Have We Typecast Jesus?

By Khen Lim



Image Source: wernerschwartz.wordpress.com

Do you know what it’s like to be given special treatment? Does it make you feel different? Does it give you the impression that you’ve been picked out to be exclusive? Is the attention given to you unique? Imagine for a moment that everyone else is waiting in a long queue to get tickets for a very popular concert when your special connection turns up and takes you to the front of the line. 

In other words, you’ve just broken out of the queue. No one else can get tickets to the sold-out concert but with your connection, you now have the best seats in the concert hall and you don’t even have to pay for them. Or you are among hundreds wanting to get that job of a lifetime and your connections enables the company management to take a particular interest in you and your résumé.

Being a leading musician in Australia, my brother has various interesting and often useful connections in the music industry. One day, I received a long-distance call from him. He told Marianne and I that we would be getting tickets to see Lionel Richie live in concert in Malaysia! 

If that was amazing enough to many, it’d got better when we arrived to pick up our free tickets. When we were brought to our seats, many around could have been thinking, “Wow! That couple must’ve something on the ‘old guy’ (meaning Lionel Richie himself)!” He had connections! As they often say, “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know that counts!”

That night, we enjoyed ridiculous front-row seats that would have cost us more than an arm and a leg. Of course we wouldn’t have paid for them. At the prices charged, I could do other things. But since these tickets were free, you don’t knock them back. You gratefully take them and then realise how fortunate we are for the connections that brought this opportunity to us.

If you ever need connections, the best connections of all are those that connect us to God. If you can get through to God so that you get special consideration from Him, that’s going straight to the top! He’s what we all could call, The Ultimate Connection but once upon a time, these weren’t available to everyone.

God’s exclusive connections were the sole attention He gave to His Chosen People, the Jews. And to them was given the Promised Land. To them, God saved from slavery in the time of Egypt and commanded that Moses took them out of bondage under Pharaoh and into the safety of the wilderness and even when they were cornered, God gave them a plan so ridiculous that it was unbelievable. Yet even when met with an inevitable watery death, God authorised Moses to part the Red Sea and allowed His people to escape from the clutches of the Egyptian Army, whom He swallowed asunder.

By the time of the Second Temple Period, which was around 515BC to 70AD, the Israelites were a completely abject lot. The prideful days when God’s protection from their enemies was a guarantee were gone. The grand triumphant Davidic era was history. 

In this Second Temple Period, the Israelites had already experienced foreign subjugation from one to another, beginning with the Assyrians (740BC) before the cataclysmic Babylonian occupation (606BC-539BC), then the Medo-Persian captivity (539BC-332BC) and Macedonians of Alexander the Great (331BC-323BC). The death of Alexander the Great as prophesied by Daniel (Dan 8:8) saw his empire disintegrating into four parts, one of which, the Seleucids from Syria, would come to rule over the Israelites.

Together with the Roman occupation, the Israelites were under foreign oppression for more than 700 years albeit with a brief period of independence brought on by the Hasmonean dynasty courtesy of the Maccabees. In and amongst the latter part of the years was the period of Jesus – His birth, childhood, young adulthood and importantly, His ministry leading to His crucifixion and resurrection.

It is important to understand a few things about this period that bring about precious lessons to us today. Firstly 700-plus years of living under oppressive rule meant that the Jews endured many generations that had no idea what freedom really meant. They would have read about it in the Torah but never quite experienced it first-hand. They would have had an oral tradition in which stories of the past shaped the history of Jewish civilisation.

At the same time, these many centuries would have also transformed Israel into a tinderbox of high-pressure socio-cultural turmoil and complicated politics. Inspired by the successful insurrection of the Maccabees, the Jewish urgency for a solution forced upon the people, the emergence of Judaistic Factionalism in which appeared five key sects notably, the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Herodians and the loosely-grouped Zealots.

As it is with Judaism, the common understanding among the Jews was the Messianic solution but herein laid a complex ideology of who the Messiah was.

The Pharisees had the idea of an invincible Messianic warrior who would conquer all before Him. The Sadducees favoured a priestly Messiah who would reign over His temple. The Essenes believed in a dual Messiah, one who would be King, the other who would be the High Priest. 

The Herodians, on the other hand, played the devious political hand, and proclaimed that Herod’s dynasty fulfilled Jewish theocracy and hence, Herod was the Messiah. The militant and terrorising Zealots were awaiting a Messiah in the form of a five-star military general, not one who would be welcomed on a donkey but a white gallant horse, wearing suited armour.

And all that while, the real Messiah was already here. All that while, Jewish leaders were pointing their fingers at the oppressive forces and blamed the desecration of the temple on the Hellenistic influences that began with Antiochus IV Epiphanes while they – particularly the Pharisees – were stifling their own people with their untenable interpretation of the Mosaic laws. 

Remember Jesus saying, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses and for a pretence you make long prayers; therefore you will receive greater condemnation” (Mt 23:14).

Sometimes it is hard to understand how it is that in the presence of the real Messiah that the people could be so deaf and blind. Jesus had ministered into their hearts; still they crucified Him. He had performed the miracles that were seen and experienced by many; yet they called Him a heretic. He taught love and came in peace; but they threw Him to the Romans, accusing Him of being Rome’s biggest threat to national security. He spoke about the Kingdom of God and how he was to die for their sins; and still they misunderstood His purpose and rejected His overtures.

For more than 700 years, the Jews had felt nothing but desperation, frustration, despondence and humiliation. They lost their temple. They were forced to embrace foreign cultures that they didn’t want. They were taxed into poverty. And they cried out for the Messiah with visions that were on their terms.

But when Jesus came, they rejected Him because He was not what they expected. He came in peace but they wanted Him to be warring. He taught them lessons they didn’t want to hear. His answers had demoralised rather than build them up. He did things that were an abomination to their false piety. And in the end, they made demands that were the antithesis of what Jesus came with.

When we typecast God according to our own terms and conditions and then shape Him to be the kind of Messiah “prefer,” we have no place belonging in the Kingdom of Heaven. The Father sent His Son to live amongst His people but they rejected Him and in the most unlikely outcome, the opportunity of His Salvation and the promise of life eternal was opened to the Gentiles who accepted and embraced Him. In other words, God’s upside-down kingdom was precisely what the Jews did not welcome.

We have to be honest with ourselves. If Jesus were to be here today, would we accept Him too? Would we reject Him like the Jews did? Would we have our own Messianic ideas that are the complete opposite of what Jesus represents?

Think first before you think you’re sure of your answers.