The Church of Jesus

Intro

For a good part of 2023 a few burning questions I had in the back of my mind:

• Why Jesus?
• Why did Jesus come when he did, in the middle of the Roman Empire?
• What is church?

I think many times, people talk about Paul's ministry and letters to the different fellowships of different cities.  Paul often instructed these different groups of people on how to conduct their meetings, rebuke them of their wrongs, but also encourage them of things they are doing right.  (And I'm being careful by calling these groups just fellowships because the English word "church" didn't appear until the 14th or 16th century [whichever source you may have found], and the word "ekklesia" was used by the Greek Christians and a work that was probably borrowed from the Greek.) 

But what was Jesus' true purpose for God's people?  Why did he come at this moment in earth's history? 

Jesus never meant to start a religion.  Yet his teachings have sprung a movement that is still going on until today.  What men strived to organize to be the church, some of these organizations has become legalistic institutes that have been divided into denominations and sects, just like the Jewish leaders of the time of Jesus.

The Life of Jesus in a Nutshell 

Let's start with Jesus, as everything starts with Jesus.  Jesus was born to a young couple, Joseph and Mary.  Jesus was born from a virgin woman.  It was thought that Joseph was a carpenter, so Jesus was also a carpenter with his earthly father.  After his miraculous birth, not much is known about his childhood except an account when he was about 10 or 12, he stayed at a temple (Luke 2:41-52).  We then fast forward to around the time he was maybe late 20's or 30 years old where his ministry began.  During his ministry, he gathered twelve men to be his disciples.  Even though he was always surrounded by people, his tightest group is these twelve men. 

And an important thing to point out: Jesus is/was single.  Not much is known if he ever had a girlfriend or a lady he courted or if he was ever married.  But just from reading scripture, all we know is that he's a single dude. 

The Environment of the Time of Jesus 

(A disclaimer before I move forward: I'm not historian and I am not a Bible scholar.  But how I'm going present this part of history is my personally understanding and may not be fully accurate.) 

Between the time of the book of Malachi in the Old Testament and the time of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), a lot of history happened, and by the time of the Gospels, the Romans were ruling much of the known world, including Israel.  I am not sure how credible this website is regarding the history of the Roman Empire in biblical times, but this pretty much summed up the history in a very broad sense.  The Romans, for the most part, left the Jewish leaders to rule themselves and over the common people.  It is a common misconception, at least in my own reading of the Gospels, that the Romans were the ones persecuting the Jews, but it's quite the opposite.  I believe what caused the most problem amongst the Jews are the Jewish leaders themselves.  There is probably no doubt that because the Romans left the Jews to rule themselves, as long as taxes were paid to Caesar, the Jewish leaders abused their powers and exploited the common people in Israel.  The Romans, in maintaining their "Pax Romana", taxed heavily and entrust this task to the Jewish leaders to enforce this heavy tax.  Not only that, the common people also have to tithe to their Jewish synagogues and priests, which they themselves have been known to be greedy and judgmental. 

Another aspect of this area of Israel is that it is a crossroads of many countries and cultures of their known world.  Europe and Rome had a much different culture than the Jews and the Middle East.  There might have been some knowledge of the far east (China, Korea, Japan, and other Asian nations), but from reading the Gospels, this was not evident.  Definitely, they did not know anything about the Americas but there were people there at the time. 

His Teachings and The Greatest Commandments 

Many of us who have read the gospels of Jesus may remember him turning water into wine (his first miracle), feeding the 5000, walking on water, healing the lepers, asking Zaccheus to come down from a tree, the Sermon on the Mount, inviting Matthew for dinner, and many other parables and miracles.  There were certain times he asks certain people to keep quiet, and other times, he asked them to go ahead and preach the good news. 

Each parable and lessons are presented around a different scenario in which we learn from depending on the situation and based on his audience.  But the ultimate lesson Jesus gave was the Greatest Commandments: love God and love people.  If you know Old Testament, the first part of the Great Commandments comes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  The second part of the Great Commandments is often called "The Golden Rule" and variations of this can be found in most other cultures and religions.  (Could it be that the Golden Rule and many other of his teachings were borrowed from other neighboring cultures?  That will be another blog for another day.)

Why Jesus? 

