Chapter Four: Jesus: The Center of the Story

Chapter One: Let Me Tell You a Story
Chapter Two: The Story from Above
Chapter Three: The Story from Below

Chapter Four: Jesus–The Center of the Story

19 For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, 20 and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ?s blood on the cross.
Colossians 1:19-20 (NLT)

Whether we begin telling the gospel story from God?s perspective or from ours, we?ll end up at the same place: Jesus. With outstretched arms Jesus brings both perspectives of the story together and holds them in place until God?s glory is revealed and we are rescued from our trouble.

Until Jesus, God had been a character without a face. At different times throughout the Bible God is revealed as a force or a presence or a voice, but it?s not until Jesus appears as one of us that we are able to understand what God is really like. In Jesus, God?s faithfulness and humanity?s frailty are combined. The result is salvation with its promise of a new creation with new life, new hope, and new opportunities.

We get a better understanding of what this means by reading the gospels?the four books in the New Testament known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
They?re like highlight reels of Jesus? life that help us see how his life, death, and resurrection are the key to our salvation.

His Life
Jesus was born into scandal. He grew up in obscurity. Then one day he stepped onto history?s stage and changed everything. He came preaching the message of ?The Kingdom of God.? This was the message of salvation that the world had been waiting to hear. But he didn?t come merely to talk about or explain the kingdom. He came to embody it. As powerful as his teachings were, they were nothing compared to the grace and truth demonstrated by his actions.

He healed the sick, raised the dead, and cast evil spirits out of people as a way of demonstrating God?s intention to heal and restore his entire creation. Jesus spent time with ?sinners??those who had been excluded by the religious elite?as a way of showing that no person, no matter how messy their life had become, was beyond the reach of God?s forgiving love.

He spoke words of truth to those who had lost their way or had been led astray. He called people to repent, to change their thinking and their actions, in response to his message. He demonstrated a way of life more befitting of human beings created in the image of God. To those who were paying attention and really listening to what he had to say, he revealed an alternative path that was unlike anything offered by his contemporaries. He invited a select group of people to be his ?disciples? or ?apprentices.? They followed him closely and learned this new of way life from him so that they could someday pass it on to others. Jesus began a revolution of love, grace, and hope that was building momentum and would eventually reach to the ends of the earth and include people from all nations.

All of this was supposed to be good news, but it wasn?t received that way by all who heard him. He accumulated enemies just as quickly as he gathered followers. It was the religious leaders who had the biggest problem with him. He challenged their traditions and embarrassed them with his acceptance of the same sinners they had rejected. He undermined their influence with his authoritative teaching style. He condemned their religious institutions, like the temple in Jerusalem, that were doing more harm than good. On top of all that, they were jealous of him. Masses of people were drawn to him in a way that they weren?t drawn to them.

These crowds were also a threat to the Roman Empire. Nothing made the powers-that-be more nervous than a charismatic leader who could build a following and motivate them to action. Rome didn?t tolerate revolutionaries. That is exactly what the religious leaders made Jesus out to be to the Roman authorities. Of course, Jesus was leading a revolution, but it wasn?t a revolution advanced with swords and clubs. It was a revolution of love. But that didn?t really matter to Rome.

The crowds around Jesus were large; they were also fickle. It happened in Jerusalem at the time of Passover, a season of intense religious and political fervor. Jesus? enemies whipped into a frenzy the same people, who just a few days earlier had given Jesus a hero?s welcome into town. They convinced Pilate, the Roman Governor, that the best way to keep the peace was to execute Jesus by crucifixion.

His Death
The crucifixion of Jesus was history?s darkest moment. Not just because a good man died an excruciating death that he didn?t deserve, but also because it appeared that once again the forces of evil had thwarted God?s attempt to rescue his creation. As it turned out, the cross was actually the best, and most unexpected, plot twist in the history of storytelling. Had we been there to witness those six brutal hours Jesus spent on the cross, in addition to the torture he endured before the crucifixion, we would have seen nothing significant in his death. He would have looked just like any other failed Messiah who had come to Jerusalem with delusions of grandeur and ended up on a cross.

Yet, the Christian faith is built on the conviction that something cosmically significant was happening as Jesus was dying on the cross. Somehow, in some way, while on the cross Jesus was fighting the ultimate battle against evil on our behalf. The forces of evil threw everything they had at Jesus and he absorbed it all. The worst of the human condition?betrayal, jealously, guilt, shame, fear, doubt, isolation, and brokenness–was placed upon his shoulders. By taking all of this upon himself, Jesus made a way for us to step out from under the burden of our guilt and shame and freed us from the grip of the forces of evil which had enslaved us to sin and death.

Sometimes an image helps us understand Jesus? death in a way that words can?t. Imagine a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings as a prairie fire rages across a farm. As the fire passes, the chicks are protected from the flames as their mother takes the full force of the heat upon herself. Her death makes life possible for others. So does the death of Jesus. (Thanks to N. T. Wright for this image.)

His death does more than just save us from evil. It also reverses the curse brought about by the fall and restores our broken relationships. By showing us pure love in action, Jesus draws us back into relationship with God and shows us how to relate with others. From the cross, Jesus shows us what God really looks like. Having seen the face of unconditional, self-giving, sacrificial love, we see everything else in a different light as well. When we become a part of God?s story and learn to love as Jesus loved, it opens up an entirely different, and much better, way of relating to and experiencing the joys found in the world around us. His death gives us life.

His Resurrection
How can we believe that what I?ve just described is the product of anything other than a bad case of wishful thinking? How do we know that something significant happened when Jesus died on the cross? The death of Jesus is meaningful for only one reason?the resurrection.

After Jesus was killed on the cross, his body was placed in a tomb. After three days, on a Sunday, the gospels report that Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared to his disciples. The Christian faith stands or falls on whether or not this actually happened. If Jesus wasn?t raised from the dead, then he was a failed Messiah who was really no different than all the other wandering sages of his day.

If he was raised from the dead, and there is good reason to believe that he was, then everything he said and did takes on greater weight. The resurrection elevates Jesus from the status of a good teacher and doer of good deeds to the Lord of all creation and the author of salvation. The resurrection validates Jesus? identity as the Son of God and vindicates everything he taught and did. The resurrection is God?s way of saying, ?This is my son, whom I love, listen to him!?

The resurrection is also God?s way of declaring an irrefutable victory over the forces of evil. Jesus entered the shadowy world of sin and death and emerged from his tomb victorious. This is good news because if sin and death have no power over Jesus, then they have no lasting power over those who are ?in Jesus.? We?ll talk more about what it means to ?in Jesus? in a future chapter, but for now, please trust me when I tell you that ?in Jesus? is one of the most important little phrases in the Bible.

While there aren?t enough words in any language to adequately explain the logic and process of how we are saved by Jesus, the historic Christian conviction is that our sins are forgiven, evil is defeated, creation is restored, and the light of God?s glory shines most brightly through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There simply would be no good news story to tell without him.

To grasp the difference Jesus can make in our lives takes a lifetime of exploration. A kind of exploration done not so much by reading books, but by becoming a part of God?s story and learning how to live, love, and die as Jesus did.

How do we become a part of God?s story? We?ll take up that question in the next chapter.