You can tell a lot about a person, by looking at the people they surround themselves with.  So that begs the question. who did Jesus surround Himself with – and what does it tell us about Him?

I was thinking about the whole Easter thing, how to approach it this year, and well, I was wondering whether together we couldn’t start a little bit early this year. Easter bunnies and chocolate eggs aside, it seems to me that the central question of Easter is who is Jesus? Exactly who is He? What’s He like? If he were to walk into my life or your life right now, what would he be like?

It’s so easy to take someone who lived two thousand years ago and turn him into a stain glass window. But if He’s going to be relevant, if He’s going to make a difference, well what’s He like? That’s a good question.

One of the things I love to do on Saturday mornings is to drive down to our local fish market, it’s just a few minutes drive from where I live. Early in the morning it’s pretty quiet, later on there’s a real bustle, lots of people and crowds and stuff. You go into the fish market, early in the morning and the fish mongers are getting their catch ready to put out there, and there’s this huge array of fish and oysters and muscles and shell fish to choose from.

Sometimes you look at it all and think, where does all of that come from? How do they get all of that variety every day here for me to come and purchase? And at Christmas time! I mean there are prawns and shrimps by the truck load. It’s kind of amazing to me the abundance of the ocean, and this is a commerce of food and flavour and experience. But it started out on a boat on the water, probably in the middle of last night when a crew was on the water doing what they do every night – fishing for fish.

And I walk into the seafood market, there are lots of different store holders, it’s massive, and just on the left there’s a man, it’s always the same man who’s shelling oysters. He’s an older man, probably Greek is my hunch, with big hairy arms and he’s these big thick gloves on and piles of unshelled oysters and one by one he breaks the shells open with the oyster knife.

I love fish, I love the bustle of the fish market and the people and the characters and the feel and the buzz and the sound and the smell, I love it. But here’s a question, if you or I were God and we’re thinking, “well I’ve got this great idea, I want to start a new fledgling thing called a church. I want it to last a few thousand years, I don’t expect it to be perfect, but I want it to be strong and last and survive and I need to find some good people”. Would we start at the fish market? Would we go down to the fish market, to that guy with the big hairy arms and the big rubber gloves and say, “listen I got a plan for your life?”

Jesus was a carpenter and he began his public ministry around about in his late twenties or early thirties, we’re not exactly sure. So for the first thirty years of his life He’s working in Dad’s carpenter shop making chairs, helping to build houses, making coffins, you know that sort of stuff. And them it’s time, it’s time for his public ministry to begin. That public ministry lasted for about three and half years or so.

He’s not a king, he’s not wealthy, he’s not a power broker. He’s not one of the recognised religions leaders with the fine robes and positions and money and people kowtowing to them, no he’s just a carpenter. And one day he’s walking down along the Sea of Galilee.

It’s a beautiful morning, he’s walking along, you can just hear his sandals crunching on the gravel as he walks down by the shore early in the morning. The fishermen have all come in, they’re cleaning their nets and cleaning their boats and emptying their catches and taking them to market. It’s a bit like the mornings when I go to the fish markets you know the commerce is just happening and just starting to tick over.

And he walks along and he sees Simon Peter and his brother Andrew. And they’re cleaning their nets and he says to them, “follow me!” There’s whole story here where they were trying to throw out their nets and they weren’t catching any fish and Jesus said, “Look, throw out your net on the other side.” And sure enough they caught all these fish and they were amazed and Jesus said to them, “Yeah, but I’m going to make you fishers of people, you’re going people fishing.”

And then they walk along a little bit further and he sees James and John and they’re mending their nets and he calls them, and he says, “Look, leave your Dad Zebedee and follow me, I gotta plan for you life.” Would you and I have started down at the fish market like Jesus did? Would we have started down by the water amongst the fishermen? The noise, the smell, the commerce, just an everyday occurrence.

There are a few things that really grab me about this story. The first one is that it was Galilee. Galilee was like the pits of Israel, the classy people, the erudite educated people, the religious people, the leaders, they all lived in Jerusalem. That was the political centre, the religious centre.

Up here north, they weren’t real Jews they were scum of the earth type stuff, they were looked down on. Jesus went to Galilee to find these disciples. And he was a carpenter, as I said, chairs, coffins, houses, calling fishermen to become fishers of people. Bit strange! Maybe if you or I were God we probably wouldn’t have done it this way.

