| HIGHLIGHTS OF DAWN | June 2004 |
The Lamb of God
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“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” |
FOR ALMOST ONE YEAR much publicity has been given to a new movie produced by Mel Gibson, “The Passion of the Christ.” Since this is a religious movie, the promotional methods used were unusual. Gibson sent 250,000 promotional DVDs to pastors of churches. A web site supplied churches with hundreds of postcards and posters for their congregations. About 15,000 religious leaders were invited to advance screenings. The main topic being discussed was did the movie blame the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus, and was this anti-Semitic? The movie opened at 3,000 theaters on Ash Wednesday and the first day’s gross was $26.5 million, making it the third biggest opening in history.
MOVIE REVIEW
A feature article appeared in the periodical, The US News and World Report dated March 8, 2004, and entitled, “The Real Jesus.” It was written to review this movie. On the front cover a caption to the title read, “Searching for the truth between Mel Gibson and the Gospels.” The caption to the article said, “How a Jewish reformer lost his Jewish identity.” The article said, “The audience gathering for Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ last week had few apprehensions about the film they were about to see. Most belonged to a large evangelical church. And even before the lights were dimmed, many who had waited eagerly for the showing in the Arlington, Virginia, theater said they were expecting an ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful’ version of the Passion story. Many also admitted to being puzzled, and even skeptical, about the allegations of anti-Semitism that had been swirling around the film for months.
“The lobby chatter afterward suggested that the film lived up to their expectations. ‘I could see it 10 more times,’ raved Sandra Correa, a mortgage banker, as she left the theater. She didn’t find it anti-Semitic at all, and even the sometimes brutally graphic violence seemed justified to her. ‘It’s hardly more graphic than the junk many adults allow their kids to see on TV. And this violence,’ she said, ‘has a purpose.’
“As months of carefully stoked controversy have made clear, not all viewers give the movie such an unqualified thumbs up. Prominent Jewish leaders, while not accusing Gibson or his film of being deliberately anti-Semitic, feel that it will fuel or reinforce the anti-Jewish sentiments that appear to be on the rise around the world. And Jews are not the only ones who think Gibson’s portrayal of the events leading up to, and including, Christ’s Crucifixion is an exploitative and sensationalistic distortion of the story. So also said James Carroll, a former Catholic priest, a novelist, and the author of Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews.
QUESTIONS RAISED
“At the very least, the film raises big questions—even for faithful Christians—about how people are to read, interpret, and understand the Scriptures on which Gibson has selectively based his film. Gibson himself came close to saying as much in his remarks to Diane Sawyer during an ABC interview two weeks ago. ‘You know, critics who have a problem with me don’t really have a problem with me and this film. They have a problem with the four Gospels.’
“Gibson might more accurately have said that people—Christians, Jews, even the unchurched—have long had a problem with the way Jesus’ life and teachings have been represented and interpreted. And not just in the four Gospels but in the rest of the New Testament, as well as in the subsequent teachings of the many sects of Christianity. For many devout Christians, in fact, struggling with those matters is a major part of their religious lives.
“And little wonder, given that there are few other religions in which the claims of historical and theological truth are more confusingly mixed. Specifically, Christians have always had to deal with the fact that Jesus of Nazareth—the founder of their religion, their Messiah, and the second part of the Trinitarian God—was himself not a Christian but, indisputably, a Jew. From the earliest years of the Christian movement, followers of Jesus had tended to handle this fact in various ways. Particularly in the first centuries after the Crucifixion, many Christians simply saw themselves as a branch of Judaism. As time went on, however, Christians tended to ignore, or minimize, Jesus’s Jewishness, and many denied that he was Jewish at all.
“To be sure, since the Reformation, a growing number of clerics, theologians, and scholars have worked hard to recover the historical Jesus. To Protestants, this effort was part of the struggle to throw off the ‘corrupted’ misreadings of the Roman Catholic Church and return to the real Jesus. Yet even in the midst of such attempts, a combination of church politics, deeply ingrained prejudice, and limited evidence impeded a full or fair examination of Jesus’s Jewishness well into the 20th century.
CORRECTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
“That has changed during the past fifty years. Aided by finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have made great strides in reconstructing the centuries surrounding the Crucifixion. In addition to restoring the fully Jewish context of Jesus’s career, they have also shown how some early Christians attempted to distance their founder and his movement from their Jewish roots.”
