The Jesus I Never Knew: A Very Jewish Messiah
Text: Matthew 26:17-30; Romans 11:17-24
November 5, 2006
Jeffrey Hayes Wildrick
Today, we’re beginning a new series of messages inspired by the book, The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancy.
Christians usually think they know a lot about Jesus. We are called “Christians” after all. Christian means “Follower of Christ,” – Jesus Christ. Some of us have been hearing stories about Jesus all our lives. Some are just beginning to get to know about him. But how well do you know him, really?
Even in preaching, it seems as though Jesus is often the silent guest at the table. I looked over my own sermon notes from the last couple of years. I consider myself a biblical preacher. I try to be sure that the Bible is at the heart of every sermon, and that Jesus is in every message. But even so, most of my sermon texts in the past few years have been from the epistles, sometimes from the Old Testament. But how many messages focused specifically on the person of Jesus?
So, for the next eight weeks, ending on Christmas Eve, we’re going to be walking with Jesus, studying his miracles, his teaching, his politics, his relationships with those who loved him, and those who barely knew him. We’re going to learn what was important to him, and from that I hope we’ll all get a better picture of what should be important to us today. Most of all, I hope that as we get to know the real Jesus, the flesh and blood and yet God Jesus, who walked and cried and ate and even got angry – that we’ll fall in love with him all over again.
So, today we’re going to begin at the beginning. Not with his birth. After all, we have to save that for Christmas. But even before Jesus was born, God had planned something about him that would be at the very core of his identity. Jesus was Jewish. And even his last act on earth before his crucifixion was an acting out of that reality.
Listen to the Word of God…
READ SCRIPTURE
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When I was growing up, well over half the kids in my school were Jewish. Like children everywhere, we tried hard to stake out our territories and establish our identities. In our school the first question we asked of any newcomer was simple. “Are you Christian or Jewish?” And, to tell the truth, when we “Christian” kids grouped up, we could be pretty prejudiced against our Jewish neighbors. Somewhere along the way we learned all the stereotypes. The Jews were our neighbors, but they were somehow not “like us.” After all, they didn’t believe in Jesus.
Now, here’s the odd thing. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that Jesus was born a Jew. But I couldn’t figure out any way that he could be both a Christian and a Jew. I remember talking about this with my friends once, and we came up with what seemed like a logical solution. We figured Jesus must have converted!
In fact, nothing could have been farther from the truth.
CENTURIES BEFORE JESUS WAS BORN, God chose a small, nomadic tribe of people for a special purpose, and he placed them on a particular piece of land. They were not a particularly noble or wealthy tribe. It wasn’t a large land – about the size and shape of the state of New Jersey. It was certainly not an especially fertile land. In fact, thousands of years later one Israeli moaned, “For forty years our people wandered in the wilderness until finally God gave them the only piece of land in the entire mid-East that doesn’t have any oil.”
Yet God chose the land for a reason. It was the land between. Although it was poor in natural resources, it was located right at the crossroads between the world’s ancient superpowers. The negative side of this was that whenever one superpower went to war against another superpower, Israel usually ended up being the battlefield. The positive side was that at some time in it’s time of dominance, just about every major civilization went through Israel – allowing Israel to be an influence on every culture around them.
God chose a people, but not for their own sakes. He made his purpose for the Jews known in many places, but he made it especially clear when he commissioned the prophet Isaiah:
He says, “You will do more than restore the people of Israel to me. I will make you a light to the Gentiles, and you will bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6 (NLT)
The word “Gentiles” means simply “Anyone who isn’t a Jew.”
God’s purpose for Jews was/is to bring salvation to the world.
And he promised again and again that someday he would send a messiah, who would be born in the line of David, to bring God’s salvation.
And so, for centuries, the Jewish people waited for the messiah.
Even in the year we now call 1 A.D., the land of Israel was under the cruel occupation of a foreign power. It was the new superpower of the day – Rome. So it’s no wonder that those who were looking for a messiah figured that he would come with one purpose: to set them free from Roman tyranny.
Jesus was a very Jewish messiah.
