Not Recognising Jesus

The Bible is a surprising book, it will not behave. Apart from presenting a non-Cartesian world where familiar references such as linear time and cause and effect are bypassed, its main character, Jesus, is often not recognised.

 In the Old Testament, there are strange appearances of ‘one like a son of God’ as in the case of a fourth man appearing in the fiery furnace Nebuchadnezzar had thrown Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Such appearances are taken to be the pre-existent Jesus, the Son of God.

 But the references in the New Testament, where individuals failed to recognise Jesus, are as curious as they are inescapable. And maybe can speak to us in our struggles to keep hold of genuine Christianity, or grapple with questions often from childhood about…pretty much everything in the Bible.

 Pole position

 Pole position must go to Jesus’ home ‘church’ or synagogue, followed shortly by Jesus’ own family, his brothers and sisters:

 Luke 4: He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Extraordinary scenes. Opposition to Jesus comes from places you least expect it.

Mark 3

Jesus told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him, to keep the people from crowding him. For he had healed many, so that those with diseases were pushing forward to touch him. Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him.  A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

It wouldn’t be a bad decision to stop and immerse ourselves in the drama of those moments. The tears, the anxiety, the conversations behind Jesus’ back, and the decision to try and ‘take charge of him’, are tantamount to sectioning in our society. Blind to all the people sat around him, healed and in their right minds listening to his teaching.

He will open the eyes of the blind

The Road to Emmaus

Much excellent work has been written about the two disconsolate disciples walking away from Jerusalem on the day of the resurrection. I’m thinking especially of N T Wright’s chapter ‘Walking to Emmaus in a Postmodern World’, The Challenge of Jesus SPCK. To quote one sentence ‘Into this conversation comes Jesus, incognito.’

The actual text reads:

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him. He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”  They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” “What things?” he asked. “About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people…we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. 

Stay with us

But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.  Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. 

Mark adds this: ‘Jesus appeared in a different form to two of them while they were walking in the country.’

I have no answer to the question ‘Why?’. In other words, why would Jesus appear in a different form, incognito to the two men? The bible will not behave. Later that evening Jesus appears to the disbelieving disciples, with the holes in his wrists and feet in his resurrected body, clearly recognisable to the disciples. He eats fish to prove he is as real as he ever was, and not a ghost. But here, on the same day, he appears in a different form.

I wonder then. Has he appeared to you, to me? Incognito. Do we, sometimes, meet someone, who is Jesus in disguise?

Peter

Read one way, this is harrowing. The event itself is like a many-faceted pebble, or jewel, but pebble seems more appropriate as we’re on the shore of Lake Galilee.

Maybe a week after the resurrection and after the disciples had seen the resurrected Jesus perhaps a few times. I wouldn’t like to conjecture that they had become blasé about the resurrection, but we are strange creatures.

Most of the disciples were with Peter in a boat, fishing. Jesus is on the shore cooking some fish for breakfast. Let’s assume it is quite early, just before sunrise will do. From the boat the disciples were watching this man preparing a fire, they can see the flames, and maybe smell the aroma of the burning wood and the fish. When they recognise who it is Peter reacts:

‘Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” As soon as Simon Peter heard him say, “It is the Lord,” he jumped into the water. The other disciples followed in the boat, towing the net full of fish, for they were not far from shore, about a hundred yards. When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish you have just caught.” So, Simon Peter climbed back into the boat and dragged the net ashore. None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord.  When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.” Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.” The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. 

Again, in a different form. The evidence was there. And the way He dealt with Peter, gently, insistently, three times asking to counter the effect of the three times Peter had denied him and wept before the cock crowed.

And He does this with all of us. Asking us ‘Do you love Me?’ for each time we have denied Him. To show us His limitless love lavished on us who deserve nothing yet are on the receiving end of everything. As the bible says He wipes away all our tears.

Two Summaries

John, the disciple Jesus loved, sat down in his older years and composed what we know as ‘The Gospel According to John’. With the advantage of hindsight, he picks up his quill and ink and writes:

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

I don’t know how hard it must have been for John to pen those words. His love was insufficient to hold him close to Jesus when he was arrested. He like all the others fled and escaped and hid, afraid behind locked doors, had disbelieved the women who had seen Jesus. He was one of those sheep scattered when the Shepherd was struck and he, like the others, had found it difficult to believe and to recognise Him in his resurrected form.

And yet. Now he writes that once he had recognised Him, he was restored, just like Peter, and could say he had been accepted as a child of God.

And, the Apostle who harassed and persecuted the church, the Pharisee Saul, later to be named Apostle Paul put it like this:

‘We declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’

I can only imagine what must have been in Paul’s heart and mind as he wrote the word ‘they’ and ‘rulers of this age’ as he had been one of them entrusted to eradicate the followers of Jesus.

And yet. The first words the Pharisee Saul hears on the road to Damascus is the voice of Jesus who says simply: ‘Saul, Saul why are you persecuting Me?’

Saul could not see the Messiah, the Christ, in the church. The church was as unrecognisable as Jesus had been.

And as we are called forward through Passover to Pentecost to Tabernacles where the reality of God dwelling (tabernacling) in the church is intensified, get ready. Get ready for our true identity to be strangely obscured from the ‘church’ or our ‘family and friends’ who think of us as mad and come to take charge of us, despite our congregations full of healed individuals and many made whole. And ‘rulers of the age’ do with us what they did to Jesus. And yet. These will be the days of ‘glory in the church to all generations’ as Paul wrote in Ephesians. It isn’t for us to make Jesus known. He will open the eyes of the blind.