By Abdu Rafiu
The Lord Jesus brought the Message of Truth to mankind from His Father, the Almighty, and the Creator of All. However, to the priestly and political Establishment in Israel in conspiratorial resolve, the high, sublime, and beneficent Mission must be swiftly terminated. The priests found His teachings irksome and saw Him as a threat to their power and influence. The political Establishment had carried in their hearts the prophecy of a Messiah who would bring the Jews liberation and freedom which they twisted to mean freedom from the Rome and the heavy Roman yoke. They got embittered, listening to Christ and all they heard was preachment of peace and the admonition to pray for their enemies. They came to the conclusion that the Lord was not the prophesied Messiah their forebears were told by the prophets was coming. They regarded Him as an impostor. I want to believe these must have formed part of the historical and political setting Professor Pius Oyeniran Abioje, who teaches Christian Theology at the University of Ilorin, referred to in the institution’s 167th inaugural lecture.
The redemptive efforts of the Lord were faced with resistance from the word go. From a chain of World Teachers and Prophets, a large number of them coming from Israel had ingrained in the Jewish people a restless expectation of a Messiah who would free them from the yoke of enslavement, persecution, wars, occupation of their lands and foreign rule. Enoch spoke of the coming of a Mediator between God and mankind who is begotten of God from all time and hidden from men until His Hour.” Daniel had prophesied: “I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of Heaven, and came and came to the ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given dominion, and glory, and a kingdom that all people, nations and languages should serve him, his dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7: 13-14).
The Psalmist said of the Messiah: “He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. They that dwelleth in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust.” He went on: “Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him. For, he shall deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor also, and him that hath no helper. He shall spare the poor and the needy and shall save the souls of the needy. He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in his sight.” (Psalm 72, 11-14). Jeremiah called him Jahweh, “the Lord of our righteousness” (Jeremiah 33, 16).
The prophecy of Isaiah is well known: “Listen, house of David! Is it not enough for you to try the patience of men? Will you also try the patience of my God? Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive, have a son, and name him Imanuel (God with us). The Lord will bring on you, your people, and house of your father, such a time as has never been seen since Ephraim separated from Judah—the king of Assyria (is coming).” Moses prophesied: “I shall see him, but now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel.”
By the time of the Lord Christ, the Jews had had The Ten Commandments of God mediated to Moses on Mount Sinai, from which the Mosaic Law, the Torah arose. Out of lack of the right understanding, the obedience to the Torah had become rigid and unnatural, dead-letter belief, forbidding, for example, healing on the Sabbath Day. It was such that the Pharisees and Scribes took very serious exception to the Lord Jesus healing on the Day of the Sabbath. Strangely, they were alarmed that He healed a man who had been sick of palsy for 38 years. They did not see Divine Power in the healings; rather their concern was their office, public acknowledgement, and influence the miracles would seem to have threatened. And they said: “This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the Sabbath Day” (John 9: 16). John further reports that after the healing of the man, the Jews were agitated and he quotes them as saying: “And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, because He had done these things on the Sabbath day.” The Lord said in response to their hate-filled criticism as follows, again reported by John: “But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore Jews sought the more to kill him, because He not only had broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was His father, making Himself equal to God.”
About the most contentious was the raising of Lazarus from the dead. The Establishment took serious exception to it because it was widely discussed and it aroused great political expectation. Political expectation because acts of raising people from the dead were supposed to foreshadow the promised kingdom of the prophesied Messiah, signaling the imminent liberation and triumph of Israel. Coinciding as it did with Passover Festival, if the crowd thronging Jerusalem for it decided to make the Lord Jesus Christ King, that was it; the claim of the priestly caste to leadership was finished. To pre-empt that it was imperative they should act fast to get rid of Him: “Tell us by what authority doest thou these things?” They wanted to entrap Him by hearing Him make claim of divinity so that on the strength of it they could sentence Him to death. They wanted to know if the baptism carried out by John the Baptist was from Heaven or from men. The Lord declined to answer. Not done, they wanted to set Him up against the authority in Rome; they asked if it was right to pay tax and He answered, “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what belongs to God.”
