Jesus Of Nazareth

(7 of 7)

At heart, the ethical teachings of Jesus are not markedly different from those of the earlier Jewish prophets, above all Isaiah. Jesus' emphasis on acceptance and mercy is especially strong, even to the point of demanding that his followers not resist evil. He insists that the unrepentant outlaws of the world will enter the reign of God before the righteous. Yet he demands that his hearers be "perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." His sense of the imminence of God's reign, and the change of heart it demands, is expressed in earlier Hebrew scripture, but only Jesus expects to administer the reign.

Whatever Jesus' final expectation, that reign did not arrive in his lifetime or in the lives of his earliest companions. Yet a majority of his followers continue to expect it. In the face of so long an uncertainty, how has his following not only endured but grown so hugely through two millenniums? And what can be expected of his long potent holding power over human imagination and hope in the near and distant future? If benign Christian institutions and the capacity to believe in a God who loves his creation should weaken fatally, if the artistic inspiration of the figure of Jesus should wane--as it has in some of the West today--are the existential promises of his teaching sufficient to maintain a world faith? What else has he to offer a ferociously diverse but rapidly shrinking planet?

As any believer might point out, there is the chance that Jesus was right. Perhaps he was what he claimed to be--the Son of God, the Messiah of Israel. Since his Resurrection, he has become--in the minds of billions--a transnational Messiah who continues to care for individual humans and to save them from internal and external evil.

I am one who believes himself a direct recipient of such care. Fifteen years ago, as I was about to undergo five weeks of withering radiation for a 10-in.-long cancer inside my spinal cord, I found myself--an outlaw Christian who had, and has, no active tie with a church--transported, thoroughly awake, to another entirely credible time and place. I was lying on the shore of the Lake of Galilee with Jesus' disciples asleep around me.

Then Jesus came forward and silently indicated that I should follow him into the lake. Waist deep in the water, I felt him pour handfuls down the long fresh scar on my back--the relic of unsuccessful surgery a month before. Jesus suddenly told me, "Your sins are forgiven." Appalled by my dire physical outlook, I thought ungratefully, "That's the last thing I need"; so I asked him, "Am I also cured?" He said, "That too."