Following Rabbi Jesus

The Christian’s Forgotten Calling

Phil Needham

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781532636073, 9781532636097
• eBook ISBN: 9781532636080
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Following Rabbi Jesus is a surprising exposure of who the Jesus we find in the Gospels really is, what he teaches those who dare to follow him, and how he models what it means to live God's radical-kingdom way. The reader of the book will discover in this exploration a very different Jesus from the celebrity or hero of much popular church culture, the tame, ineffective Jesus of compromised Christianity, and the inaccessible, conceptual Christ of much academic theology. The reader who takes the chance of honestly engaging the Jesus we meet in the Gospel stories may find an engaging and liberating contrast to the life he is now living. He may even want to make a turn or two, and start over.

Section Three

Jesus on Witnessing

Finding Our Calling in the Everyday

Jesus calls all his disciples to be witnesses. All of them. No exceptions, no passes, no excuses. In the Gospels not only does he send out the twelve as well as the seventy (or seventy-two) during his ministry, but in the last verses of all four Gospels, the resurrected Jesus, in one way or another, commissions his disciples to be his witnesses and continue his mission:

• Matthew concludes with the well-known command to his disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations [ethnicities]” (Matt 28:19).

• Mark has Jesus saying, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the good news to every creature” (Mark 16:15). Now that command is part of a concluding section not found in the earliest manuscripts of Mark. Either it was part of the original manuscript and was lost and later found or it was added later. If it was added later, perhaps compensating for an original ending lost, it is certainly consistent with the “sending out” by the resurrected Jesus in the other Gospels.

• Luke’s concluding sections focus at first on the resurrection of Jesus and its foretelling in Scripture. The text then moves on to record Jesus explaining what follows: “A change of heart and life for the forgiveness of sins must be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses to these things” (Luke 24:47–48).

• John records the resurrected Jesus appearing to a very anxious group of disciples, twice giving them the blessing of peace for their troubled spirits, and then challenging these only-moments-before fearful followers with a bold commission: “As the Father sent me, so I am sending you” (John 20:21). He invites them to leave their place of fear and cowardice and obey his call to mission.

One of the modern misinterpretations of these passages is the view that this call to mission is a select calling for only some Christians. It goes something like this: There are Christians who have been especially gifted for witnessing and reaching out to others. They may be very outgoing. They may be comfortable with engaging people in different or unfamiliar settings. They may have the ability to reach across social boundaries or cultural barriers. They may have the gift of evangelism or social service or political action, for example, and are therefore well suited for these opportunities for witness. The rest of us are called to live out our discipleship by serving the church, caring for other Christians—and, of course, praying for those who do the outreach.

Some of the church growth literature of the last century encouraged this kind of separation between people who were “gifted for mission” and those “gifted for maintenance,” those whose ministry would take place outside the church or in the world and those whose ministries would take place within the church. It is certainly true that 1) there are disciples of Jesus who have specific gifts that naturally lead them to fulfill important missional roles, and 2) their apostolic service is crucial. It is also true, however, that Jesus does not call them to carry the entire weight and responsibility for his mission. In fact, were the mission of Jesus being carried out as he intended, these disciples with special gifts for outreach would be carrying a much smaller role in fulfilling it than they are now. I remember hearing Billy Graham remark once that his form of mass evangelism was fully insufficient for the requirements of the Great Commission.

The Great Commission is a call to all Christians. Jesus calls all his followers to give witness to the gospel with their transformed lives, their timely words, and their compassionate action. That, and that alone, is the fulfilling of the Great Commission. One does not need to be a gifted evangelist to touch the hungry heart of a seeker after God, nor a qualified social worker to share the compassion of Christ with a not-yet disciple. One need only be willing to take the risk with people and trust the guiding Holy Spirit of Jesus.

How, then, do we describe this witness to which Jesus calls all of us? We imitate our Rabbi, and we obey his call. We investigate the Gospels and allow the Jesus we meet there to teach us how to live the life he gives us. And what we discover is that he also gives every one of us disciples an extraordinary calling. We cultivate a life with Jesus, and that life itself, by its very nature, becomes a mission that influences beyond our calculation.

The life of the disciple of Jesus is foundational for any real influence that the disciple will have in the world. This influence is what we call mission. Our life and our mission are inseparable from each other. The Christian life without life-changing influence in the world is a contradiction, as are formal mission projects without compassionate disciples.

So we will examine how we cultivate a life of strong witness and influence for the kingdom of God. Again, Rabbi Jesus is the teacher and his life the model. We shall call this section of our study “The Cultivation of a Life.” We shall then listen to Jesus’ command to go public. With Jesus as our model for public action, we shall explore the ways and means by which we reveal Jesus in the smaller and the larger worlds where we live. We shall call this final section of our study “Bearing Public Witness.”

