As I promised you in the last letter, We are going to look at the figure of Jesus and see how this ties in with what was believed and expected within Judaism.

Sometimes people ask why Jesus wasn’t more straightforward in his pronouncements and come out and state plainly that there is the Trinity and he is the second person of the Trinity. This may seem obvious to us, but this statement would have been met with puzzlement. A certain development, a certain preparation of the hearers had to take place and it was with time that the idea of God as Trinity, and Jesus as divine, came to be the accepted position within Christianity.

Jesus goes further than simply openly stating that he is God because if he did this, he would have totally negated his humanity and we are taught by our faith that he is perfect man and perfect God. He carries out actions and when we analyze his actions, particularly in light of what Judaism saw as God’s interactions with the world, we can draw our own conclusions as to who Jesus is. And this is what he wanted the Jews to see as well.

There was a pervasive feeling within Judaism as expressed through prophets saw as Zechariah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and others that one day Yahweh was going to come to His people and He would end the Israel’s exile which in Jesus’ time was brought on by Rome’s control of Israel. Although the Israelites lived in Israel and Jerusalem, they still felt ‘exiled’ in that they were in no position to make decisions or to influence the flow of events. Everything was tightly controlled by Rome.

There was also an expectation that a proper Temple will be built, not the disappointing structure put up by Herod. There were those within the Jewish community who would harken back to the glory of the Temple built by Solomon and there was an expectation that somehow, this Temple of Herod’s, was going to be replaced by a more fitting structure.

Jesus is going around Israel and giving hints as to who he is and what events are about to transpire but most of the hearers, including the apostles, had no idea of what was going on and what the significance was of actions that Jesus was enacting. And we come to Jesus returning for his final visit to Jerusalem. The disciples are well aware that Jesus is heading for mortal danger in Jerusalem because the Jewish leaders were out to arrest him and kill him.

Some of the stories that Jesus shares with his apostles on his trip to Jerusalem are very telling but they were still misinterpreting them. Let’s take a look at a few of them and see how even we tend to miss the central significance of what is going on.

Notice that within these stories he talks about a king going away and returning. He talks about a lord going away and leaving talents with his servants and coming back. And we tend to interpret these stories as speaking solely about the Second Coming.

In Zechariah we read a very striking prophecy which seems to have been central in Jesus’ understanding of his vocation. Zechariah writes: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Proclaim it aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King comes to you; He is righteous and saving; He is gentle and mounted upon a donkey, even a foal…”.

“The Lord God Almighty shall visit His flock…”. “And I will say to him, ‘What are these wounds in the middle of your hands? And he will say: ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my beloved’.

Underneath it all, Jesus was saying through his actions and parables that indeed Yahweh was coming back to be amongst His people and to free them from their exile. The Jews were expecting freedom from Roman oppression but Jesus came to realize that the exile that he was freeing the people from was the exile that all of us suffer from. He had come to free them and us from our sins and death because it was sin and death that exiled mankind from God.

Interestingly, Jesus’ action take place around the time of the Passover and this seems a little strange if the main thrust of his action was for the remission of sins. Wouldn’t the Day of Atonement have been a more appropriate time for this? There was something deeper and more encompassing that was going on here. Yes, there was to be remission for sins but something even of greater importance was being transacted.

We sometimes think that these parables and actions of Christ are referring to the Second Coming of Christ. The disciples were not up to even that, they could not understand this.

What Christ is saying through his parables could have been very meaningful for those who could perceive. He was saying something that Jews of that time could understand and grasp in light of scriptures. The king was returning and the king that he was referring to, and that the Jews understood, was God coming back to be with His people. God was going to again inhabit the ‘Temple’ but not the Temple that was about to be destroyed by the Romans but the Temple that was Christ.

Jesus’ messianic calling included tasks which according to the scriptures could only be carried out by Yahweh himself – not his angels or some other representatives, but by the very king of creation. Christ came to realize that he was to embody Yahweh in Israel. The return of the King had commenced and it was to end in a tragic death, as Jesus came to see clearly the implications of what the powers that be had in store for him.

This was an excruciating time for Jesus because he, being fully human, was not totally aware of where everything was heading or even if he were going to be successful. Jesus was literally staking his life on the fact that he was embodying God in His return to Israel. He did not merely state this but he performed actions which spoke of his deep beliefs. And what made it even more difficult for him was that through it all, his disciples were oblivious as to what was really going on.

This was a frightening time for him because the temptation that he was wrong lurked within him. Jesus acted and believed that he was to embody the actions of God on His return to Jerusalem – and there it was prophesied in scriptures. But even then, it was hard for the disciples to grasp what was going on. Within an extremely short period of time after his death, in the light of his Resurrection, his disciples came to see him as God incarnated. It was in the light of the Resurrection that they came to grasp and understand the full import of what Jesus taught and what his actions meant.

Already in the Gospel of John we read that no one has seen God. It is only in the person of Christ that we are enabled to say something concrete and true about God. “No one has seen God at any time, but the only begotten Son, who lives in the bosom of the Father, he has made Him known. The Greek passage literally says: He has provided an exegesis of him, he has shown us who God really is.”

When the claim is made that Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity this is not some idle claim or something with no underlying basis underneath it. It is part and parcel of the beliefs of the Jewish prophets, beliefs that had been nourished and commented on for over fifteen hundred years. We may think that the idea of Jesus’ divinity was totally opposed to anything within Judaism, but we would be wrong. There are many hints of this within the Old Testament highlighting the fact that God and only God, would carry out for His people. God was to visit Israel but it was Jesus who understood that this was his task.

This was all part of the tradition of Judaism and that is why the early church was predominantly Jewish in its composition. So the teachings of Christianity were not so opposed Judaism – they simply had to be seen from a different perspective. The important point here is that no matter how striking the claims for Jesus are, they are still consonant with the prophetic statements within the Old Testament.

We can detect anguish and an inner struggle within Jesus’ compounded by the obtuseness of the disciples. But there was an affirmation coming that Jesus was right in his reading of the events that overtook him. And this affirmation confirmed him in the rightness of his path and it also opened the eyes of the disciples so that they could now truly see what scriptures were talking about. The event that accomplished this was the Resurrection and in the next letter we are going to look at it.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas