I recently gave a talk entitled, Jesus Was a Jew. It reminded me of a story Mother once told of a little girl who came home from Sunday School and exclaimed to her mother,”Mommy, they said Jesus was a Jew!” The mother reassured her child saying, “Never mind dear, we all know he was a good Methodist!”
We all look at the Master through the lens of our own minds, conditioned by time and circumstance. We see artists’ renditions of Jesus with blond hair and blue eyes, fair skinned, all which would have been highly unusual for a Jew of his time. It makes many comfortable to think of him as “someone like us;” as a “good methodist.”
Even the teachings of the various churches that follow him would have been foreign to Jesus, certainly many of his followers would have been astounded. The notion of the trinity became officially recognized 300 years after the time of Jesus, and for many of his direct followers to think of him as one of three aspects of one God would have been news to many of them at the time. Even three hundred years later it took some pretty fancy reasoning to work it out, with many tries before there came an acceptable version. Yet today it is held as sacrosanct for all true believers.
There is no evidence Jesus intended to start a new religion. He called upon those he healed to keep secret what had happened, he pointed his teachings toward loving God and one’s fellow man, and his focus was upon strengthening faith in God, whom he called Abba, Father. He taught in Jewish synagogues and the great Temple, and strove to challenge those who ran the temple to be pure and upright. He did not break with Jewish tradition, in fact he said he was the fulfillment of its promise.
When Paul, not a direct disciple, asked for permission many years after the time of Jesus to initiate others who were not Jews into these teachings it created quite a stir. James, and even Peter rejected the idea. Later Peter had a dream in which he received sanction for Paul to do so. The point is, the direct disciples did not see themselves as anything other than Jews at the time. Paul even came up with his own fancy reasoning so that new male converts did not have to be physically circumcised, a Jewish rite, but that their faith in Jesus made them circumcised. Why go through the trouble of reasoning this out unless it was thought that becoming a Christian was essentially becoming Jewish.
And why do I now point out these self-evident facts? It is to focus on what is essential to the life and teachings of this Jewish rabbi. Even his breaking of bread and sharing of wine was a rite already established by the Essenes. While Jesus borrowed heavily from the ancient tradition in which he was born, he also articulated the greatest spiritual principles to be found anywhere. This man, whose background we are told so little, gave us the keys to finding the kingdom of heaven, only to be found within.
What he gave us was so much more than a new religion, he gave us the Truth! He taught us to live the life of a true spiritual being, to love God first, surrender to His will, and to serve our fellow man, even unto death. Jesus taught us how to truly live. I say he taught “us,” because he teaches us still through the stories of his life, and the power of his words that resonate around the world.
“Come, follow me,” he said to his direct disciples, and he says to all of us. To follow him means to live as he lived, to know what he knew, to be even as he was; a Son of God. “Follow me,” not in blind belief, but see with your own eyes, hear with your own ears, know with your own mind the same as he saw, heard and knew his heavenly Father. He calls to us even now, “Come, follow me.”