How Shall We Believe?

What gave Jesus His authority? Will we ever have that kind of certainty? How and when?

When I read the accounts of Jesus’ ministry, it seems that by the time he really matured into the ministry to which we have visibility through the Gospels that he has done his homework. By homework, I mean really emerged himself in the Hebrew Scriptures, since childhood even, which was the customary in his time and in his community. When you are raised in a tradition from childhood, you are handed a set of beliefs before you can even rationalize them for yourself. It would have been easy to just take that and run with it.

 Forgive me if this sounds funny, but I wonder if he have relatives all around him grooming him, telling him his mission, and who he was. Did they sit around at dinner and tell him, “You know, Jesus, our people have been waiting on you for centuries. You can’t go out and play - - you need to study, go to temple, and hit the books to learn what the prophets have said and be about your Father’s business.” We don’t know; there is little written about Jesus’ childhood, but to me it sounds like he was raised as any Jewish boy in the community would have been raised, which seemed normal or typical for them in that particular time period. We do have the account in Luke 2:41 that tells us how Jesus’ family made a trip to the temple and as they left on their way back home, Jesus was missing. He was still in the temple, showing that he was given to studying the scriptures, laying the groundwork. So he had a foundation, a framework from which to operate, if you will, and a tradition and knew them well. Traditionalism, that is, “just going along because this is the way we’ve always done it,” did not trap him, however. There seemed to have been some initiative on his part to “get lost” and stay in the temple. He read and knew the scriptures, but he also observed what was going on around him. How did Jesus know what he knew? I think he definitely put the time in.

 We don’t hear about the rebellious teenager part. God forbid! You mean Jesus was a rebellious teenager? If ever there was an archetype, I would venture to say this is one. We still see them today. Yeah, us. I thought my story was unique until I got to seminary and kept hearing almost the same story. Something happens (around junior high, high school, then college) and the answers we’ve been given over and over in the religion of our childhood just don’t jive any more. Many of us go off to college and our families pray we don’t stray. We still believe, but we start to experience life on our own, to reason, to question, and try to untangle and sort out exactly what we do believe! How shall we believe? That is now up to us. Do you think this questioning might have happened within Jesus as he matured through those adolescent years? Was his life experience beginning to show something other than what he saw in scripture, maybe?

In Dr. Thomas Shepherd’s Glimpses of Truth, Chapter 3 – How Do I Know What’s True, he discusses pragmatic idealism and ways to test our religious ideas. From reading the Gospel accounts, it appears Jesus seemed to have had the full package. By that I mean, an epistemology that seemed to have the ingredients of “scripture, tradition, experience, and both intellectual and intuitive Reason.” All four Gospels convey to me that Jesus was indeed out in everyday life in and about the towns and the temple observing whether or not the ideas were working for him or his people; he was also constantly in dialogue and encounters with all types of people in the communities, including the Pharisees and Sadducees; and his healing ministry was holistic, not just relieving physical ailments but genuinely caring about the whole person. I believe he began to see for himself as many of us do - - does our religion ring true and measure up to the kingdom of God - - do we even meet our own standards of what we think that is? I believe if we wrestle with these ideas as Jesus did on the mountain praying all night, or whatever it takes, we too can come down to the real-life world and feed the multitudes. Just think, the Master Teacher said we’d do greater things than he.