The Rebel Jesus

To the ( self )  righteous Jew or Pharisee such as the apostle Paul, it was unthinkable! This son of a carpenter from Nazareth, one who came from a highly questionable parentage, was not acting according to their traditions & what is more, He was even teaching His disciples to be rebels! Jesus, even though His mother, who had become pregnant out of wedlock, was daring to defy the traditions handed down by their saintly fathers & instead telling people what the commands truly meant! He even claimed to be YHWH Himself ( His Son )!

To those contemporaries of Jesus, in particular, the religious elite, His actions must have seemed like the highest form of treason; not only was He teaching a Change in the Law, He was advocating a denial of the Kingship of Rome & then claiming it for Himself! To make matters worse, He refused to be the kind of King they had wished for, one to throw off the yoke of Rome & lead them on another Exodus, just like the one Moses had led them on! Jesus did lead His People on a New Exodus, but it was A Spiritual Exodus, out of The Bondage of Sin rather than out of physical slavery! Just like their Egyptian taskmasters, the Pharisees had enslaved the True Israelites in a spiritual sort of bondage, a bondage to the Law!

Jesus taught His disciples, as One with Authority, that the traditions of their fathers were 'all wet'! There man-made traditions merely served to deepen their guilt, especially because they taught that, if one kept these traditions, that one was free of the commandments of YHWH! Because of these Teachings, plus the fact that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah & YHWH Himself, though the majority accepted Him as Messiah for a time, the religious elite saw Him as a Rebel & One who needed to be dealt with before He raised the ire of Rome! For a time, the Pharisees left Him alone, except for the occasional questioning, perhaps because they had hoped that He was the Promised Messiah & would lead them to freedom from the Roman yoke; when they figured out, however, that He cam to deliver His People from THEIR bondage, they endeavored to kill Him & finally succeeded in getting the Romans to crucify Him!

The Crucifixion of Jesus, of course, only served His Purpose, His Purpose being to offer His own Body & Blood ( as the Passover Lamb had only signified ) in order to reconcile Man on the Land ( Adam ) with His Creator! The disciples of Jesus, even though they did not fully ( at first, especially ) grasp His Plan, eventually understood it well enough to carry on His work of reconciliation. These disciples received much the same treatment as Jesus had, not just because they themselves were rebels, but because they had dared to accept Jesus as the Messiah & had followed Him in His rebellion! Those who followed Jesus in His rebellion were eventually martyred in much the same manner as He was killed!

Jesus was NOT a Rebel! Jesus, as the Son of YHWH, had the Authority to teach the religious elite & all true Jews what the commands really meant! The Pharisees rejected His claim because He, as a Man claimed equality with YHWH! Besides this, He Himself rejected many of the traditions of their fathers & taught others to do the same! From their point of view, Jesus WAS a rebel, not only because of who He was, but because of what He did! As Followers of Jesus, we too are to be rebels; rebels against the System of Man, to Rage Against the Machine, so to speak!

We are here, as the Body of Christ, to implement His Reconciliation & Rule on this Earth as it is in Heaven! To do this, we must act in rebellion against any system that man forms in opposition to the Kingdom of our Heavenly Father! In our rebellion, though, we need to be careful to remember that we are commanded to love our enemies & to pray for those who spitefully use us! Not only are we Rebels of the Highest Degree, as was Jesus, we are also Ministers of Reconciliation; we were set free from the Bondage of Sin & Death so that we could continue His Ministry of the Marriage of Heaven & Earth, that is, not only to believe with the heart & mind, but to act with our hands & feet!

Charles Haddon Shank