Why Jesus?  Why did God send Jesus?  Why hasn't God sent anyone else?  Going back into Genesis, God chose Abraham to be the father of the Jewish people and Jesus came through this lineage.  This was written in Matthew as well as Luke, although both traced their lineage somewhat differently.  God could very well choose the Buddha or Lao Tze or the Dahli Lama.  But God chose Jesus to be amongst a race of people who they themselves are sinful.  There was something about these people, that God created and chose to tell the story of Jesus.

I think there are a lot of things you can believe about in Jesus.  He is the Son of God and the Son of Man.  He is the Almighty.  He is the King of kings and Lord of lords.  He has died for our sins and was resurrected from the dead.  He also ascended to heaven.  In the book of John, it is written that Jesus is the Word of God.  A message.  An authority.  He was there in the beginning of creation.  However, even if you strip away even the physical words of Scripture, you get the essence and spirit that Jesus was one of the last, if not the last, figure in Earth's history that he must be a final summary to our search for an answer to our universe.  He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

What is the church of Jesus?

If you ignore all the other writings in New Testament from after the book of Acts, and just focus on Jesus and his ministry, I think church could be a very different thing.  You see, Jesus surrounded himself with only a small group of men, and maybe with some additional assistance along the way.  Women also played an important role in his ministry.  Mary Magdalene, Phoebe, Priscilla, the Samaritan woman, the woman who was about to be stoned, to name a few.  There was also Jesus's mother Mary.  Without her, there wouldn't be a vessel which Jesus came into the world.  This is such an important aspect of Jesus.  Not only is he the Son of God but he's the Son of Man (of the lineage of Adam).  Where Eve came out of Adam, Jesus came out from Mary, a woman.  But besides the 12 disciples and a few others along the way, that was it.  No pastor, no deacons, no elders, and no hierarchy of leadership.   

Going to the book of Acts, we see that many early believers of Jesus often just gather together, breaking of bread, pray, sing and share with each other in their resources.  There are some churches that based their small groups around the passages in Acts 2:42. Many home or house churches have modeled their gathering based on this passage of Scripture.

Jesus never taught how people should organize themselves in the church.  There were no men and women ministry, or children's ministry, or a committee to vote on how to spend on the new fellowship hall, or how to put together a potluck.  Rather, he taught and shown the people of the time how to be better humans and how you should care for those who are poor, needy, sick, widowed, and who are different like the Gentiles and Samaritans.  But he also shows no partiality towards the leaders as he included those like Matthew, the tax collector, into his circle.  Jesus knew of the social inequality of the people of Israel created by organized religion and how religious leaders can exploit the common people if a government allows for such things to happen.  He knew that organized religion could be detrimental and damaging to the people of the Jews.

I think the Jews at the time had organize their leadership in a hierarchal fashion (again, I'm not a historian, so I need to fact check this but this is purely from speculation and observation of reading the Bible).  If you go back to the time of the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth and the first part of 1st Samuel, you will find that the Israelite tribes were govern by judges and priest.  It wasn't until 1st Samuel 8 that the Hebrews asked for a king, like the kings of the surrounding nations around Israel.  When Paul wrote to the different fellowships in these different cities in the New Testament, often times the newly converted Christians will continue to operate the way they did in these types of leadership pecking order (because they didn't know better).  And to those who are Gentiles, they too copied whatever the Jews did.  So, Paul wrote his letters with this in mind on how to behave and conduct their fellowships and based on his own experience as a former Jewish leader. 

So, what does that mean for all of us?  I'm not saying leave your church and go create your own church. (I mean, you can, if you felt lead.)  I think if you felt lead by God to stay where you all, by all means, stay.  But I think Jesus spoke of a different church and that the church is the people who believed in him.  God and Jesus wants us to connect with each others, share in our resources, our faith and our lives.  Jesus doesn't just wants us to share the Gospel but to really share the Gospel of his Great Commandments by living it out daily.  And that, to me, I believe is what Jesus was striving for.  He could care less if there was another building built or how you organize yourselves or how your budget is doing or how many ministries and committees you have.  Jesus just cares about your heart and he gave up his life for it.  And I’m not just saying that to be cliché but having been through deconstruction, I am finally learning what being the church should really mean.  And finding that connection with people in the love of Christ should bring some meaning in you lives.

The one key difference in Christian living compared to other religions is that we do the things we do because Jesus did it first out of his love, and not to do things to earn anybody's favor or the favor of any other gods.  Even if you don't believe in Jesus resurrection and that he will come back again, at least know he was sent from God to share with us how to be kind and loving humans.