Why ‘just Jesus’?
It started with a question…
I became a Christian in my mid thirties. Sometime between my son being born, in ‘94, and my daughter in ‘98 I went from being an Atheist to a church going Christian. But this was not an easy process. One of my first questions was ‘What does Jesus say about Homosexuality?’. I asked my new Christian friends but they didn’t know (The answer is, of course, nothing at all) so I decided to read through the Gospels. The Gospels are the four books of the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) that tell the story of Jesus. This seems like a huge undertaking but, in my Bible, these four ‘books’ are just 161 pages long. In reading them I began to realise who Jesus really was. I also began, gradually, to realise that Jesus is quite badly misrepresented in the church I attended.
How can this be?
Well, for one thing, not much teaching in Church is based on the Gospels. Most of the New Testament teaching in church is from the Epistles. These are a collection of letters, mostly written by Paul, to early churches. They contain a lot of theology, a lot of advice and quite a few ‘rules’. Add to that a need to look at the Old Testament and there isn’t much time left for Jesus.
And, when passages from the Gospels are used in Church or Bible study groups, we look at the same passages repeatedly and other parts of the Gospels are avoided. Could it be that there are some things about Jesus the modern church does not want to look at too closely? We will come to these in the next section but, by editing what the congregations look at, churches present a very limited version of Jesus.
So, who is Jesus?
The short answer is that Jesus is the Son of God. But the relationship is a bit closer than that. For a short time, in the 1st Century, in the territory which is now Israel and Palestine, God walked around among ordinary people. In a sense he was, himself, an ordinary person - the son of a carpenter. Yet, if we are to read the Gospels as a real story (and I think we must), he was quite extraordinary. The following is what I have learned from reading the Gospels.
Jesus was deeply spiritual. He enabled good spiritual forces - God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit to act in the world. There is extraordinary power in these forces. We, as ordinary human beings, have the ability to bring these forces into the world to heal and create change in many different ways. Jesus makes this possible.
Jesus fought against bad spiritual forces. Early on in the Gospels Jesus battles with the Devil who presents him with various temptations. There are also bad spiritual forces which inhabit individual people, called Demons. In the Gospels we see these causing all sorts of problems, both for the people who are possessed by demons and those around them. Jesus and his friends cast these demons out and restore these people to normal life. This part of Jesus’ work is not talked about at all in the churches I have been part of.
Jesus was a challenger of rules and authority. The Jewish society into which he was born started with a great many rules (There are 613 ‘laws’ in the first five books of the Bible) and the religious teachers of the day were constantly coming up with variations and additions to these rules. The burden upon ordinary people was extreme. Jesus continually challenges and criticises the religious teachers of his day. Although these passages cannot be avoided altogether in church teaching I’ve never been told to be like Jesus and more challenging to authority!
Jesus was a sacrifice. In a very real sense, he caused his own death. He did this to free us so we could embrace the life he shows us.
Jesus is alive. This is quite hard to grasp for non-christians. As part of the ‘Just Jesus’ story we will look at this.
What are the next steps?
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