With all we can glean from the experiences of the Lord Christ, the hate and plot to harm and kill, can we still ascribe hate and the plot to harm and kill to the design of the Most High, God the Father Who is all love, and perfection? Without Perfection God will not be God. The Almighty has been perfect from the very beginning even if we were to speak of a beginning at all. The Most High has been in existence in all eternity and shall remain so for all eternity because He is Life. Being Life, He requires nothing to make Him live for He is Life Itself. Perfection that He is permits of no alteration, improvement, addition nor subtraction. As He is perfect so is His Will which is manifested in His Divine Laws of Creation. It should follow that these Laws also called Laws of Nature are perfect. They are immutable, constant, all pervading and self-acting because they are living; flowing unceasingly from God Who is Truth, Light and Life. They are inflexible and incorruptible. If He the Creator means love, that love is unalterable. He could not have meant harm, crucifixion for that matter for His Son. He could not have sent Him to come to the earth to die to take away the sins of mankind. If He desired joy and happiness for we puny human beings, could He have meant less for His Son? Would He have subjected Him to mockery and humiliation, and murder that His crucifixion unarguably was?
Pontius Pilate was to reveal in his letter to Tiberius Caesar in what he called his encounter with Jesus, “He appeared to be about thirty years of age. Never have I seen a sweeter or more serene countenance.” The letter is described as a historical document said to be from “The Archko Volume or The archeological Writings of the Sanhedrin and Talmuds of the Jews, entered into the Congressional Record in the year 1887. Republished in 1975 by Keats Publishing Inc., 27 pine Street, New Canaan Conn. 06840, USA.)”
Pilate said in the letter that he was informed that “some misfortune would befall the Lord Christ; that it would not be the first time that Jerusalem had stoned those who called themselves prophets; an appeal would be made to Caesar. However, my conduct was approved by the senate.” He wrote to the Lord Christ requesting an interview with Him. In his words, “When the Nazarene made His appearance, I was walking in my basilica, and my feet seemed fastened with an iron hand to the marble pavement, and I trembled in every limb as does a guilty culprit, though the Nazarene was calm as innocence itself.”
The suspicion of what the Lord was up to and the resistance had begun from when He was barely 12 years old and the bandage had not even dropped from His eyes to recognise His High Mission which was to proclaim the Message of Truth from His Father to the faithless. As early as that age, He had learnt to read through the sacred texts of the Israelites, the carefully prepared chosen people, and had even memorized them just like every other Jewish child. So armed was He that when His Ministration began, he was completely at home with what was on ground. To demonstrate that He knew where the Jews were coming from, He was wont, very often, to punctuate His pronouncements with: “Ye have heard…but I say unto you.” “Have ye never read…” “It is written …” “Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, ‘Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oath’: But I say unto you, swear not at all…” (Matthew 5: 33-34).
The Establishment made up of the Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees were crestfallen: the ordinary people were amazed and they said He spoke with authority of One who knows. He stood alone and made independent decisions, giving no bother as to whether even His Disciples comprehended Him or not. This engendered fear in the Establishment who felt their authority and power threatened. “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” At all times the Lord held His ground: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17), He said to them. The Lord brought freshness, life and meaning to age-long commandments and traditions which were furthering to human development. He dismissed many as useless and dangerous that must be discarded. The Establishment, infuriated, sought to blackmail Him and undermine His person by dismissing Him contemptuously as a carpenter and son of Mary. But the Lord was unperturbed.
