Jesus in 3D

Jesus in 3D

© 2011 by Michael DeFazio. All rights reserved.

Published by Real Life Church

Smashwords edition

23841 Newhall Ranch Road

Valencia, CA 91355

www.reallifechurch.org

Published in association with Samizdat Creative

5441 South Knox Court

Littleton, CO 80123

samizdatcreative.com

ISBN-13: 9780983328032

The author retains sole copyright to the materials.

Cover design by Joshua Heyer

www.heyerdesign.com

All Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2010 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

To Beth and Claire

I hope this is only one of many ways

I help you see Jesus more clearly.

Contents

Introduction

One

What Story Does Jesus Fulfill?

Two

What Did People Want From Jesus?

Three

What Did Jesus Come Here To Do?

Four

What Made Jesus Angry?

Five

What Did Jesus Teach?

Six

Why Did Jesus Die?

Seven

What Difference Does Jesus’ Resurrection Make?

Sources

Endnotes

Introduction

About a year ago I saw my first 3D movie. (Yes, I know, I’m a little behind.) The film was beautiful, but after a while I got a bit tired of it. So I took off my 3D glasses to see if I could enjoy the film without them. I could see the basic images and for the most part follow the movement, but focusing was very difficult and I about gave myself a headache. So I gave up, put the glasses back on, and took in the rest of the show.

Reading the Gospel stories of Jesus is for many of you not unlike watching a 3D movie without wearing 3D glasses. You can make out a few details and get a vague sense of what’s going on, but the whole screen is fairly distorted and if you stare too long, your head starts to hurt.

I hope this book changes that. Its purpose is to take a close look at Jesus as a real person—the real person you read about in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. [1] These four books tell the story of Jesus, and this story inspires, encourages, enlightens, and even transforms us. But it also confuses us.

I (perhaps naïvely) believe anyone will benefit from reading this book, but I’m especially writing to you who have read the Gospels and walked away confused. Maybe you love a verse or two from Matthew or Mark, or perhaps a story from Luke or John. But even the parts you love feel like individual puzzle pieces without a box top to clarify how they fit together.

The box top you’re looking for is something Jesus called the kingdom of God. Or to return to our original metaphor, if Jesus’ mission is a 3D film, God’s kingdom is a pair of 3D glasses. It integrates the individual layers of color to form a single coherent image.

Some of you have never thought twice about the kingdom of God, even if you’ve gone to church your whole life. This is kind of weird, considering that the kingdom of God formed the centerpiece of Jesus’ entire movement. If you don’t believe me, check out the following list. Here are some of the many ways we see Jesus and the Gospel writers talking about God’s kingdom.

1) How Jesus began his ministry: "The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark 1.14-15; also Matthew 4.17) [2]

2) What God sent Jesus to do: "I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent." (Luke 4.43)

3) What Jesus actually did: Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. (Luke 8.1)

4) What Jesus said to seek above all else: "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." (Matthew 6.33)

5) What Jesus sent his disciples to proclaim: When Jesus had called the Twelve together . . . he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. (Luke 9.1-2, 61; also Matthew 10.5-8)

6) The center of Jesus’ model prayer: "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6.9-10)

7) The meaning of Jesus’ miracles and exorcisms: "But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." (Luke 11.20; Matthew 12.28)

8) The subject of Jesus’ parables: "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables." (Luke 8.9; also Matthew 13)

9) How Jesus explains his defenseless acceptance of death: "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place." (John 18.36)

10) The summary of Jesus’ ministry: Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. (Matthew 4.23; 9.35)

Clearly, God’s kingdom was a big deal to Jesus. But what is it?

Jesus never defines it, no doubt in part because a definition alone could never tell the whole story. It might help us get a good start though, so I’m going to give it a shot. Building especially on Jesus’ model prayer, here is our working definition of the kingdom of God: The realm over which God rules as king, where his name is properly honored and his will is promptly done.

I’ll spend the rest of this book unpacking what that means. In chapter one, I’ll overview the story of God up to the coming of Jesus. (In other words, the whole Old Testament in about twenty pages!) Chapter two will explore the first century world of Jesus—what expectations they had for someone like him. The next three chapters lay out four interlocking goals of Jesus’ mission: establish God’s kingdom and reform God’s family (three), warn of God’s judgment (four), and clarify God’s will (five). The final two chapters examine the meaning of Jesus’ death (six) and the impact of his resurrection (seven). By the end, you’ll have a better grasp not only of the individual elements of Jesus’ agenda, but also how they fit together within the overall story of God’s search for a kingdom.

One: What Story Does Jesus Fulfill?

