The Crib, the Cross, and the Crown

Reflections on the Stories of the First Christmas and Easter

Hooton

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498282963
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We are all familiar with the stories of what happened at the first Christmas and Easter--or are we? The Crib, the Cross and the Crown strips away the wrapping-paper of tradition and folk-lore from the stories of the birth and death of Jesus Christ, and takes a fresh look at what the Gospels themselves say. It describes the real Jesus of the New Testament, and reflects on the ways in which the recurring themes in his story can shape our own lives and faith.

1

The Incarnate Word

“In the beginning . . . ” (John 1:1)

The outline of Jesus’ life in our Gospels starts with two complementary prologues, those of Luke (1:1–4) and John (1:1–18). Luke’s prologue gives an assurance that his account of the Gospel is accurate and reliable; John’s reveals Jesus as the eternal Word of God, who became a human being.

Without even reading beyond these two brief introductions, the Gospel writers have already presented us with the great mystery that lies at the heart of our Christian faith and of our understanding of Jesus: that he is both fully God and fully man. Luke stresses the human side of Jesus. He has researched the life of Jesus carefully—as he says, “I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning”—and in his Gospel he is offering the results of his study. There is a human side to the person of Jesus. He was a man who appeared in history, who can be investigated, studied and thought about; and a man about whom people can have a variety of ideas.

And that is what many Christians, very understandably, find difficult; we can be distressed or angered by the frequent airing of “new” and often quite bizarre theories about Jesus, which sometimes attract a level of attention in the popular media that falls only a little way short of the insatiable appetite for the latest gossip that is pandered to in the celebrity magazines. A hundred years ago, debate about alternative views of Jesus was confined largely to academic theological circles; in our day, it reaches a much wider public through popular paperbacks and, in particular, TV documentaries. So, for example, in April 2010, a series on the “Discovery Channel” entitled Who Was Jesus? presented a picture of Jesus as a pacifist political opponent of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. In August 2008, Channel Five offered Secrets of the Jesus Tomb, claiming to have discovered the tomb belonging to Jesus’ family, including his son, one “Judas,” fathered, it is claimed, through a relationship with Mary Magdalen. In February 2007, Channel Four broadcast a program with the title, Did Jesus Die?, which not only re-hashed the (long-since discredited) claim that the explanation for the resurrection story is that Jesus never actually died on the cross, but added to it the suggestion that a wandering preacher named Jus Asaf, who was active in Kashmir in the middle of the first century, was in fact Jesus, presumably having made a fresh start following the near-disastrous end to the first stage of his career in Palestine. In December 2005, two magicians, Barry Jones and Stuart MacLeod, appeared on a Channel Four program entitled The Magic of Jesus, performing as magic tricks their own versions of a number of the miracles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels, suggesting that Jesus was a kind of first-century “Dynamo.” And in March 2001, the front cover of Radio Times depicted a computer-generated face, based on a two-thousand-year-old skull, under the heading “Is this the face of Jesus?”; it heralded a new series entitled Son of God, presented by the BBC Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen, who admitted to having started out skeptical about the historical accuracy of the stories about Jesus. One of the notable aspects of the series was the attempt to “fill out” the hidden years in Jesus’ life between the ages of twelve and thirty.

It should be said that not all these and the many other television programs about Jesus that I could have listed were necessarily negative about or hostile to the Jesus of Christian faith. Some were; others were fairly neutral; some, like Mr Bowen’s Son of God series, were in fact quite sympathetic to the Jesus of biblical history. But all were essentially secular; they presented a merely human view of Jesus as a historical character about whom there can be debate and discussion, and around whom there developed theories which later became part of traditional Christian theology.

It is that treatment of Jesus that makes our evangelical hackles rise. And there are many Christians who see this modern fascination with alternative views of Jesus as a serious impediment to the cause of Christian mission in our society.

Maybe. Or maybe not. Because Luke’s prologue suggests that the situation in which we find ourselves today is not very different from that prevailing in the first century, when Luke wrote his Gospel. True, they were spared Channel Four and the internet. But there were in the days of the biblical Gospel writers a variety of other competing ideas about Jesus vying for the attention of a public as hungry for the latest religious ideas as our own society is for the latest gossip or controversy. In fact, as Luke himself tells us in Acts 17:21, people in the Greek society into which the Gospel was first preached “spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas,” which could easily be a description of our own twenty-first-century western world; all we would need to add, alongside “talking about” and “listening to,” would be “and surfing the net in pursuit of.”