Two of the four gospels go out of their way to point this out. Listen to the very first words of the New Testament:
This is a record of the ancestors of Jesus the Messiah, a descendant of David and of Abraham. Matthew 1:1 (NLT)
The very first words of the New Testament are written to establish Jesus’ Jewish heritage. Matthew even goes so far as to trace his ancestry through the entire Old Testament. Luke does the same.
What’s the first thing we read about Jesus after he was born?
On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived. Luke 2:21 (NIV)
First, he was circumcised. Although circumcision is very common now, it was rare in the ancient world. But for Jews, it was sacred. It was a sign of God’s covenant (his special relationship with the Jewish people, and every Jewish boy was circumcised when he was eight days old.
Next he was named. Traditionally, Jewish boys are not named until the day of their circumcision – and that’s the way it was with Jesus.
Let’s think for a few moments about the name, “Jesus.”
This may surprise some of you, but the name “Jesus” wasn’t Jesus’ name at all! Jesus is the English equivalent his real name, kind of like “Jorge” is the Spanish equivalent of “George.”
In the original Greek New Testament, the name is written “Yea-suse.” Kind of similar. But in Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages Jesus spoke, his name would have been pronounced, “Yeshua.” That’s right. Yeshua is the real name of Mary’s baby boy.
Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s actually a fairly common Jewish name. It’s also the name of another hero of the Bible, another Jew who was a savior of his people – the man who led the people out of the wilderness and into God’s promised land. Anybody got it? “Joshua!” Joshua and Yeshua and Jesus are all the same name.
And like most biblical names, this name has a meaning. It means, “He shall save.”
The first Joshua led the people out of the wilderness and into the promised land. Jesus, Yeshua, came to lead us out of the wilderness of sin, and into the land of God’s eternal promise – heaven.
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Have you ever wondered about that story when Jesus was twelve years old? His parents took him to Jerusalem. But, in the caravan on the way home they suddenly realized that Jesus wasn’t with them. After searching frantically, they finally returned to Jerusalem and found him, in the temple, listening to the teaching of the elders.
But why were they in Jerusalem in the first place? What happens to every little Jewish boy around his 12th birthday? He has his Bar Mitzvah. But what’s a Bar Mitzvah? It is a Jewish rite of passage, a little bit like our “confirmation,” but different. At age 12, Jewish boys are considered to have ended their childhood and reached the “age of accountability.” At the Bar Mitzvah they stand before the tribe and claim the covenant that they were circumcised into. From that day forward they are considered full-fledged, adult members of the community. In fact, one of the key parts of the ceremony is when a boy says, “Today, I am a man.”
All the evidence of the story, what every Jewish reader would simply assume when reading it, is that Jesus had just had his Bar Mitzvah. Now, no longer a child in his culture, he set about fulfilling his destiny by immersing himself in God’s Word at the Temple.
Every time Jesus sat down to eat a meal he was reminded that he was a Jew. Jews have a restricted diet. Jews eat kosher. There are certain meats, like pork, that an observant Jew can’t eat. They can’t eat shellfish. They can’t eat meat and dairy at the same meal. Now it’s true that the kosher diet is a particularly healthy diet – it saved the Jewish people from eating some foods that were particularly prone to disease. But the main message of the kosher diet is this: You’re different. You are set apart. You are chosen. Never forget that you are not like other people.” That was the cultural soup that Jesus swam in every day, every year. He was a very Jewish messiah.
ONE OF THE BEST WAYS TO UNDERSTAND ANY CULTURE is to understand it’s holidays. Do you want to know what’s important to America? Watch us on the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King day, Thanksgiving. And what will you learn? You’ll learn that we love food and football!
No, you’ll understand the importance of independence, our work ethic, the values we’ve been willing to send our children to die for in times of war, our belief that all men are created equal, and even that our nation was founded upon faith in God.
What holidays did Jesus celebrate as a child and as a man? Well, much to some folk’s surprise, Jesus never celebrated either Christmas or Easter!
But he did celebrate Purim, the festival remembering how Esther was chosen by God to save the Jews from persecution in Persia.
He celebrated Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement,” where annually the people of Israel would confess their sins (both as individuals and as a nation), then the high priest would slaughter a goat in the Temple of the Lord, as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the people.
All of the Jewish holidays were religious holidays, centered on God’s faithfulness and God’s promise. Almost all of the trips Jesus made to Jerusalem revolve around the celebration of these holy days.
