This is the second post in a short series on Christianity. To view the previous post, click here.
Shortly before Jesus died, he gathered some of his disciples together for an important meeting. He told them that despite the few years they had spent together, there were many things he wished to share with them but couldn’t because they would be unable to bear his words. He then went on to reassure them, explaining that a new comforter (the Holy Spirit) would be sent to continue teaching them after his death (John 16).
Even for a book as full of oddities as the Bible, this seems strange. As a young man, I wondered what this secret message could have been. What words, what knowledge could be so revealing, so powerful and full of mystery that a person would be unable to bear them? What did it even mean to be unable to bear words?
Well, it has now been roughly 2000 years since that meeting and there is good news: We no longer have to guess what Jesus was unable to share, or the reasons – we know. No, I'm not going to launch into a silly, pseudo-scholarly attempt to guess at the very words Jesus chose not to say that day; but believe it or not, the message itself is no longer a mystery – or shouldn't be.
As most of us know, Jesus came bearing a new message of salvation (we’ll look at what that message actually was in another post). During the short years of his ministry, he did his best to impart this new message to a group of men (the disciples), who were instructed to continue preaching it even after his own death (Mark 16). To a certain degree, that's what happened.
The problem was that the Jewish culture, even then, was a product of thousands of years of conditioning. The many traditions, Laws of Moses, and the words of the ancient prophets were so deeply ingrained within them that any new message, anything that did not agree with the traditions that had been taught among them for generations, was grounds for a fight.
Fight, they did.
As a result, this new message of salvation had to be divided into two parts. Jesus knew that to the Jewish people of the day, learning about grace and salvation was not only a matter acquiring new knowledge, but also about abandoning long-held, outmoded beliefs and traditions. Killing people for working on the Sabbath (Exodus 31:15), for example, was something Jesus saw as a good candidate for reconsideration (Matthew 12). Of course, there were other good candidates as well. Things like, say, not killing people for adultery (Leviticus 20:10), or cursing their parents (Exodus 21:17), or using the Lord’s name in vain (Leviticus 24:16), or otherwise showing signs of being human. But, I digress.
These radical new notions, brought by this blasphemous man called Jesus, were a challenge to a culture that had excused themselves from the weight of these injustices for hundreds of years through the miracles of religion. If a man is put to death for breaking the laws of the prophets, that was that. No one had to feel bad (or think at all) about killing someone if a law that everyone plainly accepted said to do it. Sadly - more than sad, really - this kind of thinking is still a common disease among many cultures around the globe today. Were it not for the gravity of these ridiculous tenets, they would almost be comical.
Still, we must understand that these ideas were not considered controversial or blasphemous based on whether they were good or bad. That had little to do with it. In fact, the merits of salvation and grace (think, tolerance) weren't the problem. The question wasn’t whether they were morally good or bad, but whether they aligned with the law. No one presumed to question whether the law was right - those laws were (sadly) thought to be the very words of God. Morality was not the issue; adherence to the Law was everything. Period. Get caught working on the Sabbath and you were dead. No one would stand up to defend you, since doing so would be, in itself, an act against the words of God.
So, we see that Jesus was incredibly bold when he came along and arrogantly proclaimed that the emperor was wearing no clothes. Intermixed within the message of Salvation was the implication that the ancient Hebrews had had it wrong. People could not be reconciled to God by sacrificing animals, or vainly attempting to abide by harsh, unyielding and unforgiving strictures that were admittedly impossible to keep (Ezekiel 20:25). Jesus said that treating others as you would wish to be treated was the summation of the laws and the prophets; and that he didn’t come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it - to end it. His message was a cool breeze of reason. Jesus knew that the laws had to go, and he was willing to die for the cause.
Things didn’t end well for him. Tell a powerful and high ranking official that the basis of his authority should be dissolved, and the only thing left to do is verify that he has your correct name and address so he can send yearly birthday cards to you. Indeed, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, whose very stations of authority were built upon the ancient Hebrew laws, were not on the short list to become early adopters of Salvation by grace. Jesus was declared a blasphemer deserving of death, and eventually received it.
What is just as interesting about the horribly difficult task that Jesus and his disciples undertook, is the blatant hypocrisy they encountered among those who opposed them. These people saw their own opposition to Jesus as the moral high-ground. They were defending the Law and the very Jewish ways of life. Yet, when the Apostle Paul returned to Jerusalem from his tour de force of taking the Gospel message to the Gentiles some years after Jesus’ death, it wasn’t the breaking of any particular law that almost got him strung up; it was his claim that not only was Salvation true, but that it had now been extended to the Gentiles.
Whew! Things were clearly out of control and getting worse. Jesus, that trouble maker, was finally put down, and now other rouges and their free-thinking followers were continuing the outrage. They were claiming that others (non-Jews) could become followers of the God of Israel just like them.
This proved to be too much. Paul had to run for his life (again).
These same people who were incensed at Paul's message seemed willing to overlook the detail that according to the very same laws and texts that they claimed to revere so deeply, God had reached out to other peoples many times before. Ruth had not been a Jew. Nebuchadnezzar was not a Jew, but had a relationship with God (despite the fact that most modern-day Evangelicals try to play it down). Jonah was sent to save the Assyrian empire, who were clearly not Jews.
What gives? If the God of the prophets had reached out to the Assyrians, why couldn’t he reach out to the Gentiles? The reason was simple. By that time, the words of the prophets had had more than ample time to harden into concrete, beyond the possibility of change or question. Nothing new, on the other hand, could be tolerated. Who was this Jesus character, or this John the Baptist, or Saul who now called himself, what, Paul? Who could be crazy enough to listen to any of them?
In that day, not many.
So, what was it that Jesus couldn’t tell his disciples that day? Well, here's part of it, and more will follow.
Jesus knew that to fully embrace Salvation, any person must be willing to abandon everything. Today, we sometimes can’t get past thinking of these kinds of things in monetary terms, but that’s not it at all. Jesus was trying to say, you’re gonna have to learn a new way of thinking. You have to know that morality is fluid - but not entirely subjective. It is the guiding imperative of creatures of conscience, not the writings of men centuries dead who sacrificed animals to their God before going into battle (I Samuel 13:9-12). Who stupidly wrote words like, “do not suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18),” not knowing, and probably incapable of caring, that those unforgivable words would, centuries later, cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent women during the years of the Church’s inquisitions. That a man is far too valuable to put to death because he makes a mistake, even if we give in to the notion that working on the Sabbath is sin.
To view the next post in this discussion, click here.
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