My hunch is that we would have gone to the best Bible College in Jerusalem and gone and picked the best scholars and said, “I’ll make them the leaders; I’ll make them the disciples of the Son of God.” And here’s the other thing, He called them! He’s a rabbi, he’s a teacher and normally what happened is if you wanted to study under a Rabbi you’d have to go to the Rabbi. And the better the Rabbi and the better the Rabbi’s reputation, the harder it was to get a gig with him studying, you had to go to him. It’s like I want to go and study at University, I have to go and apply, they don’t come to me; they don’t ring me up and say, “Berni will you come and study with us.”

But Jesus went out and picked people. He tapped these nobodies on the shoulder and said, “Come and follow me.” And then finally they’re fishermen, they’re not theologians, they’re not elite businessmen, they’re fishermen, uneducated, rough, tough, hard life, they’re about boats and nets and fish and storms and stench. It was a morning like any other, Jesus’ out walking by the Sea of Galilee and He knows deep in His heart he’s the Son of God.

He’s come for a purpose, the last thirty years He’s been growing and waiting and learning. He’s walking along the beach, He’s looking at the beauty but there’s this calling beating in his heart. He looks out over the water, there’s a tear in his eyes, there’s excitement, there’s trepidation, His time has come. This carpenter from Galilee, all of the earthly odds are stacked against him to make a difference in anyone’s life. And He calls four rough, uneducated, bumpkins. Simon Peter, Andrew, James, John. We might have called them Pete, Andy, Jim, Jono.

That does something for me. That’s here and now. This is not stain glass window stuff, this is not religious stuff. It so, for me rings a bell, it’s like me wandering down the fish market thinking, “man would Jesus have come here if he was looking for disciples today?” It’s real it’s alive it’s relevant, it’s here and now.

Jesus still has a purpose today; Jesus still wants to find fishers of people today and instead of the Sea of Galilee, what if he walks into that fish market, or a hairdressing salon, or the office building or the shopping centre or the factory with that same dream burning in his heart, looking for a Pete or an Andy or a Jim or a Jono or a Sue or Melissa or Jenny or a Helen, or a David or a Paul or … what if he’s looking for someone?

One of the things I really hate – is when people preach at me. Jesus did a lot of preaching in His day – but it was different. It was real and profound. It touched people.  Why?

Have you ever had one of those days when it feels like everyone’s preaching at you? The TV, you know, everyone seems to have a barrow to push; you might well say to me, “well Berni isn’t it the pot calling the kettle black?” And I’d smile back at you and say, “I don’t preach it’s not what I do”. My gig is laying out the things of God before you for you to have a look, and a listen, and a taste and smell and if it is good, take it.

In fact being a baby boomer I hate preaching, I listen to people speak sometimes and I think, “well who do you think you are to ram that down my throat?” Whether its politicians or preachers or people with an agenda, everyone seems to have an agenda these days. But here’s the funny thing, when I started reading Jesus’ sermons, if I can call them that, they were different somehow; engaging, stimulating, entertaining, funny, yet stretching. Somehow His stuff is really different.

And I’m not the only one who had that reaction. You know there’s a great story where Jesus goes to a place called Capernaum. Now Capernaum is a fairly large port city in the first century, and he went to the Synagogue to preach. Now he was a nobody, yet he got a gig at the Synagogue so he must have been pretty good, people must have been starting to hear about him and think, “I’d like to hear this Jesus preach”. And people were absolutely astounded because what they were used to, was the preaching from the religious leaders of their day, the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and it was obviously dry and boring and droning on.

It’s kind of the image that a lot of us, (and I certainly did), have of church, you know as a kid growing up, to me it just all seemed boring, it all seemed irrelevant, it wasn’t alive for me. So that’s what people have been putting up with here in Capernaum in the first century. And all of a sudden they hear Jesus speak, and time and time again after he spoke and you see them say something like this, “He spoke with a ring of authority”.

People were amazed because there was a ring of authenticity, of reality around what he said. It was new, it was fresh it was alive. Somehow it connected. They couldn’t explain it, it just worked. You know, when Jesus got up and preached it was amazing stuff, it was life changing stuff.

