Spying on Jesus

One of the things I have always wished I could do would be to return to first century Palestine during the three years that Jesus fulfilled his public ministry and follow Him from place to place, watching form a distance  as He encountered people and changed their lives.

Observing the miracles would, of course, be amazing – empty sockets growing eyes; withered hands regaining strength and flexibility; lepers once again merging with life while the lame danced and the mute sang.  Seeing what Jesus actually looked like intrigues me as well as the rest of the group of ragged fishermen and former tax collectors that followed Him.

But even more than that, I would like to see how he hung out with prostitutes and publicans, thieves and drunkards.  I would like to see how He walked in righteousness without compromise and at the same time conveyed absolute love and absolute truth to those whose lives were in the ditch.  How do we share God’s standard with a person who is living in sin without sounding self-righteous?  How do we accept a sinner without somehow seeming to approve the sin?  How do we affirm and love the God-given potential in even the worst of us without somehow enabling or excusing a broken and sinful life style? Jesus apparently pulled it off because the sinful and the broken clamored to Him while He himself remained sinless.

We live in a culture full of sinful and broken people who so quickly take offense at truth.  We live in a culture that now labels good as evil and evil as good and vilifies anyone who questions their paradigm as being bigoted and intolerant. But I doubt that the days of Jesus were much different.  So I want to know what He said and how He said it.  I want to know what His conversations focused on and how He called people to righteousness without sounding all religious and holier-than-thou.

I heard Graham Cooke say one time that we are obsessed with our sin while the Father is obsessed with our righteousness.  Our sin has been dealt with in Christ and so our failings are no longer the issue. For God.  We spend our days recounting all of our failures while God wants to recount the righteousness that is ours in Christ.  God wants to shout out the potential for spiritual greatness and goodness in each of so as to prophetically call forth what He has planted in each of us in seed form.

Maybe that was the secret of Jesus –  getting people to see who they could be in the eyes of God so that the appeal of the Father’s love and approval would simply outweigh the appeal of sin and the flesh.  However He did it, we need to figure it out because we are surrounded by sinners who long to hangout with Jesus and hear how He sees them and we are called to be Jesus to each of them.