Seeing Jesus from the East

A Fresh Look at History's Most Influential Figure

Ravi Zacharias, Abdu Murray

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780310531296
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

In the West Jesus is usually seen through one lens, that of Western reasoning and linear thought. As the world becomes smaller and more people are brought to our door, a broader view of Jesus is needed, one that can be grasped by Easterners and can penetrate the hearts and imaginations of postmodern Westerners.

In Seeing Jesus from the East, Ravi Zacharias and Abdu Murray capture a revitalized gospel message through an Eastern lens, revealing its power afresh and sharing the truth about Jesus in a compelling and winsome light. Incorporating story, honor, vivid imagery, sacrifice, and rewards, Seeing Jesus from the East calls readers, both Eastern and Westerns alike, to a fresh encounter with the living and restless Jesus.

Chapter 1

A STORY, A FAMILY, AND A SON

RAVI ZACHARIAS

Matthew Arnold penned one of his most noted pieces of poetry in 1853. Nearly nine hundred lines, the epic work is based on another classic piece by the renowned Persian poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi, the Shahnameh. In Ferdowsi’s narrative, which is really a compilation of stories about Persian kings, the most captivating story is that of Sohrab and Rustum—a father and son. (Note that the latter name is spelled differently, depending on whether one looks at the original or the translation.)

I remember the profound impact this story had on me when I first heard it as a young lad in India. Even the sequence of names caught my attention. Rustum is the father, and Sohrab the son. You would think the father’s name would come first in the title. But the story’s focus is really on the son and his search for his father.

This is how Arnold’s version of the story begins in verse:

And the first grey of morning fill’d the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream,
But all the Tartar camp along the stream
Was hush’d, and still the men were plunged in sleep;
Sohrab alone, he slept not; all night long
He had lain wakeful, tossing on his bed;
But when the grey dawn stole into his tent,
He rose, and clad himself, and girt his sword,
And took his horsemen’s cloak, and left his tent,
And went abroad into the cold wet fog,
Through the dim camp to Peran-Wisa’s tent.¹

Rustum is the fiercest fighter in the Persian army. He is revered by those on his side and feared by every opponent. Once, in his younger years, he wandered into another kingdom in search of his lost horse, Raksh. Recognized as a famous, great warrior, he was welcomed by the king.

The young princess also set her eyes on him and, wanting a son from him, offers to return his horse if he will consent to give her a child. Rustum obliges, and before he leaves, he gives her “a clasp which he wore on his upper arm,” saying, “If you should bear a daughter, braid her hair about it as an omen of good fortune; but if the heavens give you a son, have him wear it on his upper arm, as a sign of who his father is.”²

The princess conceives, and by the time her son is born, Rustum is long gone, never to return to her kingdom. The princess sends a false message to Rustum at Sohrab’s birth, telling him that the child was a girl so he won’t return and try to shape the young Sohrab into a warrior like himself. Sohrab was to be her son and of her making. The princess wanted a son to love, not a warrior to lose.

Yet Sohrab grows up hearing tales of his father and is determined to find him one day. As he develops great strength and skill in battle himself, his clan ultimately finds itself at war with the Persians. As the story unfolds, father and son finally do meet in a one-on-one fight to the finish, but neither knows who the other is. Locked in hand-to-hand combat, Sohrab suspects he may be face-to-face with the legendary Rustum. Rustum, though much older now, still shows flashes of the prowess he once had. Sohrab doesn’t share his suspicions in case he is wrong, but he does not wish to lose to anyone except his renowned father.

Rustum has no inner conflict, as he doesn’t even know he has a son. The fight begins, and it is obvious that two of the best warriors in the world are engaged in one of the fiercest fights in history. Only one will be left standing. During a prolonged, multiphase duel, Sohrab finally has the advantage over Rustum, but he holds back from using his sword to finish the fight in case this man is, indeed, his father. Though Sohrab has repeatedly asked, Rustum has refused to identify himself. Finally, the fight turns in Rustum’s favor. He has Sohrab on his back and finishes the job. As Sohrab is bleeding to death, he says, “The mighty Rustum shall avenge my death! My father, whom I seek through all the world, He shall avenge my death, and punish thee.”³

Rustum, stunned, asks Sohrab why he thinks Rustum is his father. With effort Sohrab rolls back his sleeve and reveals the clasp on his arm. Rustum stands speechless and shattered. He has killed his own son, not knowing a son even existed. The warrior is triumphant, but his victory is Pyrrhic. In winning the fight, he has lost something of greater value—he has lost the embrace of his son.