The Cultivation of a Life

Chapter 35

Intimacy with Jesus

My memory of Eunice McCrae goes back to when I was about twelve. I was in the first year of my church’s six-year Bible and leadership training course for junior and senior high school students. At one of our meetings, Eunice McCrae was invited to share her journey with us. Eunice was a Salvation Army officer and single. Her appointment was to operate a home for unwed pregnant mothers and be pastor to the young girls who found themselves in what was considered then to be a publicly embarrassing situation. She was nearing retirement and had much to say, but she was aware of the short attention span typical of our age group. She spoke only of the matters she felt would carry weight with us. I distinctly remember a certain beauty in how she spoke about her life, although I don’t remember most of the details.

What I do remember clearly is what she said about being single. I was growing up in a two-parent family and acquiring the unspoken assumption that people naturally got married when they grew up. Now here was Eunice McCrae telling us of her chosen path to the single life. That intrigued me.

Eunice talked about not marrying as a very conscious and important choice she made. (Is there really a choice here? I remember thinking.) And then she said something with a firm gentleness: “I feel I’ve become married to Jesus.” As a twelve-year-old, I took that in without knowing what I was taking in. I saw the institute of marriage as a social norm, but I also had inklings of a very intimate side to it—namely the sexual—and the way Eunice talked about being married to Jesus had the feel of intimacy. How could she be intimately married to Jesus? I had been taught in church that a Christian was a follower of Jesus who tried to be like him. But intimate with him? I had much to learn.

When it comes to our relationship with Jesus, imitation without intimacy will not do. It would be a sham. Remember, Jesus calls his disciples, first of all, to “be with him” (Mark 3:14), and the risen Christ promises continued intimacy with his disciples just before he ascends to the Father: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:20).

“I am with you always.” Our response to that assurance might be: That’s great, he’s got my back. I can get on with my calling. I can do my work. There’s so much to do. Stay close to me, Jesus, and we’re going to build this Kingdom of God!

Not exactly. The issue is not so much whether Jesus is with us. (He is.) It is whether we are with him. Remember Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38–42)? Mary is spending time at Jesus’ feet, Martha is busy in the kitchen seeing to needed meal preparation. Mary seeks intimacy with Jesus, Martha seeks to serve him. Both aspects of our relationship with Jesus are important.

One way to understand the story is to recognize we all have both Mary and Martha in us: We all want and need intimacy, we all want and need to serve. For all of us, it seems, one of the two is more available to us than the other. Some of us are comfortable spending time in relationships, others are more comfortable doing things. For many of us, the Martha in us is more available, and we don’t give the Mary much of a chance. Most churches probably tend to reward the Marthas more than the Marys. We applaud the people who get things done, those who have a spirit of service. Why is that? Are we ill at ease around those who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time (in our opinion) in conversation or in worship and prayer and solitude?

Jesus gives us no reason, no blessing, to run ahead of him with our good works and great plans. He gives us plenty of reason, and his blessing, to follow him. And there is no following him without knowing him, no imitation without intimacy, no discipleship without relationship, no calling without communion.

At the conclusion of his prayer for his disciples (John 17:24–26), Jesus speaks of knowing God in a way deeper than the factual and intellectual. It is a personal knowing, a true intimacy. “The world,” says Jesus (obviously using “world” here to mean the fallen world), “didn’t know you [the Father], but I’ve known you.” They do know, however, that the Father has sent Jesus (v. 25). In other words, says Jesus, whereas fallen humanity does not know God in the intimate sense or does not have a close relationship with him, they do have a strong sense of Jesus having been sent by God; and they are right.

Jesus becomes a kind of continuing conduit through which those who follow him (his disciples) connect with God. Jesus claims he reveals the Father to us; “I made your [the Father’s] name known to them, and will continue to make you known” (v. 26a). Elsewhere he goes even further by claiming an extremely close intimacy, saying that he and the Father “are one” (John 10:30). In John, chapter 17, however, he connects (we could almost say he merges) his intimacy with the Father with his intimacy with his disciples. Or as the text says, “[I] will continue to make [your name] known so that your love for me will be in them, and I myself will be in them” (v. 26b). In other words, we can receive and experience the love of God in Jesus. The Father’s love for Jesus, the God-Man, in some astonishing way becomes his love for us (humankind).

However, Jesus goes further tha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Overview and Approach for the Reader
• Section One: Jesus on Becoming
• Section Two: Jesus on Loving
• Section Three: Jesus on Witnessing
• Appendix: The Importance of the Jesus of the Gospels