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Why did Jesus tell stories?
Stories are good. That's why we enjoy
watching films and soaps, listening to stand-up comics and reading
books, and aren't so keen about listening to speeches and sermons.
In fact, Jesus does seem to have done some pretty straight sermons,
too. That one about "turn the other cheek" and "go
the extra mile", for example. But some of his words that best
stick in your mind are the stories. The Good Samaritan... the Prodigal
Son... the Lost Sheep, and so on. Which is the answer to the question.
All of Jesus's stories address spiritual issues in a way that (a)
isn't boring, (b) sticks in your mind, and (c) challenges you to
think for yourself.
Take the Prodigal Son, for example. The religious hotshots were
getting deeply stressed with Jesus for hanging out with the "spiritually
unclean" (such as prostitutes and tax collectors). Their attitude
was: God doesn't like them and neither do we.
Jesus explained why he spent time with them by telling a story:
the son abandons his father, squanders his money, and ends up on
the skids, cleaning out the pigs (and remember, pigs were themselves
seen as unclean animals). The son eventually creeps back home when
he's broke and has nowhere else to go.
Does the father give him a good smack and send him packing? No,
he is ecstatic and throws a huge party for him. Meanwhile the older
brother who has stuck by dad religiously all these years has a big
sulk, because his black-sheep brother doesn't deserve this special
treatment.
It's a wonderful illustration of God's attitude to sinners, but
it also challenges listeners to decide what their own attitude should
be, and whose side they're on.
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What is the kingdom of God?
The kingdom of God is an idea that is absolutely central to Jesus's
teaching and his life. He announced the coming of the kingdom and
called upon his followers to work and pray towards that end.
So what does it mean?
"The kingdom of God" is not a phrase Jesus invented. Jewish
revolutionaries at the time wanted to throw off imperial Roman rule
and get rid of the monarchy, so that there would be no king but
God. Many of Jesus's followers seem to have assumed that he had
the same manifesto.
But Jesus clearly had no interest in taking on the Roman army. He
called for the people of Israel to become "one nation under
God" even under its oppression by Rome, and for his followers
to make a start by being a holy community.
For Jesus, the kingdom of God seems to have been more about God
ruling in our lives than about who rules the country, and this is
one reason why his teaching proved such an international hit –
it applies equally to everyone everywhere. In practice, it was a
mix of personal spiritual life – such as praying, forgiving,
giving, holiness – and social change – such as a new attitude
to the excluded, to women, to foreigners and to the poor.
"Now and not yet" is a phrase often used to describe Jesus's
attitude to the kingdom. In one sense he was proclaiming its arrival:
the kingdom was coming now through his own life and work, and that
of his followers. But there is also a strong sense that he saw the
kingdom not only as something that we would always be working towards,
but something that would only be fully realised in the world to
come.
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What were Jesus' politics?
It's probably a mistake to try to fit Jesus too snugly under any
modern political labels – left-wing, right-wing, Euro-sceptic.
The political world of his time was just too different.
But it's equally wrong to say that he was of the "bishops should
stay out of politics" persuasion, that he was only interested
in "religion" and steered clear of the whole political
vipers' nest. For Jesus, like any first-century Jew, politics and
religion were inextricably mixed.
So what were his politics? Basically: the kingdom of God. Central
to everything Jesus said is his announcement of the kingdom of God
and his insistence that we should work and pray towards that end.
That much is clear. What's not so clear is what "the kingdom
of God" actually means.
It's not a phrase he invented. Jewish revolutionaries at the time
wanted to throw off imperial Roman rule, and even the monarchy,
and have no king but God. This wasn't an excuse for anarchy –
like Cromwell in the English revolution, they wanted a regime of
holiness and the law of the scriptures.
Many of Jesus' followers seem to have assumed that he had the same
manifesto.
But Jesus clearly had no interest in taking on the Roman army. He
called for the people of Israel to become "one nation under
God" even under its present oppression, and for his followers
to make a start by being a holy community.
Which sounds exactly like rejecting politics for religion. Except
that he also called for – and practised himself – some
radical social changes: an end to the social exclusion of the "spiritually
unclean" (such as prostitutes and people who collected taxes
for the Romans), a more inclusive attitude to women and non-Jews,
a rejection of violence, and social justice for the poor.
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What would Jesus think of the church?
Delighted that his teaching has been faithfully kept alive for two
millenniums, and is embraced by 2 billion people across the world.
Maybe.
Or alternatively, horrified that his radical vision of what life
can be has been distorted into a backward-looking institution, complete
with its own bureaucracy.
How you answer the question says more about your own opinion of
the church than Jesus's.
One thing we can safely say is that Jesus was unsparingly critical
of the religious establishment of his time, and even had some harsh
words for his own followers, so he'd be bound to pick a fight with
some of us. But whom, and over what issues? Who can say?
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Was St Paul the real founder of Christianity?