Everything about this story is Eastern. It is a father and son story. A warrior story. A story of killing and power. A mother who does not just bear a child but actively participates in his life and his calling. (You see this same thing in Moses’ mother, Jochebed; Samuel’s mother, Hannah; John the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth; and Jesus’ mother, Mary.) And there is a surprise ending.

There are many such stories in the East, tales of conflict within a family, of power and might, of killing and revenge, of veiling and unveiling—and, yes, of values. In fact, it is the prototypical story of the Middle East to this day. Whether it’s the narrative of Islam or the tales of battles in pantheistic religions, this central story is about a war to prove greatness and dominance. It may be fair to say that the tensions between the Sunnis and the Shias started as a succession story. Yet if you look at the key characters in that story, it is a succession story within a family. The whole Sanskrit epic of the Mahābharatā is also a fascinating story of a family and the warfare between two brothers.

There is another side to these stories. Many are admittedly mythological, fanciful tales whose details strain credulity. But interwoven within them are philosophical lessons that are meant to provide guiding principles for cultural life. That is the very reason the stories were constructed. In an Eastern pantheistic culture, it is not truth that is the focus, but “truths” that are of importance. Somewhat like Greek mythology, the tales tell lessons. Truths come in proverbs or sayings, seldom in a thought-out, logical framework. Invariably, the writer tells the story as a fable in order to engender some emotion from the reader and to inscribe a timeless principle in the conscience. The story may not be true, but it is intended as a medium of a certain truth.

In Islam, truth is important, mainly because it came about as a belief system that claimed to supersede the Christian faith, to which truth is foundational. Muhammad, it is claimed, was the last and greatest prophet. So to Muslims, the story of Islam is a truth claim. Therefore, Islam can and must be tested by its claims.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is also a story. People mistakenly think the story started at Bethlehem, so it’s not surprising that critics of the gospel consider it yet another mythological narrative and think they have done away with it. The story of the Father who sends his Son who does his work and returns to the Father may be a beautiful tale, but it cannot be fact, can it?

This is what I assumed when I first read the Gospels without giving them serious thought. I had been to many a Ram Leela performance, as told in Hindu folklore. The play is about Rama and Laxman and Hanuman and Sita, with the bad guy being Ravana, and it is a great battle between good and evil. I never took such narratives to be factual. They were mythological stories meant to teach us to love the values of our culture. So at first blush, my reaction to hearing the gospel was the same; it was just another fanciful tale. That is why I personally studied the book of Romans even before I studied the Gospels. How that came about in itself is interesting.

Shortly after my friend, who is today my brother-in-law, and I committed our lives to Jesus Christ, we were walking by a pile of garbage near our home. Right at the top of the heap was a book with the hard cover open. The title read Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans by W. H. Griffith Thomas. Intrigued, we picked it out of the garbage and began to read it together on our own. To this day, I have no idea who in our neighborhood might have pitched the book into the garbage dump. As far as I know, there was not another Christian in our cluster of friends and neighbors. The book may even have been given to my father by a missionary, as sometimes happened, and my dad, not being a personally committed Christian yet and not knowing better, pitched it into the garbage. As we studied it, we began to also teach it to a group of teens attending a Youth for Christ Bible study. I still have that volume. I treasure it. It was the teaching of what salvation is about that drew my attention, the explanation of the backdrop and implications of the gospel story.

It quickly became evident that the book of Romans is based on the Gospels but goes back to Genesis. Romans explains that one is justified by faith and not by works; it explains what the grace of God and sin mean. This was all so important to the Eastern minds of my friend and me, as well as to the other teens at the Youth for Christ Bible study, because in the Eastern mind-set, the earned liberation of karma is the quest of every individual.

These new gospel categories were real in my experience of salvation, but unknown to me in meditative thought. I knew I was broken inside and the world was broken, but I had never thought about the why and so what of the gospel. The book of Romans, a light that shone into the hearts of Augustine, Luther, Wesley, and scores of others throughout the centuries, shone into my heart too. It is probably the world’s greatest treatise on the gospel. The story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the backdrop, and as I read, I was struck with the thought that the ending was not just a surprise to the reader; it was a surprise even to the gospel writers themselves. That was a huge distinctive from Eastern myths.

