Food for Thought.

Revisiting Stephen’s Palm Sunday address, reminded me of the article by Rev. Jane Barraclough in the Inquirer of 21^st February 2009. If you have not yet read this, it really is worthwhile looking it up – the views of two modern young ministers on how we comprehend Jesus are very stimulating.

Stephen’s view of Jesus as a political activist who died because he was seen as a rebel against authority complements very well Jane’s idea of him being a radical prophet, concerned with the poor, the excluded and the oppressed.

Poor Jesus! Every religious group wants a piece of him. Maligned, misrepresented, glorified to an extent which he himself never claimed. We all see him differently, this simple man with the simplest (and toughest!) of messages, which could be summed up in one short phrase – love God and love your neighbour.

The great Abrahamic religions all see him differently. Muslims accept him as an important prophet, even the messiah who will come again, but not as a God. They accept the Virgin Birth, but they do not accept that he was crucified, but taken up into Heaven by Allah. Thus they do not accept the Atonement, and the Qur’aan tells them that every man must atone for his own sins.

Judaism also sees Jesus as a great prophet, but not the Messiah or the Son of God, except insofar as we are all sons of God. The Shema, the central prayer in the Jewish liturgy, (from Deuteronomy) begins “Hear, O Israel: the lord our God is one God” and this is sufficient for them to deny his divinity or the possibility of the Trinity

The mainstream Christian Churches have, for their own reasons, re-written his life story until today he is worshipped as a king, sitting in glory on the right hand of God until he returns as the Messiah.

Even Unitarianism, in its desire to be all embracing and ever tolerant, seems to cloud the message by including all schools of thought from simple monotheism to acceptance of the Trinity – which latter would make our early forefathers spin in their graves.

 We have even taken liberties with his appearance. I suppose we have such Victorian artists as Holman Hunt to thank (or blame) for depicting Jesus as a white man, a sort of bearded Robert Redford, which of course he could not possibly have been. We can never be certain, but he would probably have had a dark, possibly swarthy Middle Eastern complexion

At least, we do not have to put up with the views of an American ordained Christian minister who we recently met on holiday. His church must sit somewhere to the right of Genghis Kahn, and his views on race were unprintable. He could not accept that Jesus was a Jew preaching Jewish law, and was absolutely certain that He was a white man, which would have come as something of a shock to Mary and Joseph.

                                                                                                                   GRW