Jesus Through Christian Eyes
by Markus Bockmuehl
Markus Bockmuehl is Reader in New Testament Studies at Cambridge University, and editor of
The Cambridge Companion to Jesus.It's not often that we meet a person who is so transparent, so secure that his words and actions speak to the very core of our being. A person of such wisdom and simplicity that he seems to bring the presence of God into every encounter. Jesus of Nazareth clearly struck people in that way. Picture in your mind's eye a man in his early 30s, who has lived all his life in an Eastern backwater of the Roman Empire. He has abandoned his professional life as a builder and now wanders mainly around a few square miles of the countryside near Lake Tiberias. He visits towns and farms and villages, attracting thousands wherever he goes. Although deeply devout, he has no time for religious pomp, and ruffles establishment feathers at every turn. He amazes people by his unique ability to heal and provide for those who come to him, but he seems to have no ambition for social or political reform. He clearly disappoints some followers by talking instead about a kingdom of God that is already breaking into our world - but also still in the future. He comforts and offends in equal measure. He is authentic in a way that exposes any trace of hypocrisy or self-importance. And yet, in every place people crowd around - to hear him and touch him, to meet an electrifying man and a message that buzzes with life.
In these encounters with the crowds and the critics, Jesus has a habit of cutting through the nonsense and putting his finger on what really matters. He is a Jew speaking to fellow Jews. He tells stories from daily life, and his teaching connects with people where they really are - sweating it out as farmers in the steamy heat of lower Galilee, growing meagre crops on stony ground. Or struggling under the burden of mental illness, imprisoned in the loneliness of their own obsessions. But Jesus also takes faith to be a matter of robust disputes about truth and tradition, and about what's important to God: 'Listen!' he says to his critics. 'What really matters is not dotting the religious I's and crossing the T's, but what comes out of the human heart. Whether it's addiction to sex, or money, or power; whether it's deceit or gossip or self-indulgence - that's what really pollutes a person.'
Over the last few weeks of this series, we have heard some fascinating profiles of Jesus from the perspective of five different religions. The speakers have made no attempt to hide their reservations about the Christian view of Jesus. But more than these real differences, what has grabbed my attention as a Christian above all is the genuine sense of appreciation for Jesus himself among people of good will. For people of different faiths, the gospels paint a picture of Jesus that leaps off the page. He has emerged in these broadcasts as a man of wisdom and guts and generosity, welcoming people regardless of whether they were morally or religiously up to the mark. Jesus believed and practiced the message that God ladles out his love for his people by the bucketful. Jesus brought the fullness of God's love into lives that were crushed with disease and discouragement. And he called people to live a life of courage and adventure, choosing for themselves the path of truth rather than deceit, of forgiveness rather than hatred, of generosity rather than greed, of expectancy and faith rather than despair and cynicism.
This element of unexpected agreement about Jesus points to another important insight, which is the global significance of Jesus. Jesus cannot be contained in Western Christianity; and the story of Jesus in history and faith must never again be mistaken for a history of the west. Jesus himself was an Asian, who became an infant refugee in Africa. And after a millennium of western Christendom, today his followers are once again most numerous in those continents. What's more, Jesus cannot and must not be made accessible only to Christians. As the Hindu and Muslim contributors to this series rightly insisted, Christians do not 'own' Jesus as their private preserve. The global attractiveness of the man Jesus and his message is something to which we would do well to pay much more attention.
More than two thousand years have come and gone, but the world still doesn't seem to be finished with Jesus of Nazareth. That first-century Jew from Galilee is without doubt the most famous and influential person who ever walked the face of the earth. His influence may at present be declining in some parts of Europe and North America; it is not the first time this has happened, and may not be the last. But the fact is that the followers of Jesus are today more widespread and more numerous, and make up a greater part of the world's population, than at any time in history. Two billion people identify themselves as Christians. Then there are well over a billion Muslims who revere Jesus as a prophet of God. Unnumbered others also know and respect his memory as a wise and holy man.
At the same time, Christian faith in Jesus has always seen him as more than a saint or sage of universal appeal. Some biblical scholars have tried to reduce him to a wise philosopher with a message of inclusion for those who are marginalised by the social and religious elites. If that's all he was, Jesus of Nazareth could indeed become an inoffensive, timeless sage. No doubt that would make our Christian dialogue with other faiths a lot easier.
But we have to ask ourselves why none of the disciples who personally knew Jesus were content to construe him simply as either a 'sage on a stage' or a 'guide on the side'. The first reason was made pretty clear by Clive Lawton, the Jewish contributor to this series. Jesus came to a very sticky end. He was arrested and executed on a Roman cross, as ancient and modern historians agree. Israel and the world remained unredeemed. But this wasn't supposed to happen to the Messiah! Thomas and other disciples understood that only too well. Ever since the first century, the crucifixion of Jesus has been a major obstacle for Christian claims that he was somehow uniquely favoured by God, whether as a prophet, Messiah, or Son of God. Some ancient Christian sects, in fact, eventually found the scandal of the crucifixion so great that they claimed it never happened; and a similar belief later found its way into mainstream Islamic views of Jesus. But come to think of it, even that rather unlikely denial suggests agreement about the man's importance. After all, wouldn't it be easier just to disown him altogether?