Yet the defining difference between the claims of the biblical text and the texts of other faiths is that, right from the beginning, the writers of the Gospels and the Hebrew Scriptures affirm the Bible’s stories to be fact, true in detail, a compilation of historic events. That is why Paul illustrates from Abraham. In fact, Paul refers back to Adam, as does Luke. Luke further states, “Since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account” (Luke 1:3). Matthew, writing to the Jews, similarly traces Jesus’ story back to Abraham. John connects Jesus’ story to the Greeks by using the Greek concept of the logos. John states his reason clearly: “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). Belief in the truth and starting “from the beginning”—both of these ideas are writ large in the gospel story.

There are many profound differences between the gospel story and any other story. Though the gospel has elements of an Eastern story, the differences between the gospel and other Eastern stories, between it and Islam, are drastic. These differences create a struggle, propelling us to find a way to understand what is true and why it matters.

MY EASTERN JOURNEY

Let me digress to share a few more personal experiences. My own conversion took place as a pursuit after truth. The search was existential because my struggle was existential. For me, finding enjoyment in sports and competition had been the only real worthwhile pursuits in life. I found life to be its most exhilarating when on the cricket field or the tennis court. (Today, cricket is almost like a religion in India, courtesy of mass communication and big money.)

I seldom gave any thought to religion or spiritual matters, because I never considered the stories I heard to be historically true. They were merely cultural constructs to be transmitted from generation to generation. They provided answers to questions like why family is important, why respect for the elderly is good, why one should never question one’s parents, why shame is so devastating, and why the East is superior to the West. Reasons for the latter included that our culture was older and therefore superior; our values in the East were higher than in the West, and therefore we were better; and the morality of the East was better than that of the West, as Christians were bent toward loose living.

We also believed that excellence in academics determines one’s future, spirituality is ingrained, and there are powers greater than humanity. Fear of failure and of poverty propelled us to work hard, and superstition controlled all our rituals to that end. Such fear and superstition were systemic within our culture and accepted without questioning. The only time my family ever prayed was when facing a crisis of some sort. The fact that God could be a living, personal being never crossed my mind.

Yet my father would sometimes welcome missionaries who were going door-to-door in the neighborhood into our home as his guests because they were foreigners, and he would ask them to pray with him. I remember laughing the whole thing off, especially when they sang. It was a mean thing to do and terribly immature on my part. My brothers and sisters remember my mockery well.

To even think of absolutes or of God as a real person or a caring entity with whom I could relate was not my focus. Life was about making the best of one’s circumstances in one’s own interest. It was only when the failure and shame of performing poorly as a student brought me face-to-face with who I really was that I started to ask deeper questions. One of Abdu Murray’s chapters ahead expands on this cultural trait. My sense of shame was not based on my own failure alone though. It was also based on my failure in the face of the success I perceived everyone surrounding me experiencing.

These twin realities of my failure and the success of others sank deeply into my soul, beyond surface emotions. It wasn’t so much that I feared facing others; it was the anxiety of seeing what lay within me. There simply wasn’t meaning in my life. There was a monotony to it and no real destiny to follow. I always thought there must be more to life than what I had; I just didn’t know what it was. To put it in the vernacular, not only did I not have a GPS for my soul; I did not even have a destination in mind. To this day, I believe that finding meaning and purpose is the fundamental pursuit of life. Failing to find it has driven many to despair. The book of the Bible that would have resonated most with me at that time would have been the book of Ecclesiastes: everything is vanity.

It was with the fear that there was no purpose to anything I was doing that I attempted suicide at the age of seventeen. There is some perplexity within me today as to why I went that route, because I think so differently now. At that time, it seemed the most pragmatic way to escape my sense of shame. It was in my cultural DNA. When the Bible was brought to me in a hospital room, and I realized the possibility that God might be a real being, for the first time I gave Truth a serious look in the eye. Maybe life wasn’t an accident.

WHY THIS BOOK?

When my colleague Nabeel Qureshi asked me several years ago to write this book with him, I resisted because I still think one of the finest texts on the theme of Jesus’ Easternness is Kenneth Bailey’s Jesus Through Middl...