This is seriously maintained by some pretty serious people. Their
arguments is not that Jesus didn't exist, or that Paul wrote the
Gospels: the point is that Paul took over the reins of Christianity
after Jesus, and – allegedly – his writings took it in
a very different direction to what Jesus taught in the Gospels.
Here's the evidence...
1. In all Paul's writings (there are 13 of his letters in the New
Testament, though some may not have been by him) there is virtually
no information about Jesus's life, apart from his death and resurrection.
Wasn't Paul interested in these stories?
2. Paul seems to repeat astonishingly little of Jesus' teachings.
There are a handful of direct quotes, but little else. No parables,
no Lord's Prayer, none of those pithy sayings.
3. The kingdom of God is the one central theme of Jesus' preaching,
but it gets much less of an airing in Paul.
4. Paul never followed Jesus while he was alive, but was converted
by a vision of the risen Christ. Did he lack knowledge of –
or interest in – the life of Jesus?
5. No longer having to follow the Jewish Law was a major theme of
Paul's letters, but not something Jesus said much about.
People have tried various ways of explaining this:
1. Paul was a missionary and his writings are merely follow up letters
to his converts. This means he has already told them all about Jesus,
and he doesn't need to repeat himself.
2. Not having first-hand knowledge of Jesus, he left all that stuff
to people who did.
3. For a Jew, the crucifixion of God's Messiah was one of the most
offensive ideas imaginable, and "the age to come" one
of the most glorious hopes. Once Paul accepted that the crucifixion
and resurrection of the Messiah was God's astounding way of bringing
in that new age, here and now, this fact dwarfed everything else
in the life of Jesus into relative insignificance.
4. He was a bit sensitive about not having been an original follower
of Jesus, so he put all his stress on Jesus the risen Lord, than
Jesus the Jewish teacher.
5. Jesus was a Jewish teacher, teaching and leading Jews in Palestine.
Paul, though also Jewish, travelled the Roman world, preaching to
and organising both Jews and Gentiles. This difference in situation
meant that Paul had to adapt Jesus's teachings considerably, even
if he stayed true to the heart of them.
In balance, it's hard to deny that Christianity took a significant
change of direction under St Paul, but there's no reason this couldn't
be a legitimate development that Jesus himself would have welcomed.
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Was Jesus a Christian?
In a very important sense, no.
Jesus was Jewish, worshipped at the synagogue and the Temple, kept
the Jewish religious law (on the whole), and there is no suggestion
that he ever told his followers to split away from Judaism and join
this new religion he'd just invented called Christianity.
Everything we know about his teaching was directed towards a renewal
of the Jewish faith, not at establishing a new world religion.
But this is often how new churches start, because the old ones aren't
always too keen on being "renewed". Protestantism was
originally a movement to renew the Roman Catholic church, and many
attempts to do the same to the Church of England have ended up as
new churches too, such as the Methodists. The reformers either get
kicked out, or they realize that the only way to have a renewed
church is to leave the old church. This did not happen in Jesus's
lifetime, though, so he lived and died in the Jewish faith.
However, there is another angle to this question: did Jesus actually
believe and teach all the things that became the beliefs of the
Christian church?
Jesus certainly never said explicitly many of the things in the
creeds of the church:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven...
The church teaches these things both on the authority of the followers
of Jesus who wrote the books of the New Testament, and as its own
official interpretation of the surprising claims Jesus is reported
to have made about himself. Such as: "The Father and I are
one" (John 10:30) and "Before Abraham was, I am"
(John 8:58).
Whether the church's interpretation of Jesus is correct, that's
the big question.
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Did Jesus say he was coming back?
As usual, it depends on who you ask. According to traditional Christian
understanding, yes. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus predicts that the
temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed and desecrated, amid terrible
carnage (which happened in AD70). He goes on to say this:
"At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds
with great power and glory. He will send his angels and gather his
elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends
of the heavens" (Mark 13:26-27).
On the other hand, liberal theologians in recent centuries have
said that Jesus would never have talked like that, and that the
early church put such words in his mouth when they wrote the Gospels,
to reflect their own belief in his second coming.
However, such sceptics usually also say that Jesus cannot really
have predicted the fall of Jerusalem, so the passage must have been
written after it happened – which makes it somewhat bizarre
for Mark to say that Jesus would come back at the same time. It
would be like me predicting that Jesus would come back in the year
2000.
On yet another hand, there is a respectable scholarly opinion that
the whole thing is simply a misunderstanding of what Jesus says
in the Gospels. He talked, in picturesque language sometimes, about
his coming, about God's return to Israel, and about the future destruction
of Jerusalem – and later readers have muddled or misinterpreted
these teachings as predicting his own second coming.
St Paul was far more expansive about Jesus's second coming. He proclaimed
that Jesus would return to remake the heavens and earth, and judge
the world, and he seems to have expected it imminently.
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