The scheming went on and the Lord Jesus asked on many occasions what He had done that they wanted to kill Him. Pilate as his letter reveals said to Him with “deep emotion: Your blood shall not be spilt. You are more precious in my estimation on account of your wisdom than all the turbulent and proud Pharisees who abuse the freedom granted them by the Romans. They conspire against Caesar, and convert his bounty into fear; impressing the unlearned that Caesar is a tyrant and seeks their ruin…They are not aware that the wolf of the Tiger sometimes clothes himself with the skin of the sheep to accomplish his wicked designs. I will protect you against them.” And the Lord replied: “Prince of the earth, I come not to bring war into the world, but peace, love, and charity. I was born the same day Augustus gave peace to the Roman world. Persecutions proceed not from me. I expect it from others…” Pilate said: “I felt a heavy burden on me, of which I could not relieve myself while in His presence…The Pharisees were the avowed enemies of Jesus. They cared not for the government.”
The plotters succeeded when one of the Disciples volunteered to get Him for them. That was Judas Iscariot. The Lord exercised power through His person and Word. The audience was always enraptured soaking in His Words. So moved were they, together with some of those healed, that they thought of how they could show gratitude; they could not help offering their wealth. Judas loved money and could not understand why his Master would decline to accept monetary gifts He was being offered. In his reasoning, if the Lord was not interested in earthly things, someone else just had to take charge and see to it that the opportunities offered were not missed. Blinkered by his ambition without his Master’s knowledge, he entered into negotiation with the Jewish resistant movements for an armed rebellion. The objective of the movements was to drive away the Romans, their overlord and Christ would be proclaimed king on His arrival in Jerusalem for the Passover festival. His entry known today as Palm Sunday was meant to be the triumphal entry with thousands disguising as pilgrims hailing Him as Hosanna: “Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.” (John 13: 12). The Lord rejected the reception flatly saying His Kingdom was not of this world. To the members of the movements, it was a surprise and it raised suspicion. The pilgrims had pinned their hope of national liberation and freedom on Him.
When one considers the kicking, the beating, the humiliation, the howling mob and then the crucifixion, as I already remarked, this could not have been a Divine design—that is the design by God Almighty Who is Love and Justice—to redeem mankind of their sins. The Lord Jesus Christ would know if it was the design of His Father that He should be sacrificed. What is more: Town-criers spread out on the street of Jerusalem with announcement by the priests that the “false prophet”, Jesus of Nazareth, sentenced to death by highest court for blasphemy had been arrested! The announcement was so couched to stir up enmity against the Lord. Immediately opinion of the masses on Christ the Lord changed immediately. The same man they had hailed as Hosanna, the King of Israel. The ignorant and cruel argument that the ways of God are in inscrutable cannot suffice to explain the cruelty and illogicality that this was the design of Most High Creator. The Most High God is logic personified. In the enlightenment contained in the higher knowledge spreading on earth in these times, each individual is requested to subject whatever he is offered or that he reads to keen scrutiny, to strict examination as each human being bears personal responsibility for the errors he has permitted himself to hold as gospel truth. The Divine Laws which ensure order, peace, in all realms of existence, Paradise, and all, up to the Divine Realm do not permit of arbitrariness and callousness visited on anybody how much more on the Lord of Love, the Author of Peace.
Some of the critical sections of the Jewish law Caiaphas invoked in order to secure conviction of the Lord were articles 55, 76, and 82. They read as follows: He who doubts the Divine origin of Torah will suffer death by burning. He who openly utters the name of Jahveh is a blasphemer and the convicted blasphemer will be stoned. A pseudo-prophet is a renegade preacher who seeks by means of visions, illusions, false oracles, magic, exorcism, hallucination or general miracles to seduce Israel to apostasy. A pseudo-prophet must be judged by the Great Sanhedrin, and be executed in Jerusalem. The President of the Great Sanhedrin has the right in exceptional cases to pass over any obstructive regulations in order to put a swift and radical end to apostasy…an action according to the needs of the moment. Even, the execution of an innocent person can serve in the maintenance of law and order, and the salvation of God’s people.