The authors of the article then cited the work done by Geza Vermes, emeritus professor of Jewish studies at Oxford University and the book he wrote entitled, Jesus, the Jew. His goal was to establish the harmony between Jewish teachings and those of Christianity, and in particular to demonstrate that the willful disregard of the Jewishness of Jesus and his teachings has led to Christian anti-Semitism.
Also featured by the authors was the corrective scholarship done by Christians, as well as Jews, to explain why a religion starting in Judaism moved away from it. The highlights of this corrective scholarship included reviewing the history of the political maneuvering taking place prior to, and during, the ministry of Jesus. The new scholarship also emphasized the theological variety within Judaism at the time of Jesus, and the opposition which Jesus had to the traditions of men. In spite of this, the harmony of Jews and believing Gentiles was emphasized.
A reason arose for Christians to distance themselves from Judaism when the Jews revolted against Rome in the years A.D. 66 to 74 leading to the dispersion of the Jews from their land and the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. But as the article says:
“Even so, it would be wrong to think that the close ties between Christians and Jews were instantly or fully severed. For centuries, many Christians from Asia Minor to Africa continued to attend synagogue services and observe Jewish high holidays. ‘Fourth-century gentile Christians,’ writes Fredriksen, ‘despite the anti-Jewish ideology of their own bishops, kept Saturdays as their day of rest, accepted gifts of matzo from Jewish friends at Passover, indeed still celebrated Easter according to when Jews kept Passover.’”
THE INFLUENCE OF ROME
When Constantine became converted to Christianity (A.D. 312) changes took place and as the Roman empire became Christian, the fact that Jesus was born a Jew was de-emphasized. By the time of the 11th century, with the first crusade being called by Pope Urban, crusaders enroute to liberate the holy land stopped in the Rhineland and left a third of northern Europe’s Jews dead. From the 12th century and on, anti-Jewish violence continued to surface and, in spite of periods of enlightenment, the relationship between Christians and Jews improved only slightly. By the second half of the 19th century the resulting picture of Jesus as a Jewish teacher of his day was troublesome for many Christian theologians, especially in Germany. Eventually it led to the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany under Hitler, and the holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. The article ended by saying of the film, and Gibson’s comment, ‘My job is to make a film as well as I can make it.’ Maybe so. But at the very least, Gibson has helped to perpetuate some of the same misunderstandings that have plagued Christian-Jewish relations for nearly 2000 years.”
There have been several attempts since the moving picture industry came into existence, in the early part of the 20th century, to depict the life of Jesus. All have fallen short of being accurate because of the producers and writers lack of knowledge about the Biblical message. Even those who write about the movie lack this knowledge. In this article, reviewing Mel Gibson’s attempt to make another movie of this type, it is said, “Christians have always had to deal with the fact that Jesus of Nazareth—the founder of their religion, their Messiah, and the second part of the Trinitarian God—was himself not a Christian, but indisputably a Jew.” Jesus was never a second part of a trinitarian God. This was an error brought into church teachings during the fourth century. Jesus plainly said, “My Father is greater than I.” (John 14:28) The Apostle Paul confirmed that there is only one God (not a trinity) when he wrote, “To us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.”—I Cor. 8:6
PREHUMAN EXISTENCE OF JESUS
Jesus in his prehuman experience was known as the Logos, or “Word” of God. (John 1:1) He was the first direct creation of God the Father. (Rev. 3:14; Col. 1:15) As the only begotten Son of God, he worked with his Father in the creation of all things. God’s plan involved having a place to test his Son in order to find him worthy to receive a Divine nature. Thus the Bible tells of preparing the earth for habitation and bringing forth Adam and his family. Everything that followed, the fall into sin and condemnation to death, the permission of evil, and all the Biblical prophecies concerning salvation were to lead to the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world. This was the role that God had for his Son to play. As the Apostle John wrote of it, “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”—John 1:14
God’s plan of salvation was woven into the fabric of the Gospel message. It was demonstrated early in mankind’s experiences when Abel offered an acceptable sacrifice to God. He was a keeper of sheep and offered the firstling of his flock, or a lamb. (Gen. 4:4; Heb. 11:4) How the sacrifice of a lamb would bring salvation was unknown except as God elaborated upon it by preaching the Gospel unto Abraham, saying, “In thee shall all nations be blessed.” (Gal. 3:8) The Gospel (good news) preached unto Abraham was that “in thy seed, shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” (Gen. 22:18) The blessing would come through the ‘seed’ of Abraham. As the Apostle Paul said, “In Isaac shall thy seed be called.” (Rom. 9:7) He further defines this promised seed when he said, “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”—Gal. 3:16
THE SON OF DAVID AND MESSIAH
It becomes clear from these scriptures that Jesus had to be born into Abraham’s family through Isaac. Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, had purchased the birthright from Esau, and became the proper channel. A further definition was that Christ would be a son of King David. In this manner it became necessary that Jesus should be born a Jew, and he was. His mother, Mary, came from David’s lineage, and David descended from Judah. All the promises made to Israel were to find their fulfillment through Christ. The Old and New Testaments are in perfect harmony. As the saying goes, “God’s promises are in the old concealed, and in the new revealed.”
