Jesus was a Jew, and the Jewish people had always thought that they had a special place in the plans of the god who they believed created the world. Many of their ceremonies and laws and buildings reflected this – for instance, their most sacred Temple was a symbolic recreation of an original Edenic paradise, which the creation myth said was ruined by mankind, and which their prophecies said would grow to cover the whole world, one day.
It is against the backdrop of this Jewish story about the universe that Jesus’ life unfolded. When he came of age at 30, he began making extraordinary claims – most of which were very controversial, and many of which were considered sacriligious or even blasphemous. His chief claim was that the propesied blessing of the creator god would come about through himself and his own work, rather than the centrepiece Temple. Perhaps even worse, he alleged that his own Jewish people had failed to keep faith with that creator god, and that therefore they would lose their special place in his plans.
Jesus made both political and religious life so controvesial that the Jewish leadership contrived to have him crucified for rebellion by the Romans. However, this only turned out to be a masterstroke of table-turning. For, after three days, Israel’s god resurrected him to life. This showed beyond all question that the creator had made Jesus the means by which all the old prophecies would be fulfilled – the means by which all the hoped-for blessings would arrive. And so Jesus’ death and resurrection is what Christians celebrate every year at Easter.
After he rose, Jesus appeared to many people, including his group of 12 closest followers, and told them to shortly begin spreading the word of what this meant. These followers became the core of an ever-growing movement. They re-read all the old prophecies and stories of Isreal, and, in the light of the resurrection, realised that their fulfilment had begun. Filled with an extraordinary hope and delight, they began telling everyone – first their fellow Jews, and then their puzzled non-Jewish neighbours around Israel – that Israel’s god had begun the restoration and healing of the world. And they invited the equal participation of all in a new order. They established a memorial meal of peace and fellowship as a central act of their meetings, laying aside former barriers like race, wealth, status, gender, age, customs, and even personal wrongs. They transformed their communities.
In the ancient world, these sorts of forgiveness meals, and the new communities they established, were unprecedented. People simply did not act this way. It was subversive. It threatened the usual methods of acquiring, showing, keeping and enforcing power. It was so dangerous that many of the earliest Christians paid with their lives. They were as religiously and politically dangerous as the Jesus they followed.
But why were they prepared to do this? It is because they had come to embrace the story of Jesus. In Jesus’ life and words they heard the call to a new way of being human, a way that represented the best of humanity and a foreshading of what god intends for us. In the resurrection they saw the defeat of death, and so were prepared, in taking up this new humanity, to die themselves. In their own lives, and by the witness of community renewal, they experienced god’s transforming forgiveness. And if the renunciation of the old way of being human should end in death, so be it. A new way and a new future had been definitively opened.
Captured by the story of Jesus, they trusted the hope of a renewed present and a gloriously transformed future.
And that is why Jesus matters. In him, the whole universe stands renewed, ready for participation by any who would reject the old ways of being human.
That means you and me.