So they sent officers to arrest Him.
These officers were experienced. They had heard yakety-yaksters before and had hand-cuffed and gagged them and brought them in. Just a routine assignment.
But Christ was different, jaw-droppingly different. Stunned, they gave Him plenty of rope and for several days they listened and observed hard.
They saw none of Christ’s famous miracles. No lame were leaping for joy upon being instructed to pick up the bed and walk. No youth foaming at the mouth and convulsing were exorcised and sitting at His feet placid and attentive.
But on the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried,
“If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, … out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:39)
The officers returned to headquarters, without Him. In response to the chief priest’s outrage, the officers murmured simply, “Never a man spake like this Man!” (John 7:46 KJV.)
At the beginning, before the fall, in the cool of the evening God and man walked and conversed freely, I imagine casually. But when it mattered, when it was Satan’s word against God’s, Eve believed Satan and doubted the very word spake by God. This cut off direct words between God and man, severed, sundered, terminated, cancelled, like a telegraph wire sliced. No more casual evening chats. But God so loved fallen man that He sent His only begotten Son into this world. Never a man spake as this Man, and never will He speak like this again.
If the officers murmured that never a man spake as this Man, the Father thundered to the Mount of Transfiguration, “HEAR YE HIM!” (Matthew 17:5KJV).
But the command to HEAR YE HIM has been for the the last two thousand years scorned as outdated and laughed off by every generation of currently fashionable academically gowned seminarians, self-awarded philosophers, funded theologians, theoreticians, higher critics, and in Christ’s time by learned scribes and Pharisees, all of them away in their own noisy parallel universes. Unlearned by their standards, Christ turned away from them and praised God. “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to babes.” (Matt 11:25-26)
This Man spake so simply that babes and children understood, yet so profoundly that professors couldn’t or wouldn’t. The unlearned fisherman that Christ called as His own disciples recognized the true Messiah, but could not comprehend His mission until their devastation at His crucifixion. Then, fully empowered by the coming of, as Christ had promised, the Holy Spirit, the Former Rain, they changed the world.
Oblivious to the world’s greatest teacher are Google’s list, but to receptive Christians, Christ was greater than any, even the Greeks. Instead of Socratic questions, He asked rhetorical questions that led, for those that have ears to hear, to even higher truths than Socrates ever imagined. Like on resurrection morning He asked, “Who are you looking for?” You are looking for, and seeing, the Son of God, who alone has swallowed up death in victory.
No man ever spake so tenderly, so lovingly, so compassionately, so weepingly, so genuinely, so mercifully, so long-sufferingly, so earnestly, so knowingly, for He had with the Father created us, and sacrificed so much of His divinity to redeem us.
And drained of much divinity, Christ pled to His Father throughout many nights and constantly every day, mercifully recorded but on first glance incomprehensible. Christ pled for the glory and strength He had with the Father before the foundation of the earth. He would say and pray that without the Father He could do nothing yet the Father had given Him authority and all power in heaven and earth, had given Him life, a man’s “body.” He thanked His Father for those people the Father had given Him, yet He had, as God, created them.
He looked like other men. He was a healthy specimen of manhood. But He had not the image a national hero, much less a God to be worshipped, but was meek and mild. He could be crucified and die. “His visage was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.” (Isa 52:14KJV)
He spake in logic unknown to philosophy or science, and in ways past finding out. And He spake in apparent circles. “No man can come to me except the Father … draw him. No one cometh unto the Father but by me.” (John 6:44, 65; 14:6 KJV). “Without me ye can do nothing.” “Without the Father I can do nothing.” As God He spake in dimensions man cannot perceive, in which electrons and galaxies spin and whirl and orbit.
This Man was described by Moses as “the prophet,” but was not a prophet. He was more than a prophet. He was at home simultaneously in the past, present, and future, and for whom a thousand years is as a day and a day as a thousand. He had participated in creating time. Before Nathaniel was called Christ had seen him under a fig tree. He had seen Peter before his denial of his master, and the gentle John while he was yet a son of Thunder. He saw, sees, us facing End Times. He simultaneously dwells in a high and holy place and with those of contrite spirit.
Having defeated Satan’s deceptions, Christ turned around, as no other man should, and deliberately left stumbling blocks for those whose hearts craved them and who had eyes scrunched shut. “Destroy this temple,” He said, “and in 3 days I will raise it.” He spake of Himself as the bread of life, of His flesh and blood which we must eat and drink. So Catholic priests perform the sacrament of the Eucharist which they claim is His very flesh. To others it isn’t a sacrament but cannibalism. Christ spake in severe, testing ways, as He did to the Syrophoenician woman, as He will do to us, ways Satan seizes and twists.