The Scriptures are plain in stating that God especially blessed the nation of Israel. As one of their prophets wrote, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.” (Amos 3:2) This blessing brought a responsibility that they could not live up to. We are not surprised that they should be blinded and not be able to recognize Jesus as the Messiah (see Matt. 13:10-17; Isa. 6:9; Rom. 11:25), for so it was prophesied to happen. Therefore, trying to fix the blame upon the Jews, or Romans, for the crucifixion of Jesus is immaterial. He had been sent to earth to die as man’s Redeemer and Jesus knew this. He said, “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.” (John 10:17,18) It was God, the Father, who “gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) But it was Jesus who voluntarily cooperated with the Father and was willing to lay down his life.
Still, circumstances had to develop to have someone be the guilty party. The Adversary used the scribes, Pharisees, and priests of Israel quite well. As Jesus said unto them. “Ye are of your father the devil.” (John 8:44) Early in the ministry of Jesus they plotted to destroy him. (See Matt. 12:14; Mark 3:6; Luke 6:11; John 5:18) There were a number of times when the people accused Jesus of blasphemy and sought to stone him. (John 8:59) Jesus evaded them each time. Finally, Israel’s rulers spread the word around that anyone knowing of his whereabouts should inform them so that they could take him. (John 11:57) Judas complied. Even though the writers of this article cited an expert opinion that the charge could not be blasphemy because the Jews could have stoned him based on their own law, yet that was unmistakenly the charge that was made when an attempt to get false witnesses failed.—Matt. 26:59-66
PILATE TRIES TO SET JESUS FREE
Pilate did everything he could to release Jesus saying, “I find no fault in him.” (John 19:4,6) but the chief priests rallied the people to crucify him. (John 19:1-16) Thus, Jesus was crucified at the insistence of the Jews. Later, Peter would testify of these events saying to the people of Israel, upon the occasion of healing a lame man outside of the temple, “The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let him go. But ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you; And killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead; whereof we are witnesses. And his name through faith in his name hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know: yea, the faith which is by him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all. And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers. But those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled.”—Acts 3:13-18
WORTHY IS THE LAMB
Peter truly said that they did this in ‘ignorance.’ This rebellious and idolatrous people have been learning a lesson. God plans to save them as the Apostle Paul has written, “so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.” (Rom. 11:26; Isa. 59:20) “They shall look upon [him] … whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him.” (Zech. 12:10; Rev. 1:7) The wonderful humility and love of our Lord Jesus has earned for him an exaltation above every name that has been named. As so well expressed by the Apostle Paul, in urging his followers to have the same mind as Jesus had, he said, “who, though being in God’s form, yet did not meditate a usurpation to be like God, but divested himself, taking a bondman’s form, having been made in the likeness of men; and being in condition as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. And therefore God supremely exalted him, and freely granted to him that name which is above every name; in order that in the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those beneath; and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, for the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:6-11, Wilson’s Emphatic Diaglott) Jesus, although being a mighty spiritual being before being made of flesh and coming to earth, did not seek to usurp the Father’s authority but humbled himself and has earned the Divine nature. It will be a glorious day when every knee shall bow at the name of Jesus.
This is the real Jesus. What a great privilege it is for us to know the real Jesus. We are reminded of the voices in heaven that were heard when it was known that the Lamb, which had been slain, was worthy to open the sealed book in God’s hand. All the angelic host proclaimed, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.”(Rev. 5:12) What follows is a preview of the time when every creature will join in the same refrain, or when every knee shall bow at the name of Jesus. We read further in this proclamation: “Every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.”—vs. 13
Jesus, as the Logos in his prehuman existence, was not worthy to open the book (or to execute God’s wonderful plan). It wasn’t until he became flesh and was slain that as the ‘Lamb that was slain’ did he become worthy. As the account continues it says, “The four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped.”—vs. 14
Likewise we say ‘Amen’ and worship both God the Father, and the Lamb that was slain, his ‘only begotten Son’—the real Jesus.