Who Is This Man?Sample

Career Change

Jesus spent most of his adult life as a blue-collar worker, crafting benches and tables. Then one day he decided to change jobs. We do not know what prompted Jesus to change occupations, or how long the idea had been in his mind, or what his family thought when he told them. One Sabbath he went to the synagogue in his hometown, picked up a scroll and read a passage in Isaiah, and then sat down.

Sitting down is the traditional teaching posture of a rabbi—the scholar-teachers of Israel. When Jesus sat down, he was proclaiming his new occupation. He claimed in his first message that God is a Gentile-lover ready to embrace anybody. Jesus claimed to know this. By the end of his sermon the congregation was so furious that they drove him out of town and attempted to throw him off a cliff. They resisted his knowledge.

If this were me, at the end of my first sermon I would be tempted to feel discouraged. Jesus began his new career—to put it mildly—as an undistinguished visiting scholar. But Jesus was a teacher through and through. He had a quality—generally restricted to either a genius or a psychotic—of being so convinced that he was right that even intense opposition did not sway him.

Jesus’ ability to help the simplest person while still challenging the smartest was understood as one sign of his mastery. Early church fathers had a favorite saying that the Gospels are a river in which a gnat can swim and an elephant can drown.

The historical impact of Jesus’ thinking is so pervasive that it is often taken for granted. The record of his life and teaching, the Gospels, have impacted the world so much that they have been translated into 2,527 languages.

What would the history of our world be if Jesus had not changed careers? Imagine that he stays in the shop: there is no teaching ministry, no crucifixion, no rise of the church, no New Testament scriptures, no monastic communities. The reason for which Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale got founded does not exist.

It is a mark of Jesus’ impact that the scenario is simply, literally, unimaginable.