Volume 1, Issue 3, June 1994

JESUS CAN'T BE LEFT IN THE PAST

What a man Jesus was! He was a human person who did more than anyone else to better humanity. He did not drift among the commonplaces of life untouched by what he saw. He did not run from trouble because it was implicating, or sidestep human need because it was demanding. He consistently refused to answer the hard questions of life with half-truths or naive platitudes. He never left a person or a situation as he found it.

He was a man! He was the kind of man who had courage and the power to be. As we look at his life we might say, as the rock opera, "Jesus Christ Superstar" declared, "Jesus is cool".

Once you look more deeply at Jesus, the Palestinian Jew who lived in the first century, you find it increasingly hard to leave him in his own time and setting. The early Christians found it hard to leave him dead. They were possessed with the knowledge his spirit and teaching would remain alive in the world. This was his resurrection and in his followers he is still alive today.

There are three observations that may be made about the influence of Jesus.

(1) Jesus makes God's presence in our world and in human life very human. In the Jesus of history we see a very human being, but one in whom people saw the nature of God, love. He expressed the godlike qualities of humour, joy, concern, power to heal. People saw in him glimpses of what God is like and then found God in their own lives.

(2) Finding God in your life re-orders it. Everyone who met Jesus, listened to him, tried his teaching, found their lives radically changed. They learned how to do good. Moral sensitivity, honesty, helpfulness, caring, became the norms of their lives.

(3) Encountering Jesus, his teachings and spirit, calls for a personal response. Surrounded as we are with a world with so many in need, so many problems, so many threats to our very survival, the ethics of Jesus demand our acknowledgment and acceptance. He showed that God in our lives enables us to better the world around us. It gives us the courage to be, the freedom to become what is our potential.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.