Who Does This Jesus Think He Is?

Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Course 2024

What Gospel do we sin-weakened, morally compromised people want to hear? It’s the Gospel of self-advancement, pleasure, total control over our lives and destiny, and unending wealth. It’s a Gospel unconcerned with other people, maybe the Gospel of Adam Smith. But it’s not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So when Jesus appears in Nazareth in what seems like His first missionary journey in Galilee, teaching repentance from sin, keeping the Ten Commandments and even loving those who hurt us, His neighbors were not at all impressed. He was acting like a rabbi, but everyone knew His training, at His dad’s side, was in carpentry. In today’s language, His curriculum vitae was most surely incomplete if He wanted to be a teacher of doctrine and morals. His listeners said, “where did He get all this? Surely not at a legitimate rabbinical school. He’s just another radical stirring up trouble. And I hear the Pharisees and Scribes accuse Him of heresy.” So, no faith, and the result was no miraculous cure of the sick. Their loss, these Nazareth people. So Jesus from then on was considered a man of Capernaum.

We can have some certainty that when Jesus prayed the psalms, He dwelt for a while on the words “Those outnumber the hairs of my head who hate me without cause. Too many for my strength are they who wrongfully are my enemies.” And that got worse, not better, as His ministry matured.

God is and has always been the God of love for His people. Initially He chose the people of Israel as His own, but time and again they broke His commandments, ignored the covenant they had made with God at Sinai. By the time of Jeremiah, it seems like the fabled divine patience had just run out. Josiah was Israel’s last good king, one who tried to reverse the long apostasy of Manasseh, tearing down pagan shrines and forbidding pagan worship. But he died fairly young and his heirs were terrible leaders who let faith and morality literally go to hell. Even so, the Lord longed for their love, and tasked Jeremiah to try to inspire their repentance, just as Jesus did centuries later: “Perhaps they will listen and turn back, each from his evil way, so that I may repent of the evil I have planned to inflict upon them for their evil deeds.” He does the same for all today who repent of their crimes, establish themselves through faith and sacrament in the Way Jesus taught, and unite with the Christian community in doing good for their neighbor. We must never lose hope, for God is love, often “tough love,” but always Love.