At the end of the day, of course, it is not possible to take the New Testament seriously and come away thinking that the first disciples regarded Jesus as someone rather like Gandhi - a holy man or prophet. Christians have always affirmed that the meaning of Jesus depends crucially on certain events that happened after his death. Some of his followers personally saw him executed on a Roman cross and buried in a Jewish tomb. What is more, to their surprise and ours, they found that same tomb empty when they came to pay their respects two days later. And then, in some sense that was both inexplicable and yet unmistakable, they claimed that many of them - several hundred, in fact - encountered Jesus alive in the days and weeks that followed. The conviction that God raised Jesus from the dead is already a long-established consensus position even in the earliest surviving sources - so much so that it was never questioned by any first-century Christian known to us. And it is the cross and resurrection of Jesus on which the Christian view of him depends to this day.
For all the excited confusion of the gospel narratives, even sceptics agree that whatever happened on that first Easter Sunday must form an integral part of any properly historical account of Jesus of Nazareth. And it is precisely the excitement and narrative mayhem of these reports, even a generation after the events, which testifies eloquently to their vigorous consensus that 'God raised Jesus from the dead'. In fact, the disciples' witness to the resurrection became the decisive reason why we know anything about Jesus at all. That conviction turns out to be deeply rooted in the biblical hope for the redemption and resurrection of God's people, while affirming a wonderful down payment of that hope here and now. Reading the biblical psalms and prophets, Christians discovered that the Messiah's innocent suffering and divine vindication was part of the biblical story from start to finish - and there is reason to think that Jesus himself had thought so too.
The gospels don't attempt to mount some sort of watertight 'proof' of the resurrection. But the early Christians evidently did find themselves confronted with a series of diversely experienced encounters that could only be made sense of in theological terms, as something hugely important, something totally unprecedented. They didn't come to this conclusion because the case was rationally unassailable or psychologically comfortable. To apostles like Paul and James it clearly wasn't! Nor was Jesus simply encountered in visions or some other familiar religious experience. No, the accounts show the risen Jesus appearing in almost every case to demoralised betrayers and defiant sceptics. It's people like these that he turned into empowered witnesses. Here was something that surpassed their existing categories, and invited them to deepen and renew their faith in the God of Israel.
It's only on this level that we can begin to come to grips with the apostles' talk of 'resurrection'. If God had really raised Jesus from the dead, then maybe he was after all the promised Messiah, the descendant of David who in the Hebrew Psalms was called God's Son whom he would exalt to his right hand.
And it is on the integrity of those first Jewish witnesses to the resurrection that Christians of all races and cultures base their faith in Jesus. Christians believe that he really was God's Messiah, who first came to the land of Israel those many years ago and humbly gave his life for God's people. At the same time we believe that he is now present through God's Spirit; and that he will come again in God's power to fill the earth with justice and peace, and to wipe every tear from human eyes.
Jesus of Nazareth bound his own fate specifically to that of the people of Israel - and, reluctantly but deliberately, to the troubled city of Jerusalem in particular. Twenty centuries later, that same city is once again full of life - but also bleeding with ancient hates and fears. Sacred to Judaism, to Christianity and to Islam, it is sadly symbolic of our world - a global village and a tribal killing field, a place in which the rhetoric of a partisan justice is forever threatening to suffocate the truth of mercy.
Whether for Christians or for Jews, for Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs, the global meaning of Jesus will remain incomprehensible apart from his first-century particularity. That migrant Jew from Nazareth who walked the troubled Palestinian hills two thousand years ago, who wept for Jerusalem, and who bound his fate to that city and the people of God. The Jewishness of Jesus is the clear witness of the gospels, as Clive Lawton so eloquently showed at the beginning of our series. In our era of globalisation, Christians too must face once again the very Jewish particularity of the one in whom we believe, while also seeing him open his arms wide on the cross to embrace people of all creeds and countries.
As the events of September 11th demonstrated so tragically, we certainly have a lot of lost ground to make up in this department. Less than two months ago, Pope John Paul II invited leading representatives of the world's religions to the Italian city of Assisi for an international day of prayer for peace in the world. "We must show the world", he said, "that the genuine impulse to prayer does not lead to opposition and still less to disdain of others, but rather to constructive dialogue, a dialogue in which each one, without relativism or syncretism of any kind, becomes more deeply aware of the duty to bear witness and to proclaim."
At this time of Lent and Easter, Christians remember the innocent death of Jesus and his resurrection and vindication as God's messiah and Son. Easter marks the place in which God's world has gained a foothold in this world of violence and corruption. He has planted here in our midst the flag of redemption. God's heaven is no longer just a metaphor of earthly bliss, a kind of pleasant postscript to mortality. Instead, Easter morning turns things upside down, claiming creation renewed as a metaphor of heaven. Here mortal life can become the threshold of paradise. This all-welcoming significance of the New Testament's Easter message is made powerfully visible in Orthodox Easter icons: the risen Jesus, ascending to heaven, reaches his hand to raise up the awaking dead. This is Jesus in whom we Christians put our hope: the healer and teacher who bore in his flesh the wounds of God's love for humanity; the risen and coming Messiah of God.