“Many have undertaken to draw up an account” of the story of Jesus, says Luke; and we can be sure that he was not referring merely to Matthew, Mark and John. Luke is not of course saying that all or even most of the “many” were offering versions of the story of Jesus that were inaccurate; he simply says that lots of people are talking about Jesus, and so he wants to present a proper and “orderly account” of Jesus, one that can substantiate the other stories where they are right, and correct them where they are misleading. We know that a number of apocryphal stories about Jesus started to circulate very early in the history of the church, and that one of the reasons for the four biblical Gospels being written was to present an authentic and reliable account of the truth about Jesus. Even within the ministry of Jesus himself, people were expressing a variety of ideas about him, some of them distinctly unflattering: he was seen as an ordinary man (“Isn’t this the carpenter?,” Mark 6:3), as an immoral bon viveur (“Here is a glutton and a drunkard . . . ,” Matthew 11:19), as mentally unstable (“He is out of his mind!,” Mark 3:21), as a political activist (“ . . . one who was inciting the people to rebellion,” Luke 23:14), as a foreign impostor (“Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan . . . ?,” John 8:48), and as a tool of Satan (“You are demon-possessed,” John 7:20).

That is the context into which the apostles first proclaimed Jesus as Lord and Savior. “Many [had] undertaken to draw up” their accounts of Jesus, and many more would continue to do so over the years to come. Those accounts would contain everything from the sublime to the ridiculous; some would be sympathetic to Jesus, some wildly inaccurate, some well-meaning but misleading or inadequate, some downright heretical. And if Luke were writing in our age, he might well have started his Gospel by saying “Many have undertaken to present TV programs offering ideas about the things that have been fulfilled among us . . . ”

The general impression that we get from the New Testament is that the apostles’ response to the multiplicity of religious views in their society—including the variety of wrong, misleading, silly or even blasphemous ideas about Jesus—was not to huff and puff about them, not to inveigh against them, not to bemoan the fact that they made the task of Christian evangelism so much more complicated, but simply to tell people the truth about Jesus. Luke admits that many have presented their ideas about Jesus, but he says nothing about the degree to which he agrees or disagrees with any or all of them. He merely says that he is going to tell the story of Jesus as it happened.

It is worth saying that this fact significantly counters the frequent assumption that the life and ministry of Jesus was that of a simple preacher whose message could be summed up as one of moral and social teaching, and that the Gospel writers then embroidered this by adding all sorts of supernatural detail in order to make their Jesus a more “charismatic” and “divine” character. In fact, says Luke, the opposite is true. He has been at pains to strip away all the fanciful and legendary additions to and distortions of the story of Jesus, and give us the plain, unvarnished facts.

So how should the Christian church respond to the fact that we live in a society awash with theories about Jesus that are at best less than the whole truth and at worst a blatant rejection of the truth? Luke’s prologue would suggest, simply by telling people about the real Jesus. In the church’s evangelistic witness, two minutes spent sharing the truth about Jesus is more potentially fruitful than two hours explaining why other people are wrong. Jesus himself said that “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32); he did not say that denouncing those who don’t speak the truth will set you free.

Luke presents us with a Jesus who is a man in history, who has been and can be investigated. Moreover, Luke’s approach to his task of putting together his Gospel was, in a sense, very human: “I myself have carefully investigated everything . . . it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account . . . ” That suggests a number of lessons for us.

1. Luke had done his homework. He had researched his subject, or, as he puts it, “investigated”: the word used means literally “to follow” or “accompany,” but it is never used in the New Testament in the sense of literally “following” Jesus in the way his disciples did, that is, accompanying him on his travels; Paul uses it in 1 Timothy 4:6 when he says that Timothy was “brought up in the truths of the faith and of the good teaching that you have followed,” and Luke is here using it in the same sense, as a reference to his long and detailed study of the facts about Jesus, which has made him, humanly speaking, competent now to write his Gospel account.

2. Luke undertook this research “carefully.” He was thorough; his was no Gospel sketched on the back of an envelope, but the result of a long and painstaking process of hard work.

3. He was at pains to produce “an orderly account”: the same word is us...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Incarnate Word
• Chapter 2: The Promised Messiah
• Chapter 3: The Baby of Bethlehem
• Chapter 4: The King and Judge
• Chapter 5: The Teacher, Lord, and Prophet
• Chapter 6: The Passover Lamb
• Chapter 7: The Leader and High Priest
• Chapter 8: The Suffering Servant
• Chapter 9: The Crucified Savior
• Chapter 10: The Risen Christ
• Bibliography