stories such as Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman (John 4:4–26), or His healing of the servant of a Roman centurion (Luke 7:1–10), seem to indicate that He came to a gradual realisation of the universality of God’s love. This was, however, an insight that was already present in some strands of Judaism. For instance, the prophet Jonah was forced to recognise that God was the God of the whole of creation, not just of the chosen people of Israel. Again, Christians will differ here; some will hold that Jesus had perfect knowledge throughout His ministry, so the idea that He ‘came to recognise’ something would be rejected.

On one occasion Jesus was approached with a very simple question, but one with profound consequences. Matthew and Luke’s Gospels record different occasions for the question. In the Gospel of Luke, it is asked by a lawyer (Luke 10:25) and in Matthew by a rich young ruler (Matthew 19:16). The question was universal: ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ The questioners were probably expecting a simple answer. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus turns the question round and asks the questioner what is written in the Jewish law. The lawyer’s reply is succinct:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’

(Luke 10:27)

Jesus agrees and tells the lawyer to go away and do this. The first part of the quotation is the Jewish Shema which every devout Jew would have recognised, and the second is the Great Commandment or Golden Rule. It seems so simple! The lawyer, being a lawyer, then asks, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan:

‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”

‘Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’

The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’

Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

(Luke 10:30–37)

It is worth noting that the expert on the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ He could not bring himself to utter the name of the Samaritans, so despised were they by devout Jews, and yet the Samaritan is the hero of Jesus’ story. The significance of this is profound. Firstly, Jesus is speaking to a devout Jew who would have regarded Samaritans as pariahs, so making a Samaritan the central figure in the story would be profoundly disturbing. Secondly, the characters who ignored the needs of the injured man were a priest and a Levite. The tribe of Levi was the tribe from whom the priestly class were normally drawn, so, effectively, Jesus is saying that two of the types of people who, in Jewish society, were regarded as most holy and righteous were, in fact, not so. It was the outsider, the Samaritan, who recognised the need of the injured Jewish person. Jesus’ message is clear: one’s neighbour is anyone who is in need, irrespective of race, skin colour or religious belief. This message was to be central as Christianity became the largest religion in the world. Christianity was not just another Jewish sect; it was a universal religion. Its roots lay in Judaism, but its message of the love of God and its demand to love other human beings was universal.

Jesus emphasised this continually. He frequently taught in stories or parables which are appealing but have multiple meanings and great depth – and can often be uncomfortable. In one of these stories Jesus spoke of the criteria that God would use to decide who would go to heaven and who would go to hell after death. The story challenged his audience but it maintained the same theme that runs through all his teaching:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was ill and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison and go to visit you?’

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was ill and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or ill or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

(Matthew 25:31–46)

This message was (and is) challenging because Jesus is saying that the people who will be welcomed into God’s kingdom are the people who visit those in prison or those who are sick, the people who feed the hungry or give water to the thirsty; and the people who are destined for hell are those who fail to do this. What is more, when someone does these positive things to any other human being it is as though they are being done to Jesus Himself, and when someone in need is ignored, it is Jesus who is ignored. This again emphasises the Christian claim that God is intimately involved in the world and that love of any other human being is directly related to love of God.

The message of the universal love of God was not easy for the early Christians to accept and, after Jesus’ death, there were many of his original followers who still wanted to see Christianity as merely the development of orthodox Judaism. They considered, therefore, that following Jesus meant becoming a Jew and taking on all the rigorous food laws and religious laws that the people of Israel considered normal. It also meant that males had to be circumcised. This position would have restricted the growth of early Christianity as it would, effectively, have become a Jewish sect. It took divine intervention and the activity of one of the most significant of the apostles – St Paul – to demonstrate that these laws were not necessary.

Figure 1: Statue of the Archangel Michael defeating the devil (Coventry Cathedral). Christians hold that it is the power of love that can defeat the forces of evil and that this love was shown most clearly in Jesus’ life, teaching and death.

So the first and most important command which Jesus affirmed was the absolute centrality of the love of God. Secondly came unconditional love of neighbour. The first command every Jew would recognise and accept, but Jesus taught that the second should be taken literally: that is, it did not apply to Jews alone. It also questioned whether those who were thought to be holy were really so.

For Jesus, the love of God for every human being was essential. God was the Father of all human beings and should be addressed in the intimate way that a child addresses a father. God was a God of love, wanting above all what was best for individual human beings. God would always welcome back those who failed, those who did wrong. Jesus told many parables to illustrate this, including the parables of the Prodigal Son, the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep. For Jesus, God almost cared more for those who were lost than those who were faithful. The person who was a failure and marginalised had more need of God than the person who was always faithful.

