The Significance of Jesus

A Catholic priest-friend of mine sent me a copy of the special edition of the Time magazine. 

The entire issue is on Jesus. Apart from essays written by eminent writers, there are numerous photographs related to Jesus like the ones below. 

Most of the essays present Jesus as seen by his religious believers. The very first one, titled ‘Who Was Jesus?’, starts with a ‘discovery’ made in June 2024. During a routine digitisation at Humboldt University in Hamburg, researchers discovered a scrap of papyrus with 13 lines of Ancient Greek. They were able to identify some of the words: Jesus, crowing, branch, etc. It was the earliest physical copy of a narrative called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Jesus is 5 years old in this gospel. The child has just moulded 12 sparrows out of clay sitting by a river. His father, Joseph, finds him and scolds him for working on the Sabbath. Jesus then claps his hands and tells the sparrows to go away. “The sparrows took flight and went away chirping,” reads the gospel.

This is one of the many gospels that didn’t find its way to the New Testament of the Bible. The Time relies on the biblical gospels for many of its first essays. But a lot of additional material is brought in by the later essays in the issue.

Who was Jesus? Why did he die on the cross?

If we leave aside theology and religion, Jesus was a hero for many Jews of his time. The Jews were a highly persecuted lot in those days. The Roman Empire and its soldiers were never kind to this race of people. The Jews were made to pay all sorts of taxes. Even their own religious leaders exploited the people in their own selfish ways. N T Wright, New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian, and Anglican bishop, shows in his essay how Jesus fit the bill for a people who longed for multiple liberations.

The Jews in the Palestine of Jesus’ time longed for a Messiah. They were dead tired of both the emperor’s kingdom and the priests’ kingdom. They now wanted God’s kingdom to come. That is exactly what Jesus promised. He taught the yearning Jews that they could be liberated easily. You can be healed, restored, forgiven right here; there’s no need to go to Jerusalem for all that. The intermediacy of the priests isn’t needed either.

Wright goes on to argue that it wasn’t the conversion of the individual Jew from his petty sins that Jesus wanted. He wanted Israel to be a whole new nation: the light of the world, the salt of the earth, the peacemaker, the healer. Israel was destined to be a kingdom of saints. And Jesus was the one who would establish that. How? By sacrificing himself. 

Wright’s view is that Jesus’ death was a sacrifice in atonement for Israel’s failures. Jesus describes himself as the sacrificial goat many times in the gospels. Yes, he would die so that Israel would live a new life. And that new life of Israel would revolutionise the world itself eventually.

Jesus’ death did alter the world revolutionarily. An entirely new religion arose from his teachings, a religion of love and compassion. It is quite a different matter that this ‘revolutionary’ religion, which could have actually made the human world God’s own kingdom, went the way of the other religions eventually. But the Time’s glossy pages do not look at the dark history of Jesus’ legacy.

If Jesus returns to the earth once again, will his priests of today repeat just what the priests of his time did? Richard Jerome, one of the editors of the Time, says in his essay that the Jewish priests of Jesus’ time convened a high council to decide whether Jesus had become a threat to their authority. “If we allow him to go on like this, soon everyone will believe in him. Then the Roman army will come and destroy both our Temple and our nation,” concluded the high council of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And Caiaphas the high priest passed the verdict: “It is better that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed.”

It is highly ironical that Jesus was killed by his own people, particularly the religious leaders. If he returns to the human world today, his fate will be quite the same.

Why did Jesus die? This question is the title of David van Biema’s essay which appealed much to me. I grappled with that question for quite a while as a young man and I lost my faith in religion altogether when I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer to it. David van Biema accepts the atonement theology of Bishop Wright [traced above] but goes beyond that. Life is pain. Jesus’ death on the cross and the subsequent place the cross played in the religions founded in his name inspire the believers to accept the pain called life with resignation. Even God embraced that pain!

My personal problem still remains. Couldn’t the omnipotent God find a better way to deal with the pain called life? Well, that question remains and that’s why I am not a believer even now. Jesus, for me, was a great spiritual teacher. Like the Buddha and others. I admire them. But I’d rather embrace ways of alleviating life’s pains than embrace pain itself. 

Note: All the images above are copied from the Time.

PS. Thanks to Rev Jose Maliekal for his gift of the Time which made me take yet another look at Jesus and his teachings.