The wife of Pilate the governor appointed by the emperor in Rome warned her husband; “Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.” (Matthew 27: 19). Pilate gave a fuller account of the dream and the disposition of his wife in the letter to Caesar: “Weeping and throwing herself at my feet, she said to me: ‘beware, beware, and touch not that man; for he is holy. Last night I saw him in a vision. He was walking on the waters; he was flying on the wings of the wind. He spoke to the tempest and the fishes of the lake; all were obedient to him. Behold, the torrent in Mount kedron flows with blood, the statues of Caesar are filled with gemonide; the columns of the interium have given way; and the sun is veiled in the morning like a vestal in the tomb. Ah! Pilate, evil awaits thee. If thou wilt not listen to the vows of thy wife, dread the curse of a Roman Senate; dread the frowns of Caesar.” Pilate was torn between the admonition of his wife and loyalty to Rome; not wanting to offend Rome. In the end he elected the latter.
On the day of the execution, and the death of the Lord, there was revolt in the firmament. The elements could not understand, darkness descended at high noon when the weather should have been characteristically bright. The curtain shielding the Holy of Holies was rent in twain by the unseen elemental beings that were filled with disgust. Judas upon returning the bribe of 30 shekels he was paid to sell out His Master committed suicide and was buried far outside the city in the forest where vagabonds and murderers were always buried. Sensing deeply within us as human beings that his was an act of betrayal, of the highest degree, no one up till this day has been known to name his child Judas. The Lord Himself prayed the most powerful prayer of intercession for His traducers and murderers, and the lukewarm mankind in general: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” Does anyone forgive what is right? We only forgive wrong. Christ told some women of Israel who were weeping: Weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children’s children!
Divine Love was temporarily defeated and His beneficent work of Love halted by the hatred of those whom He made all the sacrifice coming from the Heights to save. The Son of God was sentenced as a blasphemer because He neither could nor would He deny His Origin, even at the cost of His earth-life, a tragic irony, and the gravest crime that was ever committed against One Who brought Holy Peace!
In the Roman Empire, crucifixion was not only the most inhuman but also the most agonizing and dishonourable sentence. Neither arms nor legs nailed to can be moved and the person is made to choke to death! The hanging of the body on the cross caused prolonged death struggle. Let’s face it: Is that the way to salvation? Was that the design of His Father? In the words of someone who stands in very high knowledge, it was a drama of cosmic dimensions! Up till this day, the church is yet to come to grips with the phenomenon of stigmatism when some Christians go through very harrowing experiences ahead of and during Easter period. They are flogged by unseen hands; they hear strange voices and blood oozes out of their hands and feet, similar to the very spots and wound marks when the Lord was nailed to the cross. They get relief only after Easter is over. They were the people who participated in the nailing of the Son of God to the Cross, or took part in mocking Him on the Cross. In accordance with the Law of Sowing, they were and still being made to go through the experiences of the Lord on the Cross. The first incident was that of Francis Assisis in 1224. The most publicized was that of a German woman, Therese Neumann. Born in 1898 in in a village North East of Bavaria, she began to have her experiences. She had become stigmatized in 1926. Hers was such that she attracted tourists, indeed pilgrimages under the misconception that she was special, sent by the Lord. Clergy men milled round her. There were three such cases in Nigeria, in the South East in the 1990s. The Guardian traced two of them and ran reports about them at the time.
Anthony Borga reports in his book titled More about life in the world unseen thus: “You know Roger, it’s not so very surprising that hundreds of people when they arrive here and find out the truth, go about like a ‘mighty wind’, and want to go back to earth to shout the truth at last to the folk they left behind them. Some of them actually do go back but the result is dismal—on both sides.” I dare say once again that the Lord Jesus, the Son of God, brought the Holy Word, not the Blood. The assertion is an invitation to awaken in our souls, to seek and find the right knowledge, weigh and examine so the Light of Truth may be beamed on life and existence and on all human affairs.
Resurrection of the Lord is a subject for another day.
The Guardian
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