Understanding Jesus - the extraordinary

By Lionel Wijesiri

No man’s words have been translated so frequently, distributed so widely and quoted so generally as the words of Jesus. Yet, on one occasion only, so far as we are told, did He write - and then it was with His finger on the ground. We do not have any idea what that writing was. Fearlessly, He entrusted the entire fabric of His teaching to the memory of those who listened to Him.

No portrait of Jesus was painted during his lifetime. No sculptor moulded His face or figure. Among the countless thousands of likenesses that form what has become a continuous tradition, there is only one that is even attributed to an eye witness. It was the slight sketch by St Peter, and it is preserved by the Cathedral in Rome that bears his name. The story is that the Apostle was asked what Jesus was like. On a piece of cloth he traced an outline.

Jesus’ sorrow

The depiction of Jesus in art took several centuries to reach a conventional standardised form for his physical appearance, which has subsequently remained largely stable since that time. Most images of Jesus have in common a number of traits which are now almost universally associated with Jesus, although variants are seen.

The conventional image of a fully bearded Jesus with long hair did not become established until the 6th century in Eastern Christianity, and much later in the West. Earlier images were much more varied. Images of Jesus tend to show ethnic characteristics similar to those of the culture in which the image has been created.

Beliefs that certain images are historically authentic, or have acquired an authoritative status from Church tradition, remain powerful among some of the faithful, in Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and Roman Catholicism.

It is thus remarkable that the successive generalities should have developed a kind of artistic orthodoxy, according to which the face of Jesus of Jesus is today beyond all other faces the most intimately known to the human eye.

Mystery

There have been many who asked if Jesus was always sad in His demeanour. The answer is that nowhere in the records is it stated or even implied that He laughed or smiled. From first to the last He was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

Jesus’ sorrow was not owing to his own sin, but to the sins of others. Paul calls followers to put sin out of their lives: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.

Yet there is no evidence that His sense of responsibility restrained the happiness of those around Him. At a marriage, it was He who turned the water into wine. At a funeral, it was He who turned the sorrow into joy. And children gathered around Him.

The recorded life of Jesus is, admittedly, the profoundest of all mysteries. But it is evident that whatever He said, whatever He did, embodied certain ideas, and that those ideas have worked through society since His day. Great changes have resulted and further changes are to be anticipated.

First is Christ’s emphasis on the infinite value, here and hereafter, of the individual. He did not say that all men are created equal. But he said that, by birth, all are divine.

The constructive genius of St Paul seized on this affirmation, and elaborated it into the citizenship that transcends all frontiers, announcing that, in Christ, there is nether Jew or Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, that all are entitled to the respect of brother to brother in the royal family of human race.

After such a “Declaration of Rights”, the Christen world could never be the same. Slowly a society which had been based on oppression and slavery, has become a society based, in the main on citizenship.

Law of the Gospel

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives examples of how His Law, the Law of the Gospel, fulfils the commandments of the Old Law. One example that Jesus gives is the fifth commandment: You shall not kill. Jesus adds to this the proscription of anger, hatred, and vengeance.

And then He goes even further, asking His disciples to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. Jesus is calling us on a moral and spiritual journey towards holiness, the perfection of love.

Another example Jesus gives is the sixth commandment: You shall not commit adultery. Jesus calls us to more, to the virtue of chastity: “But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Jesus applied His Magna Carta to women. The Gospel of Luke provides the answers to these questions. Twenty-four times in Luke, Jesus either met a woman, talked about a woman, or mentioned a woman in a parable. All of these 24 times are instructive and positive. The words accepting, sensitive, and affirming sum up what Luke and the example of Jesus Christ teach us about Jesus and women.

It was Jesus who set the child in the midst. His familiar New Testament picture of Jesus taking a child in his arms and receiving him with love portrays an attitude of care and concern for children found nowhere else in the ancient world. Children, along with women, old men, and slave, were viewed as physically weak burdens on society who had little value to the wider life of the community.

Stumble

In Greece and Rome, it was an accepted practice to abandon unwanted children along the roadsides to die.

Jesus, however, seemed to always find time for youngsters; he told his disciples that unless they became like little children they would not enter heaven. He warned his followers not to despise children or to cause them to stumble. Children were valuable and were to be treated with love and care.

It was Jesus who declared war on disease of body and mind. Whatever the different view one may take of his “miracles,’ they convinced mankind that it was worthwhile to touch the deadly contagion and apply treatment, It was the unique achievement of Jesus that He discerned the innermost secret of life itself - the secret of love. Not love as a mere emotion, but love as a strict emotion: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Unless we live in others, so He taught, we do not live our lives at all.

Today, mankind is still staggered by this omnipotent paradox and rebel against it. But we are learning by hard and painful experience that there is no way of living unless we live for others.

It is the rule of the family. It must become the rule of the society and of all nations.