Remember Yasser Arafat? I mention him because my guess is that this leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization bore a stronger resemblance to the human Jesus of Nazareth than most of the iconoclastic imagery that has evolved over the last two millennia, particularly the Aryan revisionism. In other words, try to imagine a feisty little Jew from Palestine agitating and irritating the rich and powerful, and you may begin to see a different Jesus than the one that was presented to you in Sunday school. Now, I know what comfort there is in the squeaky-clean, spotless robed, clean-and-combed, manicured version of the Savior, but it unfortunately probably isn’t consistent with reality. This really need concern only those who profess to be Christian, and by that I mean those who claim to be disciples of Jesus as the Christ. But for those who do, there is a genuine dilemma about which Jesus they think they are following: the sanitized superman created by a developing religion, or the itinerate Nazarene preacher who chose fishermen and tax collectors to be his friends and students.
I’m taking off next week to visit Mom and Kim and her family, so I may not get many entries posted (especially if I can’t get the Word program in my laptop to cooperate better than it did on our trip earlier this summer to Lincoln). That’s why I thought I would just toss out the controversial (oh, that it could be considered inciting; better yet, insightful) notion that we need to think a little more carefully before we go shouting around that we love Jesus. He might have been someone that we would detest. History informs us such was the case for the majority of his contemporaries.
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