Talking about Jesus today is both difficult and easy. Easy because everyone seems to love Jesus. Difficult because the Jesus most people love bears a shadowy resemblance to the real thing. Search for Jesus online and in one-tenth of a second you’ll discover nearly 200,000 options to explore. The images alone will make your head spin in confusion (or shake in disgust), and not just because of the amount of Jesuses but the variety as well. You’ll see laughing Jesus, crying Jesus, serious Jesus, smiling Jesus, black Jesus, white Jesus, warrior Jesus, hippie Jesus, biker Jesus, business Jesus, Native American Jesus, Middle Eastern Jesus, iconic Jesus, cartoon Jesus, even—and perhaps most tellingly—Play-Doh Jesus.

There seem to be as many profiles of Jesus as there are people talking about him. What’s worse, the underlying question has become, "What kind of Jesus do you want? Folks have always disagreed about different aspects of Jesus’ identity and work, but today much of the Jesus conversation has been hi-jacked by consumerism." This is just a fancy way of saying that most of us construct an image of Jesus that matches what we already desire. Do you want soul-saving Jesus or world-changing Jesus, Jesus who rides a donkey or one who prefers an elephant, a Mr. Universe double or a Gandhi look-alike? All this begs the question of how to navigate our path through the many faces of Jesus and discern the truth of who he was and is.

Things don’t get much easier when it comes to Jesus’ message about God’s kingdom. While virtually all scholars agree that proclaiming and manifesting God’s kingdom was central to Jesus’ ministry, beyond this small consensus we find many disputes. Is the kingdom of God heavenly or earthly? Present or future? Political or spiritual? Personal or communal? Or more to the point, in what ways is it a combination of all these things (and many more besides)?

Remember our working definition of God’s kingdom: The realm over which God rules as king, where his name is properly honored and his will is promptly done. Given that God created the universe to be his kingdom (as we’ll soon discover), in one sense the kingdom of God is a way of talking about the world as he intended it to be. But keeping the matter this general isn’t enough. We must be more rooted and specific if we want to understand what Jesus came here to do.

More to the Story?

Remembering a simple fact of communication may help us: Most statements can’t be properly understood apart from the context or story in which they find a home. Much of the time we recognize this instinctively. For instance, the words I have a dream by themselves could mean anything. But in the context of a certain Alabama preacher’s struggle for racial equality in 20th century America, they take on very specific content. They find a home here, and here they say something they don’t say anywhere else.

If I told you that Frodo and Sam reached Mount Doom and successfully destroyed the One Ring created to rule them all, you’d need to know the Lord of the Rings story to make heads or tails of my declaration. There are endless examples—We’re not in Kansas anymore, I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse, red pill or blue pill?—but you get the point. Statements don’t make sense apart from the context or story in which they belong.

This matters in our search for the real Jesus because when he arrived on the scene announcing, The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news! (Mark 1.14-15), his words hardly came from nowhere. His announcement of the arrival of God’s kingdom marks a climactic moment in a certain story, and without this story we risk missing Jesus.

Clues from the Gospels

If you were going to tell someone the story of Jesus, where would you begin? What would you say first? How would you open your presentation or start the conversation? The authors of our Gospels clearly wrestled with these questions. All four of them open differently, each one making unique and complementary points in line with their distinct portraits of Jesus. Yet in their own unique ways, each of the Gospels begins by drawing attention to a simple but substantial fact: the Jesus story belongs within a much larger story of what God had been doing for quite some time.

Matthew wastes no time in framing his Jesus story within the history of Abraham and his descendants. The second word of Matthew’s Gospel is genealogy or geneseos, which comes from the Greek word genesis. Sound familiar? Matthew then ties Jesus to two central figures from biblical history, both of whom figure prominently in his upcoming family tree: Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Mt 1.1). Matthew rounds out this opening section with a well-crafted list of characters from Israel’s history—some more memorable (and easier to pronounce!) than others—and these many stories together tell the one story of God’s relationship with his people. [3]

Unlike Matthew, Mark is in too much of a hurry to bother with a long list of names. Instead he immediately points out how the very beginnings of Jesus’ story must be understood in relation to ancient promises given by God through Israel’s prophets. Notice his first words: The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet. Apparently some knowledge of this Israelite prophet named Isaiah—and in turn the world in which he prophesied—will help us know this Messiah named Jesus.

Luke’s opening scenes provide many clues like this, but let’s stick to one hint we find in the first line of his work: Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us. For our purposes the key word here is fulfilled. You only talk about things having been fulfilled in the present in relation to promises made in the past. In other words, once again you must know the story into which Jesus born and the promises made there in order to understand who he is.

For John’s part, we don’t even need the entire opening sentence. The first three words will do: In the beginning. The rest of John’s opening poem (1.1-18) overflows with allusions to the sacred history