I am glad to hear that you enjoyed the overview I presented in the last letter. I hope it has become clearer for you how there is a continuity in the Bible and it is not just some hodge-podge collection of writings. There is an amazing continuity with a beginning and a final ending.

When we had left off last time, we were at the stage of seeing a consideration of the Messiah but, as we will see, even here there was a lot of necessary correction what the term Messiah means but I am just proceeding a little bit too rapidly. The concept of the Messiah started to acquire the trappings of a national leader who would overthrow the oppressors of Israel and lead Israel into freedom from those who controlled Israel. This was, more or less, the state of affairs when Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Militaristic sentiments were rife; rebellion was in the air.

Jesus started his mission with his baptism by John the Baptist and started to preach and slowly taught a new way of seeing the role of the Messiah. And here we come to a question that you have asked in the past. Was Jesus aware that he was divine? The baptism by John triggered something in Jesus that made him aware that he was more than just human, that there was a destiny awaiting him which was truly revolutionary. Now, if we mean by aware in the sense that he knew he was God in an unambiguous, objective manner, then his suffering and his interactions with the world become of questionable value. In this case we would not be able to relate to him because what he lived through was colored and distorted, from the human standpoint, by his objective realization of his divinity. You see, the matter is not so simple, not so black and white and this is reflected in the dogmatic teaching that Jesus was fully divine and fully human without one part influencing or blending or merging into the other. So, the ambiguity and pain faced by Christ was genuine and real in the sense that it was what we as humans would experience and this makes him truly human, in fact even more so than we.

The way that Jesus came to realize his vocation and what awaited him was by immersing himself in prayer and in the Bible, in the prophecies to see what they really said about the Messiah. And one of the major factors in Jesus’ realization of his role occurs immediately after his baptism. Often we read about the temptation in the desert as some mythological, fictitious account. After all we live in an age that does not believe in these things, although we believe in things even more incredulous. However, one way that we could look at the temptations is the realization that the world is a battleground filled with strife as we compete for limited resources with each other. What the temptations do for Jesus is focus on whom we – all of us – are truly struggling with. We should not be out to judge and condemn others, because in a deep sense they are pawns of forces of which they are not even aware. Our enemy is not our neighbor, but Satan, the one who accuses, the one who is out to destroy the good creation by portraying it as evil and bad. The one who uses death as his ultimate and widespread weapon. And it is this realization and conviction that now colors Jesus’ teachings to love even our enemies.

Jesus begins his ministry and his teaching is accompanied by teaching and by acted parables and by miracles. When we think of the New Testament, what comes to mind is miracles and much ink has been spilt as to whether they occurred or not. The sense that comes through very clearly and strongly in the Gospels is that miracles were indeed performed by Jesus, true miracles in the sense that no matter how hard we try to explain them away, there is always a residual mysteriousness about them. We think of miracles as unusual occurrences which call for wonder. But, in fact, what comes through, especially in the Gospel of John is that they are signs. They are intended to tell us something important about all of creation and not just the specific situation in which they occur.

So what is it they tell us? Well the first thing they tell us is something we know already – there is something dreadfully wrong in the cosmos because our bodies fail and we become ill with all kinds of horrible illnesses, and in fact the whole universe is ill and is running down. Jesus’s actions tell us that this is not the way the cosmos was supposed to be. It was supposed to be a hospitable and receptive environment for humans and others but something disastrous happened and now the cosmos has become a threatening place of death and decomposition. Even physical laws, through the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, indicate there is no permanency in the universe. (What entropy tells us is that the universe is running down as chaos increases. Another way to state this is to say that no machine has been invented nor will be invented, which is one hundred percent efficient. There is always waste involved in every process and in a sense, this enables us to postulate what is called time’s arrow.)

But these miracles also point to something else, something which is profound and is something that is tied into the very basis of creation, and this is something we will turn to later because it takes a central role in the whole story of man and of the whole universe.

Jesus’ ability to perform miracles was also an acknowledgement and affirmation of who he is. Remember, as we saw above, Jesus was exploring his vocation and his ability to heal the rift in human lives through miracles of healing for example, and this was an acknowledgement of what his role is. Miracles were not just some spectacular exhibition of power and control, but spoke of the deep healing that was and is needed by creation and this was to come through the person of Christ.

You have voiced a comment that many make. The need for miracles indicates that God somehow is incompetent in that He now has to intervene and correct the creation that He made. And, secondly, there is something inherently unfair about miracles in that they touch only a limited number of people.

Both of these objections arise from a certain assumption and once we identify this assumption we will see an answer.

The first, and very important point is that God is totally absent from his creation and therefore, when miracles occur, He somehow intrudes, almost artificially, into the operations of nature’s laws.

The second point that needs to be made is that creation is neither complete nor perfect. Some have said that the fall signifies a descent from perfection. But others, like Irenaeus, claim that creation was immature from the very beginning and needs to grow to perfection. The fall is more than a moral failure by Adam and Eve; it attests to a failure on the part of Adam and Eve, as representatives of humanity, to fulfill their destiny. But, more about this later. So, the argument that miracles somehow attest God’s failing are really groundless, because, as we shall see, creation is a work in progress.

Thirdly, yes, God would like everyone to be free of disease and corruption. This is a goal and it will be attained, but it will take time and meanwhile, individual miracles are given to us as signposts as to how God would like all of creation, the whole cosmos to be. Sometimes the question is posed: why do you pray for healing when your prayers are so often not answered? And of course the answer is that we pray even when our prayers seem to be unanswered because it is also our way of asserting that the world is not as it should be. In our prayers, we enter a world that God wants, where disease and death and decay are strangers. It is our way of reminding ourselves of the possibility of a perfect world.

So, through miracles, and through prayer, and through the prayerful study of Scriptures, Jesus starts to see more clearly what his vocation is to be. But there is something else that looms in all of this. A shadow comes over Jesus because he starts to realize that somehow his vocation includes his dying. He starts to inform his disciples about this, but they cannot seem to grasp this. They are puzzled and start to protect him from harm, from going to Jerusalem.

Jesus comes to see that somehow his death is necessary and not to be avoided because it is through suffering and his death that his vocation is to be completed and God’s original plan is to be put back on track.

But more about this in the next letter.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas