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My hope and prayer for us this night is that we will look a little more closely, a little more deeply, at this man Jesus who changed the world by the way He lived and loved and died…and who calls us to follow Him. We’ll try to focus our attention tonight on the more human characteristics of Jesus: what made Him tick, what moved His heart, what meant a lot to Him. To help us look at Him again with fresh eyes, I want to start with a meditation on Jesus. I invite you to close your eyes and prayerfully imagine this scene with me.….

Opening meditation: (from John Shea, An Experience Named Spirit.)

Now open your eyes. Did you feel like you were there? Did you see him there by the fire? Were you watching Him? Good. Because doing that kind of prayerful imagining helps us to see Jesus a little better, watch Him in our mind’s eye. You can do that with any Gospel passage, anytime, or you might even imagine your own scene, when you pray. I think this really helps us to get to know Jesus better.

So who is this Jesus, who is both Son of God and Son of Man? People were asking that question when Jesus walked the earth. “What manner of man is this, that the winds and the seas obey him?” and “Who is this man who forgives sins?” People were drawn to him, intrigued by Him, and sometimes put off by Him. Jesus himself asked those closest to Him what people thought about Him. “Who do people say that I am?’ Then he asks the big question: “And who do YOU say that I am?” That’s a very personal question, and an important one for all of us. Who is Jesus to us? What have we discovered about Him? What does He mean to us? Are we growing in our understanding of Him?

We’re going to try to do something really difficult. We’re going to try to paint something of a portrait of Jesus. That’s very hard to do, because He is always more than we can put into words. We have four different Gospels and each one paints a different portrait of Jesus, and even all four put together can’t capture or contain ALL of who Jesus is. But it helps to try, because it helps us to see Him maybe a little more clearly - and this is the important part – because it helps us to love Him more.

Who is Jesus? What was He like when He walked the earth? We said that one of the best ways to discover the person of Jesus is through the Scriptures, by really watching Him in the Gospel stories. Look at what he does, look at what He doesn’t do; look at what He notices, what moves His heart, what matters to Him, how He responds. When you do that, you’re getting a window into his heart, because a person’s heart is reflected in their words and their actions, their attitudes and their concerns. So we put together a portrait of Jesus by watching Him in lots of different situations and really noticing.

But first a bit of background. We know, of course, that Jesus was a real historical person, who lived in first century Palestine in a region called Galilee. He was a Jew, raised by Jewish parents, who grew up learning the Hebrew Scriptures and praying the psalms. He is also the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the promised Messiah and the Redeemer of all creation. When He came in the flesh, He came to show us how much God loves us and how we are all to live. So He was both human and divine, true God and true man. Two natures – a divine nature and a human nature – coexisted in Him when He walked the earth. We can’t quite wrap our minds around how that could be; it is one of the mysteries of our faith. Don’t try to figure it out!

Jesus was fully in touch with both His humanity and His divinity, but He had to grow into the knowledge of His divinity. As a young child he couldn’t possibly have grasped His full identity or what His mission was about. He had to grow and mature in His understanding of who He was and what His life was about. That understanding came to Him gradually.

In His humanity, he was born of a woman, was nursed at her breast, was raised by Jewish parents who taught Him many things and probably even had to discipline Him at times. He ate, worked, slept, laughed, loved and wanted to be loved. He cried, got angry, got exasperated, got anxious, experienced pain, loneliness, and temptation. He lived as a celibate man and never married. He suffered and He died a terrible death while He was fairly young, in His early thirties. He was like us in all things but sin.

He was an itinerant preacher and healer who went about doing good and teaching about the Kingdom of God. It seems that His Baptism by John was a profound moment of awakening to who He was and what He was about. John may have even been a mentor for Him prior to His Baptism. The experience of His Baptism seemed to drive Him into public ministry. It seems that He finally understood how loved he was by His heavenly Father – his Abba (Aramaic for “Daddy”), and His public ministry began shortly after that event. His ministry lasted only a few short years before He was arrested and crucified. He was charismatic, and He attracted many followers, including a core group of twelve that he spent a lot of time with. He attracted women disciples as well, and this was unheard of in his day. The way He valued and respected women was remarkable and counter-cultural. He had special compassion on those who were oppressed and devalued in society, who were treated as though they had little worth. He knew better.

He was a master teacher and storyteller, with a quick mind and vivid imagination. His language was poetic and full of images and stories that people could relate to – about wheatfields and seed, flour and yeast, fig trees and birds, lost coins and lost sons. Some of his parables were deliberately obscure so that people would have to wrestle with them to come to new insights and ways of seeing. Jesus was highly intelligent and clever in debate when people would try to trap him. He would often cut right to the heart of the matter and turn the question back on the questioner. A man asks, “Lord, tell my brother to give me my half of the inheritance.” He answers: “Friend, who made me your arbitrator? Guard against greed.” He gets right to the issue underneath the question. He was very verbally skilled and at the same time highly intuitive and perceptive. We would see Him nowadays as both right-brained and left-brained. He taught with an authority that was true and deep but not heavy-handed. He was consumed with teaching about what the Kingdom of God was like – what kind of life, what kind of world God wants for His children. A world of mercy, of peace, of justice, of compassionate love. A world without domination and exploitation and violence. A community of love and mutuality, of brothers and sisters.

He was an exorcist and a powerful healer. People sought him out to heal them and their families of illness, and to cast out demons. Demons obeyed him when he ordered them to come out of a person. Interestingly, the demons always know His identity, though the people around Him often don’t. He was always wanting to heal, and willing to heal, even when laws forbade this, as on the Sabbath.

He had a great deal of conflict with the religious authorities of His day. He criticized their narrow understandings of sin and of the law. He tried repeatedly to stretch their consciousness and to help them to see more clearly. Most of them refused. He cared more about human persons and about right attitudes of the heart than He did about laws and external practices. He had a different vision for the human community, and he challenged the social order of his day. In the tense political atmosphere of Palestine under Roman occupation, with the religious leaders in a delicate and precarious relationship with political leaders, he was seen as a serious threat to both the religious and political establishment. One particular incident – the cleansing of the Temple – seems to have generated extreme animosity toward Him and sealed his fate. After this incident, He was openly hunted and in constant danger.

He associated with all kinds of people, and was highly criticized for eating meals with “sinners.” He had a special concern for all those treated unjustly and shunned by society – women, children, lepers, outcasts, tax collectors, prostitutes, and others. He held out a present and a future to them. He stood up for them and advocated for them. All people mattered to Him. There was obviously something very compelling about him. He had a large following. He exuded a powerful spiritual presence that affected people. He also had enemies.

He called God “Abba” (Aramaic for “Daddy,” “Papa.”) In a time when Jewish people used very formal titles for God, this was quite radical. He lived in an intimate spiritual relationship with His Heavenly Father, and found His strength and identity in that relationship. This grounded Him, gave meaning to Him, and motivated Him. Long hours of prayer cultivated a deep intimacy with His Father, and He lived in a deep oneness with the Father. He was in such solidarity with His Father that He was full of God’s feelings. He saw Himself as someone who was meant to “preach good tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to comfort those who mourn, to proclaim liberty to captives.”

He was the most influential person in all of human history. No one before or since has had the impact that Jesus did.

So that’s some of who He was. Now, what was He like when He walked the earth? Let’s look at that. Because he is the human face of God, He reveals all the time what God is like. When we look at Him in the Gospels, we see qualities like these:

1. First of all, He is decidedly NOT like the stoic, serene Jesus figures portrayed in some of the movies about Him. NOT someone who speaks in calm, measured tones and without any emotion. On the contrary! He is a very exciting person! Philip Yancey writes: “The Gospels present a man who has such charisma that people will sit three days straight, without food, just to hear his riveting words. He seems excitable, impulsively moved with compassion or filled with pity. The Gospels reveal a range of Jesus’ emotional responses: sudden sympathy for a person with leprosy, exuberance over his disciples’ success, a blast of anger at coldhearted legalists, grief over unreceptive Jerusalem, and awful cries of anguish in Gethsemane and on the cross. He had great patience with individuals but no patience at all with institutions and injustice.
He didn’t hide his fears or hesitate to ask for help. Three times he cried in front of his disciples.” Jesus was not afraid of emotion the way that some of us are. He allows himself to be transparent and to be vulnerable. Unusual for a man in his day.

2. He was filled with love, bursting with love. Love flows outward from Him all the time. He does not restrict it. His love is other-oriented, not self-interested. And His love is constant. His every word, His every act was motivated by that love. He doesn’t seem to get tired of loving. He does seem to struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane to stay faithful to his decision to love in the face of hatred and violence, but He remains faithful to being a person of love, no matter what. He doesn’t turn back. He loves to His last breath.

3. He is a man of care. His love spills over into care for people. He is attentive to them and their needs. He had a passion to heal them and to restore them to wholeness and to fullness of life. He says “Of course I am willing!” when asked if he is willing to heal a leper. Everything in him rushes forward to heal. John Shea says that Jesus wanted to set humankind free and watch it flourish. Several times Jesus got into trouble for healing on the Sabbath, when no “work” was allowed by Jewish law. It’s amazing to me that the Pharisees saw only that a law had been broken; didn’t see the person in front of them who was now restored to health and jumping for joy. Jesus didn’t see any need to make them wait until after the Sabbath because of some law. People’s needs were more important to him than laws. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

4. He was wide-eyed and open-eared. He notices EVERYTHING. He notices a desperate tug on the hem of his garment by a woman who needs healing and wants to remain anonymous. He notices a short man up in a tree who wanted to get a better look at Jesus. He notices his disciples pushing away little children away from him, and corrects them. He hears little arguments erupting among his disciples. He hears voices at the edge of the crowd calling his name. He notices things and he STOPS to give his full attention to the person in need. Actor Bruce Marchiano, who portrayed Jesus in The Gospel According to Matthew said that this is what “knocked his socks off” about Jesus. He talked about doing the scene of the healing of the leper after the Sermon on the Mount: he said how Jesus is coming down the mountain and was probably tired after those hours of teaching in the hot sun, and here’s this leper who suddenly calls for him, and Jesus STOPS to give him his full attention. To Bruce, the healing of the leper was the secondary miracle. The greater miracle for Bruce was that “here is the Son of the Living God and he STOPS for this guy”, or for a hemorrhaging woman, or for a worried father. His actions say “I’m a God who STOPS…for you. You are my whole world!” (Bruce Marchaino)

5. He is very sensitive and compassionate. He feels everything, and feels deeply. He weeps over the death of his friend Lazarus, and over Jerusalem. His heart is moved by a crowd of 5000 hungry people who are sitting on the hillside for days, listening to him. Even his anger is rooted in compassion. The scene with the money-changers in the Temple fueled his anger because they were gouging the poor by setting exorbitant prices on the animals that people had to buy for the Passover sacrifice. So he is angry because the poor are being exploited by the rich. His compassion comes from deep within him, and wells up. The Greek word for compassion, sphlanchizomai, means emotions that come from the gut, from the bowels, of someone. The kind of feeling for someone’s suffering that wrenches your own stomach, you feel it so deeply. Like what we felt watching the scourging in the Passion movie. That is what He felt for people’s suffering all the time. He also had a special sensitivity for women and children. How many men of that time took into account the hardships of pregnancy and nursing? Here was a man who spoke of the coming tribulation and then said compassionately “Alas, for pregnant women and nursing mothers in those days.”

6. He looks people in the eyes. The Scriptures tell of him looking at a rich young man with love, looking Peter in the eyes after Peter’s denial, looking at a blind man as he was healing him, holding his face, saying “Can you see anything yet?” or looking at the Pharisees with anger. He really looks at people. Not just a quick glance. He beholds them, gazes at them. He is also confrontational at times. He uses tough love and tough words with people sometimes to make them wake up and see differently. His harshest words are for people who will not see, whose hearts are hardened. He engages people in conversation, asks them questions, corrects their thinking when it’s wrong. He becomes angry at sin and at stubbornness of heart. He is grieved when people will not turn to him, and he suffers over that. “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I LONGED to gather you under my wing as a hen gathers her chicks, but you were not willing…”Listen to his heart there!

7. He was a man of joy. People invited him often to parties and to dinners. He came to weddings. People liked being with him. Otherwise, he would not have had such a large following. He had a sense of humor and sometimes would use clever word plays. He could tell a story that would make a point and still people laugh, like the one about the plank in your own eye while you’re worried about the speck in someone else’s. He would nickname his friends funny names like “sons of thunder”. He would laugh and rejoice with people. Life was fuller, better, when he was there. Fishermen dropped their nets and took off to be with Him. People traveled around the countryside with Him. Why? Because “He was a person of such gladness, such freedom and openness, that he was irresistible” (Sherwood Wirt). They wanted to be near Him, to catch His spirit, to learn His secret. He radiated a deep joy.

8. He was a man of prayer. He prayed often and taught his disciples to do the same. The Scriptures tell of many times when he would steal off alone at night, or in the early morning to pray. Sometimes he spent whole nights in prayer. He got his strength and his power from his intimate relationship with his Father, and he connected with His Father in prayer. That prayer nourished him and anchored him through everything. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when his courage is failing and his heart is most troubled, he finds the strength through prayer to see the journey through, and not to turn back. Notice that he spends that evening in prayer. His disciples keep falling asleep. Jesus is “prayed up” and ready when violence strikes. The sleepy disciples who failed to pray were not.

9. He is absolutely nonviolent. No matter how much violence is aimed at him, he never lashes back with violence. He has great strength of restraint in the face of evil and violence. He absorbs violence into himself, where it is swallowed up in non-violence. He never returns evil for evil or insult for insult. He uses the power of love to combat the power of violence. The only time we see any hint of violence is with the money changers in the Temple, and even that violence is not a physical violence directed at people, but rather toward a situation - an overturning of tables in order to destroy the marketplace set-up in the Temple, where the poor were being gouged.

10. He is wise and discerning. He is deeply attuned to people’s spirits and discerns their innermost thoughts. He reads hearts. When he is having dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee, and a woman comes weeping and wiping his feet with her hair, he already knows what Simon is thinking (probably “She’s a sinner, and she’s touching him…”), and Jesus says “Simon, I have something to say to you…” When people bring him a paralyzed man on a pallet, and he declares that the man’s sins are forgiven, the scribes are already thinking, “why does he say that? He’s blaspheming…” and Jesus “immediately knew in his mind what they were thinking to themselves.” (Mk. 2). John Shea says “it is dangerous to hang around Jesus. Even if you do not talk, he knows what you’re thinking.” He is the Wisdom of God.

11. He is a person of forgiveness. He never condemns people, gives up on them, or writes them off. He stares down a mob who wanted to stone an adulterous woman to death, and gives her a clean slate, saying “neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” Even as he is dying, he forgives the thief on the cross next to him. He prays for everyone as he is dying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He forgives Peter’s denial and the abandonment of all his friends. Many of his parables are about forgiveness…about a Father who forgives a prodigal son and another son who does not forgive, about a king who forgives a servant, and how that very servant fails to extend forgiveness to a subordinate. Forgiveness is one of the great themes of his teaching.

12. He valued every person and treated them with respect and dignity. He knew that they were all created equal and each one made in God’s image. All persons mattered intensely to him. He exalted women, children, the poor, the sick, the outcasts. He showed a preferential option for the poor, for all those that society shunned or considered unimportant. His treatment of women and children was very counter-cultural. His openness to the sick, the lepers, those considered unclean or unsavory, was also counter-cultural.

13. He was approachable and touchable and affectionate. He was not afraid to touch lepers or others considered “unclean,” like the hemorrhaging woman. He did not wince at the thought of touching them. Instead, he took their hands, held their faces, picked them up, embraced them. He let women anoint his feet and his head even though Pharisees and scribes were indignant because “she’s touching him.” He was not afraid to come close to people. His touch brought love and healing and acceptance to people. For people like lepers who had been cast out of their communities because of being considered unclean, His touch was life to them. I love Bruce Marchiano’s portrayal of Jesus’ healing of the leper, because it shows the leper calling for Jesus and then turning away and hiding his face. Jesus stops in his tracks, wheels around, and circles around the man. Jesus then takes his hands and lifts the hood off the man’s face, then starts to unwrap the bandages. When the man sees that he is healed, he is so overjoyed that he starts running around in circles, almost dancing, and then throws himself on Jesus, knocks him to the ground, in all his joy. Jesus is laughing as the man knocks him over, and the two embrace each other. It’s beautiful. It’s so like him, I think.

14. He quickly established intimacy with people he met. He had an uncanny ability to get right to the heart level with people. In a conversation, He could cut right to the heart of the matter, and after a few minutes, people like the Samaritan woman were revealing to him their deepest secrets. People of his day tended to keep rabbis at a distance, but Jesus was different. People came and told him their stories, and their deepest secrets, and their deepest hungers. He had a way of drawing that forth from people. People trusted him with their hearts. He had close friends. We know that He was especially close with Peter, James and John, with Mary Magdalen, and also with Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany.

15. He is strong and yet gentle. When we look at the few places in Scripture where He actually describes himself, “gentle” is one of the words He uses to describe Himself. “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle, and humble in my heart.” (Mt. 11:28-29). Instead of flaunting power, he wants us to know that He is gentle, and that with Him we don’t need to be afraid. He has a strength born of great gentleness, and a great gentleness rooted in strength.