Christ spake to us individually or as multitudes, from a boat or seated on the grass, or standing in the temple and crying aloud, but never behind a pulpit as Paul or our pastors do. He didn’t rehearse for a week to say nothing, as some of our senior pastors do now.
He spoke as no other Man and always in their language. He left it for Pilate to write plaques on the cross using 3 current languages. After the resurrection His disciples were empowered by the Holy Spirit to speak in all tongues. And He spake not in Elizabethan KJV.
Christ spake in different tones and ways for different people. Even by Jewish standards Nicodemus was extraordinarily wealthy as well as an educated Pharisee. He indulged the Savior in introductory wheedling flattery, but Christ cut him off with, “ye must be born again.” At this Nicodemus was, like the officers, dumbfounded. That planted a timid slow-growing seed, only a seed.
On the other hand, with the saucy Samaritan lady at the well, it was all coquettish chat for her as He first simply ask for a drink and then recited everything that she had ever done, but ending in His soft announcrment that He was the Messiah. She instantly believed! That chat yielded a full and instant harvest.
He spent hours miraculously feeding the hungry thousands from a couple of loaves and little fishes, as buildup to days of a running exchange with the materialist throng who had chased Him all over the landscape determined to take Him and make Him king simply because of His supernatural logistic prowess. If having fed them He evaded them, He now evaded their king-maker ambitions and kept changing the subject back to His being the bread of life, His whole object in the first place.
But hearing of the bread of life when they expected to hear of bread for armies, is foolishness. At the end of the exchange this crowd walked with Him no more.
Christ turned to His disciples and asked them whether they would leave also. But, exclaimed Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You speak like never a man spake. You are the Messiah.”
The departing crowd switched from boosters to scoffers, as just days after His triumphal entry into Jerusalem the multitude went from a crowd of palm-wavers who also wanted to make Him a temporal king, to a murderous mob. To the unrequited king-makers Christ became merely of dour countenance and long of face and no fun at all. Only a joke.
However, Christ is not our model for hee-haw, head-back, side-splitting, knee-slapping, belly-laugh, night-club laughter. Christ did not and never will send audiences into guffaws as comedians and many preachers now compete to do. He was not the original Jewish stand-up comedian. He did not come to compete in joke-a-thons but in the contest with Satan for ownership of the world and us.
The Beatitudes did not crack them up. His sermons and parables were not to evoke ripples of chuckling and chortling. The life of the world, He was not the life of the party. He came not to offer bacchanalia but blessings, as at the wedding in Cana when he miraculously transformed water into good ‘wine’. Wealthy admirers sometimes mounted dinners at which He was the guest of honor, but He never responded with human one-upmanship or jokes. Parables and homilies, generic or laser-focused admonitions, rebukes, tearful predictions – yes. But jokes – no.
Christ had been sent from heaven and would return to His throne on the right hand of the Father. He could therefore promise as no man can,
“I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go to prepare a place for you I will come again and receive you unto myself that where I am ye may be also.” (John 14:2-3 KJV) . “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor entered into the heart of man the things that God hath prepared for them that love Him.” (1Cor 2:9KJV)
Christ at His mock trial had forewarned, “I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” (Matt 26:64KJV). Accompanied by unnumbered mighty angels, He will return in overwhelming Godly glory. The earth will tremble and the mountains and towering cities crumble. Then the jokesters and jokers will tremble with the earth, and their jokes will segue into pleadings for the rubble to fall upon them.
And He had also foretold End Times, times of trouble such as never have been. By the Latter Rain Christ will warn the world and refresh the church. But we may think we are plenty wet, even baptized, already. And the Latter Rain, an extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit for the End Times, may not be through our dear high-tech videos, or podiums, or even online, in which we put our faith. But God’s ways are not man’s ways, even man’s high tech, cutting edge, self,-sufficient ways. Alas, many of us won’t know the Latter Rain is happening.
The Bible record of what this soft-spoken Man said when He came among us looking like every other mortal man, is necessarily incomplete. As a sort of benediction to beloved and loving apostle John’s gospel, which of all the gospels records the most of Christ’s speaking as no other man did, John opines that
“there are also many other things that Jesus said, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.” (John 21:25)
When the last amen has been shouted and it’s all over, Christ will welcome us as only our God can to Heaven to receive us unto Himself that we may forever be where He is. And we, and the officers sent to arrest Him, and Adam and Eve, and Nicodemus and the woman at the well, the Syrophoenician woman, and Nathanial, and Peter, all of us will sing loudly and throughout eternity His praises as only the redeemed can.
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