But the most significant of all was PASSOVER.
Every culture has certain stories that are told and retold, and the values of the nation are embedded in the story.
We’re about to celebrate Thanksgiving, and over the next few weeks, school children will hear again about how the Pilgrims crossed the ocean in seeking freedom from tyranny, with the hope of starting a new nation. They’ll be reminded of how the Native American Indians befriended these poor lost souls and taught them how to plant corn. They’ll dress up as Pilgrims and Indians and sit around huge tables enjoying a fall-harvest feast. Regardless of whether this is historically accurate or not, the entire legend has become our national story, and we reenact it year after year because it tells who we are, and who we aspire to be.
If you take the emotional resonance of Thanksgiving and multiply it about ten times, you’ll begin to understand the significance of Passover.
Every year at Passover, for thousands of years, Jews have gathered around the table and reenacted the central story of their people. The story is told every year as part of an elaborate meal. Every bit of food has symbolic meaning. There is horseradish to remind people of their tears. There is a mushy fruit paste that reminds people of the bricks and mortar they were forced to build with as slaves. There is the shank-bone of a lamb, reminding them of the lambs that were sacrificed – who’s blood spared them from the angel of death. There is bread – unleavened bread – that reminds them that they fled without leavening into the desert. There is wine, reminding them of the blood of the innocents, and God’s deliverance.
It is the quintessential Jewish meal. It is a meal of remembrance. Jesus celebrated it every year of his life.
And on the last night of his life he gathered his disciples around him on the eve of Passover. It was the night before he was to give his own life to set people free from sin. It was the night that he took the most Jewish of all Jewish rituals and gave it new meaning. The bread was his body broken. The wine was his blood shed. And because of his sacrifice, all people would be able to find freedom from the death of sin, and find new life with God our heavenly father.
Jesus was, and is, the Jewish messiah. His Jewishness is as central to his life and ministry as is the truth that he is fully human and fully God.
Could I ask for a show of hands? How many people here today are Jewish, or have Jewish heritage?
So where does that leave the rest of us?
Of course, most of the first Christians, that is, “Followers of Christ,” were Jews. It’s only natural. But then, a strange thing started to happen.
First, Jesus himself seemed to go out of his way to connect with god-fearing, but non-Jewish people. Remember the woman at the well, and the Centurion?
Then, after his return to Heaven, more and more Gentiles began to come to believe in him. To see the light that God had promised – the light to all nations.
It created a huge problem! Lots of Jewish believers figured that if you wanted to be a Christian, first you had to convert to Judaism. How else could you serve (and benefit from a relationship with) the Jewish messiah? “First get circumcised, then let’s talk!”
It was only another Jew, Paul, who put it all together.
You Gentiles, who were branches from a wild olive tree, have been grafted in. So now you also receive the blessing God has promised Abraham and his children, sharing in the rich nourishment from the root of God’s special olive tree. But you must not brag about being grafted in to replace the branches that were broken off. You are just a branch, not the root. Romans 11:17b-18
Gentiles, people like most of us, are like branches that are grafted into the covenant that God made with Abraham. We’re the newcomers. By God’s grace, God’s salvation is for all people, through faith in Jesus.
You can be born a Jew, but you can’t be born a Christian. You can only be re-born a Christian.
Jesus was the Jewish messiah, but through Jesus, God opened the way for all people to be saved.
Which is why I’m always surprised with how stingy some of us can be with Jesus. Because the world is full of people who need to know about Jesus. The world is full of people, like us, who can only receive life, can only receive salvation, if they too are grafted in.
The Jewish people were called to be a light to the nations. Jesus came to bring God’s light to all people. And Jesus says to you and to me…
“You are the light of the world.” Matthew 5:14
If we have received the light of God’s love by giving our lives to Jesus, then it’s also our call to share his light and his life with others. The salvation of the world has been God’s purpose all along – starting with the Jewish people, leading to Jesus, and now, through you and me. The torch is in our hands.
Today we are going to gather again around the Lord’s table, to eat the bread and drink the wine of the Passover meal. It is the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. It is a promise of his real presence among us as we worship. It is a reminder of our heritage – that we have been grafted into God’s covenant of grace by faith in the Jewish messiah. May God bless us as we share the feast.
