A Revolutionary Message
The contemporary quest for the historical Jesus has convinced me: Jesus, the man who lived so briefly some 2000 years ago, was a revolutionary. Jesus’s teaching stripped away the unessential to touch the very heart of the human condition. And he practiced what he preached.
He grounded his teachings in a doctrine of love. A teacher of the law once tried to trick him by asking which of the commandments was the greatest. Jesus sidestepped legalisms by replying, “First love God. And second love others as you love yourself.”
Jesus taught and lived a radical egalitarianism in which the underclasses of his day, including women, were lifted up to the level of the social swells and the political powerful. He was an itinerant activist; and his radical teachings got him into trouble with authorities who didn't want their order upset and their power challenged.
Using the cruelest and most humiliating of means, the authorities who executed Jesus failed to silence his message. To the contrary, Jesus's influence was magnified through his followers until a religion about Jesus became the state religion of
In spite of all the concretions of theology about Jesus devised through the ages, many antithetical to the radical vision he preached and lived, the core of his transformative message survives, summarized as divinity, egalitarianism, and love. Strip away ancient mythologies of dying and rising gods that seeped into Christianity, there is nevertheless a reality that doesn't die.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once characterized Jesus as the “one man [who] was true to what is in you and me.” Jesus, in person and in practice, proclaimed the transcendent worth and dignity of each and every person.
This season compels us to search ourselves. Do we realize our inherent worth and dignity? Do we respect the worth and dignity of others? What is our call and capacity to love?
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