Jesus twice surprised

It is recorded that Jesus was surprised, twice, and only twice. He was amazed that his own, hometown people rejected him, and that the gentile accepted him.* ** This is worthy of speculation.

[* My Japanese wife asks, but wasn’t he God and why would he have been surprised? The answer is simple: the Mystery requires us to state categorically that he was wholly man and no different from us. He had to grow in wisdom and in statute and in favor with God and man. He also comes to knowledge as we do, by interpolation and then extrapolation.]

[** Put here the scriptural references.]

It is my view that Jesus foresaw very early (by means of such as his rejection at the hands of his hometown people) that he would be rejected by the Jews (which made him weep in frustration per Matthew 23:37-38) and so would have to be accepted by the gentiles (in order for his mission not to have been in vain). And so he already had some Saul in mind, to be provided by God, to bring the rejected gospel to the gentiles, and that his own people would be forever dishonored by having the rejected the very man who had been sent specifically to them.

The position of the Jews is very understandable and might have been forecast. They had a deal with God and they could not let go of this deal. They believed in God and that he was both truthful and honest and dependable. They believed that they were blessed by virtue of the patriarchs and that it was their duty to adhere to the covenant and to pass it on to their children in order that they might reap the benefit of the promised and necessary Messiah. Therefore when Jesus comes as the Messiah and tells them to put aside the law and to accept rather the spirit of law in general, they are faced with believing this remarkable man or believing Moses and the prophets and they very prudently decide that since one of them must be wrong, the best bet is to stick with the tried and the true, Moses and the prophets.

Jesus wanted them to understand that he was Moses and the prophets, for he is what had been produced through a culture and mind set nourished on Moses and the prophets. Mary, a gullible young girl like Joan of Arc, hallucinates, we might say, and has a vision, and believes the vision as much as I believe that this computer I am writing with is out in space now in front of me. But she produced a greater work than Joan, for while the latter produced a king, she produced the Son of God. She had produced him, and he was the entire point of the law, the rescue of the people from law of the body, and the salvation of putting them on the Way of the spirit. They had produced him, the working of God’s plan, and he would give them the means to become the envy and blessing of the world. They would become righteous Jews without any tie to a law of the body. They would become the spirit people and commune directly with God without need of Moses or anyone else.

But they rejected his vision and his mission and so his mind had to reach out and find fulfillment in the gentile. And for this, since he was dedicated to the Jews and had to remain with the Jews and thus to reject the gentile, he would be provided with the “second Christ”, Paul, the man who would be Christ to the gentiles and would die for their sake, just as Jesus dies for the sake of the Jews.

In the extreme expression of universal love, Jesus dies in order that Barabbas might be saved. In this way he showed his salvation for all Jews. His job, as King of the Jews, was to fight for the wellbeing of every Jew. Thus in the moment of truth, Jesus, under the momentum of God’s plan, takes the place of Barabbas and returns him to his people. This is his duty as king. And he does his duty. Barabbas is set free and a Jew has been reclaimed from the hand of the gentile and returned to his people.

Jesus dies in faith, after losing faith for awhile in order to be savior also of those who have lost faith, he dies in the utter faith of his resurrection and the success of his mission. He has already set the stage for his rejection and for his success, the crucifixion and the resurrection.

Jesus asks of his followers only one thing: that they trust him so much that they must even be willing to drink the absolutely forbidden material drink, his own blood, if he asks them to. They agree to this, and they are good Jews who will keep their bargain. He announces that he is the Son of God and that he has all power and that he will not reign in power on this earth, but only in heaven. They, his disciples, they will reign in his stead. To this end Jesus conveys to them this same all power to fashion their own reign as they wish, only being sure to be united in spirit of him, with Jesus. He will be in heaven waiting on them, and they will know this when the time of resurrection comes, and whatever they order in their kingdom on earth, Jesus will order exactly so in heaven. They shall become the Son of God, together as a unity, for in the body they may be different but in the spirit they are one. They will ordain in Jesus’ name on earth and God will honor that, no matter what it be.

Jesus does this in anticipation of some Saul, someone to be provided by God to bring Jesus’ salvation to the whole world. This is the promise of God to the Jews, that through them salvation shall come to the gentiles. This disciples will be moved by the Holy Spirit to authorize some Paul, whom God will provide, to leave the realm of law and enter entirely into the realm of spirit.

Jesus weeps because the people that he knew about him would end up being the progenitors of the johnny-come-latelys.

And so the Last Supper becomes a memorial service for the end of the Jewish raison d’être. The king of the Jews, provided by God, was to die and there should be a memorial service. Later will come the resurrection of the Christ and dawning of revolutionary religion on the world.*

[* Kant considered the Christian religion as revolutionary in the annuals of human religion. For it constituted to dedication to a love of the moral law alone, and this was simply unheard of.]

A conclusion from this speculation. I think the gentile Christian should simply ignore the Jew and treat him as any other well intended person, if that be the case, like he would a Buddhist or an atheist. I think there is no need any longer for any special consideration of the Jew as though the Christian were closer to the Jew morally than to the atheist. Now this does not mean that we do not seek to bring the Jew to salvation as we do the Buddhist and the atheist, but only that we stop considering him as a moral cousin of some sort, an historical cousin, perhaps, but no longer a moral cousin. The Jew is simply another one of many suffering beings in the world. Paul was required to go first to the Jews, but that is because that is an obligation devolving on all Jews, and Paul was a Jew. But the gentiles are not required to honor the Jew by going to him first. In fact we have good reason to think that some Jews may end up being a museum religion, i.e., a few people continuing to live in a dream religion deliberately in order simply to do it.