2-4 Jesus A Palestinian Jew
And so we come to I guess the crucial question, in our search for a
true picture of Jesus. What did people see in Jesus as He walked down
the street, as He scratched, sneezed, as perhaps He asked for
directions to someone's home...? Surely they saw no halo around His
head. The Orthodox and Catholic churches have done huge damage to
people in pushing this image of Jesus. People saw in Him a man. So
human, that they were surprised when He indirectly declared one day in
the synagogue that basically, He was Messiah. We read that Jesus “came
into his own country” (Mk. 6:1)- an artless reflection of the way in
which He really was so human, having His “own” native area- here on
this earth and not in any pre-existent form in Heaven! He had a very
common Jewish name. The brothers of Jesus had names which were among
the commonest Jewish names at the time- James, Joseph, Simon and Judas
(Mt. 13:55; Mk. 6:3). I know we know this, but just remember how Jesus
truly shared our nature. He smelt the smells of the marketplace, as He
walked around helping a little child crying because he'd lost his mum.
From the larynx of a Palestinian Jew there truly came the words of
Almighty God. There, in the very flesh and body tissue of the man
Jesus, was God manifested in flesh. And yet that wondrous man, that
being, that Son of God who had no human father, readily laughed at the
funny side of events, just like anyone else. His hands and arms would
have been those of a working man. He is always described as walking
everywhere- and it's been calculated that He must have walked 10,000
km. during His ministry. He slept under the Olive trees at the foot of
the Mount of Olives; the Son of man had nowhere to lay His head. So He
would often have appeared a bit rough, His feet would have developed
large blisters, and His skin would have been sunburnt. Palestine was
infested with bandits at the time. It was almost inevitable that the
Lord was robbed and threatened at least once. He would have gone
through all the gut feelings one does when they are mugged: the initial
shock, the obvious question that skates through the mind 'How much harm
are they gonna do me...?', the bad taste left in the mouth afterwards,
the way one keeps on re-living every moment of what happened. He would
have known those feelings.
He was “despised and
rejected of men”, as Isaiah had foretold so long before. It’s perhaps
hard to feel from our distance the extent to which Galilee was despised
by the Jerusalem Jews. Although Jerusalem to Galilee is only around 100
km., “only in exceptional circumstances will someone living in
Jerusalem have travelled to the distant province of Galilee, as the Life
of Josephus shows…a journey to Rome would be more likely for a better
class Jerusalem dweller than one to provincial Galilee, which was the
back of beyond…the people of Judaea despised the uneducated Galileans
and were not particularly interested in this remote province”(1). Yet it was exactly from here
that the Son of God came! It was from the parochial, the ordinary, from
the nothing special, that God’s holy child came forth to change this
world. So if you too feel a nobody, a cut below the rest, held back by
your background…this is the very wonder of God manifestation. It’s
through you and me, the kids from the backstreets, the uneducated, the
duffers, the dumbers…that God Almighty reveals Himself to this world.
Notes
(1) Martin Hengel, The Geography of Palestine in Acts, in Richard Bauckham, ed., The Book of Acts Vol. 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1995), p. 33.
