Jesus Christ - God's voice to save people

By Amal Hewavissenti

The life of Jesus Christ is the perfect example of his own teachings on self-sacrifice and unconditional love for other people. He focussed much of his teaching on the premise that God rules as the loving father who expects his children to believe firmly in him to find solace on earth and in heaven after death.

Even as he was breathing his last on the cross, he prayed to the God to forgive the soldiers who had inhumanly nailed him to the cross. It is also interesting to observe that he encouraged his followers to think very little about clothing, food or homes and to care for one another. Jesus Christ underlined the fact that people should depend truly on God who would re-establish prosperity on earth.

Even non Christians view him as a great teacher and consider him as an inspiring prophet who came on earth to rescue human kind. Generally the Christian religion is the flower of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ who had an elevated intellectual and conceptual framework to reshape the thinking of people of Palestine almost two thousand six hundred years ago.

In the Christian viewpoint, Jesus is divine and is the son of God who was sent to the earth to channel God's grace in to the human world.

Promise

In all probabilities, he lavished love and compassion on all sorts of people and the moments of his teachings were enormously enlightening and thought provoking experience for people. His boundless enthusiasm and the ineffable, questing mind found solutions for a myriad of questions and problems that long remained unsolved before people.

Jesus Christ persistently stressed that people should under no circumstances, repay evil with evil and one's greatest victory is to love another. His message concerned the kingdom of God that would soon triumph over the world of sin and evil to protect his followers for life.

He visualised entry into the kingdom as a challenge as well as a promise to be accepted by people who would be enabled to lead a new life in perfect obedience to God's will. The most spectacular segment of his teachings is found in his earnest command to love one's enemies.

"And thou shalt love the Lord, thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.

This is the first commandment."

"And the second is like, namely this, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself..." (Chapter 12 of Mark's Gospel). As the Gospels say, the spirit of God (in the form of a dove) rest on his shoulders when he is baptised and a heavenly voice proclaims him God's son.

His public life begins with his teachings in Galilee where he is accompanied by disciples such as Peter, John, Andrew, James the Elder, Matthew and Judas Iscariot.

Most of Jesus' teachings appear as prolonged speeches and the most prominent of these is the sermon on the mount which was greeted with rapturous applause.

The technique Jesus Christ employs in his teachings is the generous use of parables to illuminate religious or moral truths.

The Bible is profusely scattered with references to his miracles of superhuman powers and miracles of therapy. People watched, with disbelief, how Jesus Christ restored sight to the blind, cured people afflicted with leprosy, and gave back walking ability to the lame.

Though his life is a wonderful source of support for people, Jesus Christ was confronted with an unbroken chair of condemning, threats, aggression and antagonism from contemporary society.

A close examination of the events of his life shows that he was frequently accompanied by tragedy particularly in his attempts to support and rescue people.

Jesus Christ was born somewhere in 4 BC, shortly before the death of King Herod the Great, a ruler appointed by Romans in control of Palestine.

On a strange revelation of Jesus' birth, Herod indiscriminately killed the toddlers to bring a possible rival to ruin and to prevent any threat of his downfall.

However, Jesus miraculously survived death and grew up in Nazareth with his parents until he embarked on his humanitarian mission at the age of thirty.

His magnetic approach to people's needs and problems earned him a multitude of followers and a few powerful enemies who inevitably detested his religious acumen and growing popularity.

Encounter

His encounter with the teachers at the Temple was an important breakthrough in his life. Here the teachers were astonished at his understanding of religious questions and profound sympathy for mankind, in all respects, he had to struggle against all sorts of adversity and had little prospect of winning honour from Roman rulers.

On the other hand, he succeeded in invading common people's privacy fairly and justifiably and winning a growing chorus of worshipful praise from relieved masses.

Despite his great dedication and commitment for the welfare of the people, the last moment of his life was really tragic. In a crucial moment, his disciple Peter acknowledged him as the saviour and at this point Jesus Christ predicted his own death and subsequent resurrection. As Jesus and his apostles entered Jerusalem triumphantly to celebrate the passover, people thronged to welcome him by spreading palm branches before him.

His revolutionary teaching and popularity had directly provoked hostility in other religious leaders who greeted his teachings with scepticism and began to conspire against him.

On the fateful night of Jesus' arrest, at the famous last supper, Jesus Christ predicted that he would be betrayed and condemned to death.

In the middle of this historic supper, he gave bread to his disciples saying "This is my body" and gave them wine saying "This is my blood."

This tragic incident in Jesus' life shows that he was well prepared for the dark and even sinister possibilities that lay in his path to relieve people of their sufferings.