“In many and various ways,” the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, does God reveal himself. I was reminded of this again recently while reading the Gospels. It’s thrilling to think about what it would have been like to hear his words freshly delivered while sitting amongst thousands in the rocky countryside of Judea or pressed against a perspiring mob in a synagogue. There would have been moments of awe and wonder at Jesus’ description of the coming Kingdom, joy and comfort in his renderings of the Beatitudes or the Good Shepherd and his flock. But at other times, there were reactions much more visceral in nature—those of shock and bewilderment.
It’s these moments that I find particularly fascinating to imagine witnessing—Jesus at his most provocative. In Matthew 10, his predictions for the future must have sounded then, and continue to be ominously abrasive: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother.” Later in Matthew, Peter was undoubtedly stunned by Jesus’ scathing retort in response to a seemingly caring concern for his life: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” The ultimate jolt that Christ delivered to those in his hearing must have been from John 6:53: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” At the time, this must have felt like nothing short of a gut punch. Indeed, we are told it was such a shock that “many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.”
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