1st August, 2009

NILS VON KALM

Sitting At The Feet Of the Rabbi Jesus

Ann Spangler & Lois Tverberg

Zondervan, 2009
ISBN-10: 0310284228
ISBN-13: 9780310284222

"If we could somehow have the opportunity of stepping into a time machine and stepping back in to the world of Jesus, I would recommend that you read 'Sitting At The Feet Of Rabbi Jesus' before you go. It would help you grasp the meaning and impact of His words and deeds. We would begin to appreciate the chaos He created, the incredible love He showed, and the news that He brought; indeed the news that He was."

Imagine if you could take yourself back 2,000 years and immerse yourself in the world of first century Palestine; to a little Jewish backwater where you were hearing reports of a man who was healing people and making the most extraordinary claims about himself.

Imagine if you could follow him on the way for a bit and listen to some of what he was saying, and see some of these things he was doing; these things that had people talking and spreading all sorts of rumours about him. But imagine your disappointment if you had no idea of the meaning of what he was saying; if you were just thrown back in time to try to understand the scandal that this man was creating everywhere he went.

If we could somehow have the opportunity of stepping into a time machine and stepping back in to the world of Jesus, I would recommend that you read Sitting At The Feet Of Rabbi Jesus before you go. It would help you grasp the meaning and impact of His words and deeds. We would begin to appreciate the chaos He created, the incredible love He showed, and the news that He brought; indeed the news that He was.

One of the authors, Lois Tverberg, is co-founder of the En-Gedi Resource Center which seeks to deepen Christian understanding of the Bible by teaching about its Jewish context. I have read a lot about Jesus over the last few years, but when I saw this book advertised recently, I couldn't but take a second look. As we worship on a Sunday morning, even when we read our Bibles, it is easy to forget that God entered history in Jesus at a specific time in a specific place. Jesus was a Jew, and to understand Him better, it is crucial that we learn more about what this means for how we understand the Gospel itself. As I read this book, many of the sayings of Jesus came to life as I read about the context in which they were said.

By learning about the Jewishness of Jesus, our faith can be transformed, as the sub-title of this book tells us. Taking a look at some of the Jewish Festivals and Jewish life will help us understand what Jesus was on about as we read the Gospels with fresh eyes.

One such example is the Jewish Passover. The Passover coincides with the Feast of Unleavened Bread and sometimes they are even referred to as one. The bread that Jesus broke at the Last Supper was unleavened bread. The significance of this is seen in the fact that leavening was done by “adding a blob of old, raw, fermented dough to the new dough. The fresh batch was deliberately infected with microbes that would cause it to rise, but then later to sour, decay and eventually rot...the ancients saw leavening as a picture of sin and contamination”

Do you see where this is going? When, during the Last Supper, Jesus held up the unleavened bread, un-infected by decay, and said “this is my body” he was saying that He is the unleavened bread, uncorrupted by the rottenness of decay.

Another feast which highlights without a shadow of a doubt what Jesus was saying about Himself was the Feast of Tabernacles. During this feast, “the priests performed a water libation ceremony, accompanied by impassioned prayers for life-giving water in the form of rain. At that point the joyful voices of thousands of worshippers reached a thunderous intensity”.

Imagine then, in this setting, Jesus standing up, as He does in John 7, and crying out: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them”! Everyone would have known what He meant. Imagine the scandal of this man claiming to be the very living water that only God can provide. This is no gentle Jesus meek and mild, tip-toeing through the meadows.

By learning about who Jesus was, and the culture and setting in which He lived his life, we can see anew just how outrageous and incredible his words and deeds were in the culture of his day. It's almost impossible for us to imagine the controversy He would have caused, living as we do, 2,000 years later in a completely foreign context. Not even his closest followers really got it until after He was resurrected. They never expected the Messiah to be crucified by the might of Rome. To the contrary, they expected the Messiah to lead a not-so-quiet revolution. But, as the authors of this enlightening book tell us, Jesus overthrew, not Rome, but the expectations of those who thought the Messiah would do just that. Even Jesus' cousin, John the Baptist, wasn't sure anymore who He was.

Another fascinating fact to emerge from this study of Jesus' Jewishness is that, contrary to our western, individualised understanding of Jesus, He didn't actually have a whole lot to say about the afterlife, about heaven and hell. Jesus spoke mostly about the kingdom of God. But the kingdom of God, according to Jesus, is not a place you go when you die; it is the very inbreaking of God's rule here and now, and it started with the invasion of God into history in the form of this Jewish Rabbi from Nazareth. When He spoke of the kingdom, Jesus was talking about abundant life, the renewal of creation.

This crucial point is explained by the authors when they say that “the way we understand Jesus' words about the kingdom is crucial to the kind of life we live. If we think that the 'kingdom of heaven' is simply about Christ's second coming, or about going to heaven when we die, we'll be tempted to become passive and complacent. But if Jesus' kingdom is a living, dynamic reality - a reality that is right now steadily advancing against the kingdom of darkness - that's a different story. As followers of Christ, our obedience is vital because it is a catalyst for the Spirit's work, making us more like Jesus so that his reign can spread across the whole earth”.

The only criticism of this book that I would make is that, as partly seen in the above quote, the authors seem to still see the salvation that Jesus was proclaiming in primarily individual terms. It is that, but it is so much more. When we focus on just our own personal salvation, we short-change the Gospel. That said however, this book is worth the read. Written for the layperson, it will open your eyes to the world that Jesus lived in, and make Him come alive as you immerse yourself in His culture, imagining yourself walking the dusty roads of Palestine, following the Master on the journey towards the renewal of all things.

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