He stared out with a preaching tour in Galilee which is up in the north of Israel. It’s not exactly where you’d choose to begin your preaching career if you were the Son of God. And it was early in the morning one morning and he went to a deserted place, it says, to pray. Didn’t have a hot shower to freshen up, didn’t get the can of shaving cream out or the electric razor to have a shave, there’s no espresso to give him a charge, you know he just got up early in the morning while it was still dark and went out to a deserted lonely place to pray. Just Jesus, God, what did he pray?

What transpired there early in the morning? We can only imagine, you and I don’t know, it’s not recorded for us, and there are so many stories of him going around preaching thousands, thousands of people flocked out to see him, to hear him, to experience, to hear the jokes, to hear the profound things that he said. He talked about things that they could understand.

Where He was saying to them, “look don’t live your life worrying about things”, he talked about the birds, he said “look at the birds do they sow or till, do they farm? But are they ever hungry?” He said, “Look at the lilies of the field, even Solomon who was one of the richest, wisest people ever, never looked that good. Aren’t you worth more than birds and lilies of the field to God?”

He called a spade a spade, he dealt with real issues. Jesus didn’t steer away from real issues, in fact because the religious leaders were getting quite riled at what he was doing, people tried to trap him. They gave him hard questions. “Should we pay taxes to Rome when we are an occupied country?” “What do you do about divorce?”

Sometimes he talked about things they couldn’t understand. There were parables: One about a farmer with seed, and the farmer would go out and throw seed and some of the seed would fall on the path, and it wouldn’t grow. And some of it fell in shallow soil and it grew but as soon as the sun came out it died. And some of it fell in the soil, but the weeds and the thorns grew up around it and killed it off. And some of it fell in good soil.

He just told that story, nothing theological, just a little story. And afterwards, he went away from the crowd and his disciples said to him “Jesus, what’s that stuff all about with the seeds and the farmer and the weeds and … What is that all about?” Fancy the Son of God, who’s only got three and half years after all to get his message across to people before he’s crucified and rises again and then goes back to heaven.

Fancy the Son of God, being prepared to preach about something that no one understood. Wonder what happened at the dinner table that night at home when people went back to their families and they were sitting around in the various places, and the public places, or at home, talking about this. “What do you reckon Jesus spoke about today, what was that all about?” You know here’s this Jesus prepared to give people space to discuss and to argue and to figure out and to turn it over in their mind.

You know we want to take everything and put it into pigeon holes. Particularly us theologians, we want to put everything into doctrinal pigeon holes. This is the doctrine of original sin, this is the doctrine of this, and that and the other. Well that’s great, but Jesus didn’t do it that way, Jesus actually gave people time to think and mull over and digest and take on board what he was saying. He made sense too.

I had dinner the other night with a Senior Executive; he’s been having a tough time at work. Very smart and competent guy in his forties and he was telling me the things that he’d learned over the last twelve months in the school of hard knocks. And he’d learned some amazing things through his experience. “But you know something”, he said, “no one is there to teach you that stuff, no one’s there to pull along side you and explain it, you’ve got to learn it the hard way.”

He’s only just starting to realise as he’s searching around for answers in his mid-forties that something’s work and don’t work. The dogma of religion of his youth, you know, he’s saying “no that doesn’t work.” He then talked to some new edgy people and they were talking about the inner self and it’s all on the inside and he said “you know” I tried that at that doesn’t work either.”

And he’s tried meditation he said, “You know I just can’t get my mind around it, it just doesn’t seem to work to for me”. And he’s just exploring now, Jesus and religion and coming to grips with the difference between religiosity (man-made religion), and this person Jesus. Just wonderful to see how he’s exploring and coming to grips with the fact that Jesus has some amazing, wonderful, things to say.

The world always wants to preach at us, but my question is: “Does it ring true? Is it here and now, is it really about life, does it deal with the hard issues?” Is there something inside you when you hear someone preaching at you saying, “You know something that’s it, that’s what I’ve been look for” I think that’s Jesus, a profound communicator, edgy, real. I wonder as we hang around Jesus for a little bit, just kind of hang there and listen, I wonder what’s going to happen.