It is an issue of trust. Christian teaching is that the Christian should trust their whole life to God and should be willing to accept and believe in God’s love and forgiveness. God’s love is unconditional; it does not come as a result of a person being virtuous or good. God’s love is there, whatever happens, like a parent who will always love a child, no matter what the child does, and simply wants the child to return. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus tells the story of a rich man who had two sons, one of whom was obedient, stayed at home and worked hard. The other, however, demanded from the father that the eventual inheritance he could expect should be given to him. He then left home and spent all his father’s money on a dissolute life. He ended up destitute and sleeping among the animals. In despair, he decided to go back to his father, recognising that it would be better to be one of his father’s lowest servants than to go on living as he had been doing. When he returned, the father ran to greet him, put on him the choicest clothes and laid on a great feast for him. This was not because he had done anything good – he had not; but simply because he had returned home. The other son resented this because he had spent all his life being loyal and working hard, yet his father had never laid on a similar feast for him. Jesus explained that God loves those who have failed, those who have ignored God and yet come back, almost more than those who never need forgiveness. It is not, however, easy to accept being loved unconditionally and many reject God because they simply cannot accept that God loves them as they are. Trust in this love is, therefore, a central element of Christian belief.

Figure 2: Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son (c. 1669) shows the father welcoming back his penitent son. One of the hands of the father is male, the other female. The poverty of the returning son is shown in his clothes and also in him only having one shoe. Jesus referred to God as Abba (Mark 14:36) – a very intimate term similar to ‘Daddy’ today. God is seen as the Father of all who wants nothing more than to welcome people back, however far they may have strayed in terms of selfishness and lovelessness.

What is more, Jesus taught that Christians should refuse to judge others. Only God could truly see into the heart of another human being. Only God could judge justly. If any Christian judged others, then he or she would be judged harshly by God. If Christians forgave others, they would be forgiven by God. One man asked Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother – seven times? Jesus said, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times’ (Matthew 18:22). In other words, Christians should act towards each other as God acted towards them and should be willing to forgive again and again – and yet again.

Jesus was absolutely clear that the way Christians behaved towards other human beings would determine the way God behaved towards them. God would judge a person by the innermost nature of their heart and not by appearances. Jesus therefore condemned those who would make a display of their religious observances. If people were fasting, He said that they should disguise the fact; if people gave to charity, they should do so anonymously. If the real motive for doing good was in order to be recognised by other people, then the good actions were actually just self-centred (Matthew 6:1–4). Jesus said that people should do acts of kindness without others knowing; God sees into the hearts of everyone and will reward those who do good and punish those who do evil. Jesus was clear that God knows everything: not even a sparrow dies without God knowing about it. Humans are worth more than many sparrows and all human actions are seen by God and judged accordingly (Matthew 10:29–30).

Jesus was, however, clear that God’s love was a demanding love. God had to be placed at the centre of a person’s life and the love of God had to be shown in action. There was no room for complacency, and the idea of trusting in the love of God and ignoring the need for practical action runs contrary to Jesus’ message. Jesus specifically warned of a rich man who decided to take life easy and enjoy his wealth: that very night his soul ‘was demanded from him’ (Luke 12:16–21). In other words he died and had to face God and account for his life. Anyone who ignores those in need, or the demand for practical action to relieve suffering, effectively ignores God. Words without action are empty.

The one category of people that Jesus did condemn was those who deliberately ignored God or pretended to be devoting their lives to God when they were not. He utterly condemned the priests and religious leaders who were so proud of their own reputation as holy and good people but, inside, were self-centred and corrupt. His language about these people was anything but temperate (Matthew 12:34–37). The one incident that the Gospels record when Jesus seemed to have lost His temper was when He went into the Temple in Jerusalem and found it filled with merchants selling things and people who changed money. He was angry that they had turned what should have been a house of prayer to God into, as He termed it, a den of robbers. He took out a whip and physically attacked the merchants. His anger was greater because He is recorded as calling the Temple ‘my Father’s house’ (John 2:13–17) referring, of course, to the Christian claim that Jesus was the Son of God and not the son of any human father. Instead of a place of holiness and devotion to God, the Temple had become something very different. The extent, therefore, to which Jesus would have been seen as a scandalous and uncomfortable figure by those with money and power is hard to over-emphasise.

For Jesus, prayer should be at the centre of a person’s life. Prayer was like talking to a close friend and Christians should bring all their concerns to God. His disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, and the Gospels record what has become the most famous prayer for Christians, called ‘The Lord’s Prayer’:

Our Father in heaven,