In the days of the Roman Empire, during the reign of Augustus Caesar, when King Herod was tetrarch in Judea, a child was born to peasant parents in the town of Bethlehem. They were Jews. The mother’s name was Mariam. God had told Mariam that He was giving her a child even though she had slept with no man. God had said that the boy she was carrying would be great and would be called Son of the Most High, that this boy would sit on the throne of his father David and would “reign over the house of Jacob forever, [that] his kingdom would never end.” Mariam surely knew the meaning of these words, though she did not fully understand what was to happen. She gave birth and named the boy Yeshua, which in English translates to Jesus. The boy then grew up in a Jewish family in the town of Nazareth. He read the Law and the Prophets; he celebrated the Passover; he learned his father’s trade and became a carpenter. In many respects, he was an ordinary boy.
Except he wasn’t really an ordinary boy. About thirty years after his birth, during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, God called Jesus to proclaim the kingdom of God to the people and to verify his message by doing wonders. Jesus became an itinerant preacher in the region of Galilee and began to draw large crowds because of His teaching and miracles.
He taught people to love God above all things and to love their neighbors as themselves. He told people that they had to become like children in order to see God and that God demanded of them everything. He said not to worry about food or clothing – that God would provide what we needed – but instead to seek first His kingdom. He taught of a God who had mercy on sinners who repent but who had no mercy on those who think themselves OK. He called the people to a faith that was deeper than the status quo; he called them to give away their lives.
He healed the blind and the lame and cast out evil spirits from those oppressed by them. He was the rage of Galilee at the time, for people talked about him as people today might talk of a famous actor or a rising politician. Could he be the Messiah the prophecies spoke about? They would debate amongst themselves this question.
The large following he attracted did not go unnoticed. Along with his admirers, he also gathered enemies. Many leaders feared losing their influence, and, to them, Jesus was getting too influential. Some feared what Rome might do. If Rome caught wind that large crowds were flocking to hear a preacher whom many called Messiah, Rome might not be happy. And Rome could be brutal. Some were outraged at the things Jesus said. He certainly did not mince words. He called many of the Jewish leaders hypocrites, whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones, and he said that their father was the father of lies. He told parables against many leaders, and he did these things with crowds of people standing in front of him.
In addition, he taught and practiced things that seemed to violate the law. He forgave sins as if he was God Himself. He healed on the Sabbath and even called himself “Lord of the Sabbath.” He said, “I and the Father are one … if you have seen me you have seen the Father … no one comes to the Father except through me.” He claimed authority for himself, and yet to many, he was just a carpenter’s son. He challenged the status quo, and the status quo fought back.
Many Jewish leaders wanted Jesus out of the way. They tried to trap him in his words and debated how to be rid of this troublesome preacher. Finally, in the spring during the biggest Jewish festival of the year – the Passover – they saw an opportunity. Crowds had flocked to Jerusalem for the festival, and Jesus had come to town as well. After the Passover meal, at night, while the city slept, the Jewish leaders arrested him in a garden just outside town. One of his disciples led them to the place.
Time was of the essence. The Jewish Council (the Sanhedrin) met in a hasty midnight session to proclaim official charges against him. They found him guilty. The charge – blasphemy. This man claimed to be God. They then hurried him off to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, for only Rome had the authority to execute. They had a difficult time persuading Pilate to condemn Jesus, but they finally did so by whipping up the crowd that had showed up early in the morning.
Pilate had Jesus scourged with whips and then executed for being “King of the Jews.” The soldiers in charge spread his arms out wide across a thick wooden beam and then drove nails through his wrists. They pounded nails through his feet and into another beam, the two beams forming a cross. They then raised the cross and hung him there, battered and bleeding for all to see. Jesus died that afternoon.
Some of his followers took his body and began to prepare it for burial according to their custom. They used various spices and wrapped the body in linen with a separate piece for the head. Because the Sabbath was approaching, they could not finish the job, so they put the body into a tomb that was like a small cave and then rolled a great stone in front of it.
After the Sabbath, on the first day of the week, early in the morning, just before sunrise, many women, including Mariam of Magdala came to the tomb to finish their burial customs. They wondered how they would move the stone. When they reached the tomb, however, they found that the stone had already been moved and that the tomb was empty. Jesus appeared to Mariam and the women, and they ran and told his disciples.
Over the next forty days, Jesus appeared to his disciples in various locations. Two were walking along the road to Emmaus. A group was sitting in an upper room in Jerusalem. Some were fishing in Galilee, and he called them to the shore. A crowd of more than 500 all saw him at once. He taught and prepared his disciples for his going away, for he was to pass on to them his authority and mission. In the end, he returned to his Father from whom he had first come, but he gave a promise that he would return in like manner.
By late May or early June, the disciples were standing in the temple courts in Jerusalem and proclaiming that this “Jesus, whom you killed, God has raised from the dead. And we are witnesses of the fact.” Everywhere they went, the disciples proclaimed that the body of Jesus was resurrected from the dead. They were beaten for saying it. They were imprisoned for saying it. They were threatened and ordered to cease this message. Yet they insisted. “No. God has raised Jesus from the dead, and we saw it.” Some were stoned, some were whipped, some were hung on crosses themselves, but the message stayed the same.
The followers of Jesus multiplied, and they began to see the story. They saw the wreckage that sin had brought on the human race going all the way back to the garden. They saw the ancient prophecies of a king who would free his people from their bondage. They saw the ancient sacrificial system and the power of the shed blood to remove sin, and they understood. Messiah did not come to deliver us from the bondage of Rome. He did something much deeper and much grander. He delivered us from the bondage of ourselves. He took our sin and threw it into the sea. He rose and conquered it. He made it possible for the human race to fulfill its purpose once again. Now, in Christ, we can know God, not because we have kept a moral code or certain rituals, but because He has opened the door.
That is the story of Jesus. Remove it, and Christianity ceases to exist. The fundamental premise of the Christian faith is that God’s work and God’s revelation in history provide the foundation for any change in a person’s heart or life. Jesus today frees people from their sins because He really died under Pontius Pilate to free people from their sins. Jesus today has the power to change the darkest life because He really rose on the third day. Jesus today brings peace beyond understanding and joy abundantly because He really was the Son of God born in Bethlehem to a Galilean peasant girl during the reign of Augustus Caesar. The story is the substance of the faith. Jesus does not call people to be moral. He calls them to Himself. He calls them to jump into the story. He says to people, “Let my story change yours.”
