There are different lenses through which to see Jesus. I suppose there is a Florence Jesus—the pale, gentle, Caucasian Jesus of the Italian Renaissance paintings, with a scraggly blond beard and two fingers raised in blessing. There’s the Managua Jesus, the peasant revolutionary. There’s the Jesus of the American slaves, the suffering Christ bearing the burden of the oppressed. There’s the Oxford Jesus, the strong, elegant, protective Aslan for those who came to faith through C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Anglophilia. And then there’s the Jerusalem Jesus. This is the lens that sees Jesus the Jew.
This is the lens that tries to see through two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism; that tries to see through two thousand years in which Jews and Christians have defined themselves against one another, magnifying their differences. This is the lens that tries to see Jesus in his original Jewish context, that tries to put his Israelite and Jewish experience in the foreground, and not in the background.
I’m always amazed by how many people who have dedicated their lives to Christ have never actually been to Israel. They have money to travel, and go off to Europe and such places, but they haven’t directly experienced the clashing confrontation of faiths, powers, and tribes that marks Jerusalem today and was just as present in Jesus’s own lifetime. They haven’t given themselves the chance to appreciate how misleading it is to associate the faith with the serenity of a church pew or the reasoned domesticity of a Bible study. The world Jesus inhabited was a world of fractious intensity. The Israel of Jesus, like the Israel of today, was a spiritual and literal battle zone. He was love in the most hostile environment imaginable.
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