Monday, March 30, 2020
698 - Who Knew?
Spirituality Column #698
March 31, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Who Knew?
By Bob Walters
“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and
the world knew him not. He came unto his
own, and his own received him not.” – John 1:10-11 KJV
The King of all Creation rode a donkey into Jerusalem 2,000
years ago.
Nobody recognized Him.
God who promised to return one day to the temple, fulfilling
all prayer, prophecy, and promise of delivering-out-of-evil not just Israel but
all the world, would prove his absolute obedience and faithfulness later that
week.
Nobody had a clue.
Millennia before that, with a rainbow and dove, the One True
God and Creator of All that Is, promised all creation He would one day renew
the hope of the entire world, heal its fallenness, and take His throne as its
King.
That week in Jerusalem God would be lifted up as King, but
onto Calvary’s cross.
God long ago promised sinful but faithful Abraham that he
would use Abraham’s children – the still-to-be-established nation of Israel – as
his chosen, special people to deliver his ultimate and divine judgment, truth,
peace, and mercy into the whole world.
And on what we now know as Palm Sunday this enigmatic but
wonderful miracle-working, sin-forgiving, cadaver-raising, truth-telling,
status-quo-breaking priest, rabbi, prophet, or whatever various things Jesus
appeared to be, God was making good on his eternal promise to inaugurate his
kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
It was to be the most transformative week in human history, but in that cosmos-rebirthing moment no human yet but Jesus knew the King of Kings was upon them.
This Jesus, eternally present in creation, was utterly unexpected by hopeful Israel and something the larger world had no idea even existed. It was Israel’s calling all along as God’s instrument to reveal this king to the world and even they ‘knew him not” when Jesus – fully human, fully God, fully without precedent – arrived in their midst.
It was to be the most transformative week in human history, but in that cosmos-rebirthing moment no human yet but Jesus knew the King of Kings was upon them.
This Jesus, eternally present in creation, was utterly unexpected by hopeful Israel and something the larger world had no idea even existed. It was Israel’s calling all along as God’s instrument to reveal this king to the world and even they ‘knew him not” when Jesus – fully human, fully God, fully without precedent – arrived in their midst.
As renowned British theologian N.T. Wright describes in his
recent book, The New Testament in Its World (p. 373), “Jesus was not a
new god … He [Jesus] was and is the human being in whom yhwh, Israel’s one and only God, has acted within cosmic
history, human history, and Israel’s history, to do for Israel, humanity, and
the world what they could not do for themselves.”
And nobody saw the King of Kings coming.
And nobody saw the King of Kings coming.
We tend to look out for ourselves, and hopefully each other,
but usually it’s on our own human terms – power, safety, comfort,
pain-aversion, and fear-mitigation. In
the obedient life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we encounter God’s righteous
terms.
Israel, as the Gospels describe, had forgotten God’s terms. The rest of the world, we must understand, didn’t
know that Israel’s God had terms. Believers
in Christ now are Israel in the loving, faithful, gracious, and
surprising terms of the one true God.
Salvation and forgiveness rode into Jerusalem – along with
God’s glory, Israel’s perfection, and humanity’s only true hope – on that
donkey 2,000 years ago.
Who knew?
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) offers these thoughts heading into Holy Week.
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