16. Another of his self-descriptions is found in John’s Gospel. “I am the Good Shepherd,” he said. “I know mine and mine know me. I lay down my life for my sheep.” This is a very loaded statement. In Jesus’ time, shepherds spent all their time with their sheep, lived with them day and night, caring for them, loving them, protecting them from wild animals and from robbers. They knew each sheep by name and knew each one’s quirks and tendencies and personality. The shepherd knew which ones were more skittish, which ones were more likely to wander off, which ones were weaker, which ones were obstinate and more likely to get into trouble. The shepherd worried about each one, and each one mattered to him. Each shepherd had a particular call that only his sheep will recognize and respond to. Even if two flocks were put together in a communal sheepfold for the night, it was easy to disentangle the flocks as soon as each shepherd called for their own. Immediately his own sheep would run to him at the sound of his voice The shepherd would have to know where to take his flock to find food or water, at all times of the year, regardless of the season. He would have to go after sheep that strayed from the flock, and would pick up little lambs or sick sheep and carry them in his arms or in the hood of his cloak. It was not unusual to see a shepherd with one lamb under each arm and two or three in the hood of his cloak. The shepherd was always watching for hyenas or lions or even robbers that might suddenly attack. At night the shepherd would put his flock in some kind of enclosure with an opening – like a cave, or a makeshift pen made of branches – and he would lay down with his body across the opening, so that no sheep could get out and no predator could get in except across his body (William Barclay, Jesus as They Saw Him). So he guarded his flock with his very body, and would give his life if necessary to protect them. One writer wrote of the typical shepherd in the Holy Land, “On some high moor, across which at night the hyenas howl, you meet him, sleepless, far-sighted, weather-beaten, armed, leaning on his staff, and looking out over his scattered sheep, every one of them on his heart, and you understand why Christ took the shepherd as a symbol of self-sacrifice” (Tristam, quoted in Barclay’s Jesus as They Saw Him). You can see how Jesus identified with the shepherd, and saw Himself as the Good Shepherd. The shepherd had to be always vigilant, always patient with his sheep, kind, courageous, strong, and ready to die for his sheep. So when Jesus talked of himself as the Good Shepherd, He was saying a lot about Himself, a lot about the kind of love that God has. And this was not understood. When we read this section of John’s Gospel, the section concludes with : “Some of the people who heard this picked up rocks to stone him, and others said, “He is possessed and out of his mind; why listen to him?” Jesus… a gentle shepherd, who was not understood, but who loved them all anyway. A gentle shepherd who did indeed give his life for His sheep. Our Jesus.


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And so we ponder and celebrate the love of this one called Jesus, who showed us how to live, who gave His life for us, who calls us to discipleship and to fullness of life in His name, who we know by many titles:
( read “Jesus” Litany…some of the ways we think of Him)
JESUS…

Word-made-flesh
Emmanuel
“God with us”
Wonderful Counselor
Prince of Peace
Our Redeemer
Savior
Messiah
Anointed One
Suffering servant
Wounded for our Transgressions
Gentle healer
Rabbi and Teacher
Son of Mary
Son of God
“Son of Man”
God-Man
The human face of God
Friend of Sinners
Man of Sorrow
Man of Joy
Compassion of God
Mercy of God
Wisdom of God
Justice of God
Tenderness of God
Savior-Brother
Bread of Life
Lamb of God
Light of the World
Divine Bridegroom
Good Shepherd
Man for Others
Reader of hearts
Image of the Invisible God
King of Kings
Life-giving Lord
Liberator of all
Lover of all
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“…you see, you’re actually only really dealing with Jesus when you throw your arms around Him and realize right down to the bottom of your being that this is something you can still do today…”
Karl Rahner, The Love of Jesus and the (Love of Neighbor)

It’s ultimately all about love. If He is ultimately just a head trip for us, then we don’t know Him well enough. It’s meant to be a relationship. Karl Rahner is right when he says: “You’re only really dealing with Jesus when you throw your arms around him…”


Questions for discussion:

Any thoughts you want to share, or questions?

Why do you think Jesus was the most influential person who ever lived?

Do you have a favorite Gospel story about Jesus? Why is it your favorite? What does it show you about Jesus?

Of all the characteristics of Jesus that we talked about, which one do you think is the hardest for us to emulate? Why?

To reach Kathy, please contact her at
khasty2@wideopenwest.com

Kathy F. Hasty, M.A.
Pastoral Minister
3-22-04

















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