David Cowles
Sep 1, 2024
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds find shelter in its branches.” (Matthew 13: 31 – 32)
Jesus’ parables are a mixed bag. Some are clear and incredibly insightful. Others are opaque, serpentine, and hard to interpret. Even the apostles couldn’t make head nor tail of some of them.
I do not mean to give Jesus ‘notes’. He had issues! As has often been pointed out, he could not relate to his followers using only the abstract concepts of ‘professional’ philosophers and theologians. He needed to give his audience something they could relate to and so he needed to rely on imagery familiar to everyday Palestinians in the first century CE.
But that was a secondary motivation! More importantly, Jesus needed to ‘code’ his message. At the beginning of his public ministry, he tried proclaiming it directly in the synagogue in Capernaum and barely escaped with his life. “Won’t make that mistake again. So much for 40 days in the desert wrestling with Satan. Time for Plan B!”
Beginning with Matthew the Evangelist, Christians have gone to great lengths to situate the Christian message as a logical continuation of themes found in what we now know as the Old Testament. And rightly so!
But this laudable theological exercise blunts our realization of just how radical Jesus’ teachings were. Supported only by a ‘gang’ of men and boys recruited from remote, hillside villages in the Galilee, Jesus was preparing to take on two global superpowers: Rome (political) and Jerusalem (religious).
Not that these two elites had much in common. The Jesus Story is firmly embedded within a much longer conflict between Israel’s two ‘masters’. Pontius Pilate to his credit tried to maintain a modicum of ‘peace’ between the two parties; of course, he failed!
Ironically, about the only thing the political and religious forces could agree on was their mutual disdain for Jesus.
So let’s recap. On one side, we have Rome’s ‘global’ political hegemony (Empire) supported by overwhelming military might. On the other side, a millennia old theology and religious tradition, fundamentally theocratic and anarchic, rapidly gaining converts all the way from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules.
“And then came Maude” (aka Jesus of Nazareth)! I wonder how William Hill™ would have handicapped this 3 way race.
Spoiler Alert: Over the next 400 years, the ‘glory that was Rome’ faded out. Efforts to revive it (800 CE, 1500 CE) were never fully successful. Judaism continued to spread and became an important world-wide religion but, for various reasons, failed to reach ‘critical mass’. Only Christianity achieved ‘escape velocity’.
The Jesus Story often presents the political and religious establishments as a collection of bungling fools, too preoccupied with their own interests to respond effectively to Jesus’ challenge. Nothing could be further from reality.
Just ask Jesus’ cousin, John, the Baptist, arrested, imprisoned and beheaded. Or the two prisoners crucified alongside Jesus on Calvary. Or Barabas whose life became a bargaining chip. Imagine his shock when he learned that he was being released as part of a comprehensive ‘deal’ to kill Jesus.
For one brief evening, the Roman Governor (Pilate), the local ruler (Herod), and the Chief Priest joined hands and sang Kumbaya. That’s how much of a threat Jesus was to political order and religious orthodoxy.
In fact, far from dropping the ball, the forces of reaction dogged Jesus from the very first days of his public ministry. To survive even three years, Jesus needed to deploy a complex strategy:
Stay out of the big cities, avoid the limelight, take the roads less traveled.
Stay out of Judea, until the end, and even minimize time in Galilee. Jesus was most at home in the region north of the Sea of Galilee, from the shores of Lebanon (Type and Sidon) to Syria (Golan) and along the East bank of the Jordan, including the Greek cities of the Decapolis – areas where sway of the political and religious powers was weakest.
Swear witnesses and beneficiaries to secrecy.
Encode his teachings in the language of parables, only explaining the unencrypted meaning to his closest disciples.
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.
purpose and devotion.