One of the things that I’ve tried do, and I had to go through the same as this man that I was talking about, who I met with just recently. I had to go through that in my life. And what I discovered, what I discovered is exactly the same as what he was discovering, that there are some things that ring true, and there are some things that don’t.

There’s a really great communicator by the name of Michael Frost, he’s the Deputy Principle of Moorling Baptist College in Sydney, in Australia. And he is just someone who seems to be gifted to communicate the reality of the person of Jesus Christ into my life. I love to hang around the guy, and listen to him speak and just, I get so much out of that.

And as we look around the world and through the media and all the things that want to preach at us I challenge you to think about which ones ring true, which ones are really working, which ones really hit the mark and I’d be really surprised if they aren’t the Jesus ones.

Sometimes, “religion” can make us feel like lepers. Outcasts. Unworthy. Valueless. Back in Jesus’ day – there were lots of lepers. Outcasts. How did He treat them?

I remember when I was growing up, kind of looking at the whole church religion thing and it seemed so weird to me; men in funny gowns, Bishops with funny hats, incense every now and then, songs that didn’t make sense, sermons that bored me, people in pews who didn’t seem to be enjoying the experience, or their own lives for that matter. Does that sound vaguely familiar? And I remember thinking if I ever sign up to something like that, it has to be real, it has to make my heart sing, it has to rock me to the core, it has to be real.

I’m a baby boomer; we don’t much like authority or institutions and stained glass windows, and rituals, and shams. We want to experience reality. Now so many in my generation are still putting on their Levi’s jeans and hoping, hoping to find that reality, but you know what I mean. Don’t give me some kind of trite ritualistic religiosity that doesn’t make a difference.

I was talking to a man recently in his forties. Now this man married young, he divorced, he remarried, his second wife fell pregnant, that was wonderful but sadly, they lost the baby, sadly the baby was stillborn. I’ve never had that experience but I can imagine, what a tragic experience it must be to conceive and to carry this child, and to look forward to the excitement, and this new life in the family, and all of a sudden the baby is stillborn.

And he’d been going to church on and off, it was a hang over from his upbringing, it didn’t really work for them but y’know they just went. “Who knows why people do things” he said, “but we just used to go now and then, even though it really didn’t mean much to us”.

So when the baby was stillborn and they were going and coping with this tragedy, they went to see the Minister because they were gutted, they needed some encouragement and some care, this is the response that the Minister gave them. That what had happened to them was God’s punishment because they were divorced and re-married, he said you and your wife now need to live together as brother and sister.

Now I don’t know about you but that just doesn’t work for me. I find that really scary. It’s simply one of three options here. The first is: That’s what Jesus would have said, and if that’s what Jesus would have said, well you can lump it or leave it, and sure Jesus said some hard things we don’t always like, and yeah that’s what he would say. The second is that this particular Church, and I won’t name the denomination or anything like that, this church doesn’t much care about Jesus, it’s more about religion and rules than it is about Jesus. There are some of those out there as well.

The third option is that Jesus, Jesus may have given them a different angle, a different answer. These people were treated like lepers as they were struggling through one of the most difficult situations of their lives – it’s a tragedy.

There were plenty of lepers in 1st Century Palestine, plenty of them. Leprosy at that stage had no cure, in fact it didn’t have a cure until about 1960, so they were ostracised because it was thought to be highly infectious. So to be a leper, was to be a social and religious outcast. They lived generally in shantytowns often outside the city walls. In those days cities had walls for protection because armies came and attacked cities, so lepers often lived outside the protection of the city wall. They were non-people, they were infectious, they were incurable, they were, in a religious sense, unclean and that’s a bit deal for them.

So when they came into the city, they had to keep a distance of so many paces, from all the other people and if anyone who didn’t have leprosy came close to them, they would have to yell out ‘unclean, Unclean,’ to warn the other person not to come any closer to them. On Saturday’s when they went to the Synagogue they had to get there an hour early and there was a room at the back segregated away for them, if there was a room at all. They were segregated away; they got there much earlier than everyone else, they had to leave much later than everyone else, so that the people who didn’t have leprosy wouldn’t catch the stuff from them.

So these people couldn’t participate in society, it’s a sad situation. A leper comes up to Jesus desperate, desperate and says, “Lord if you are willing, make me clean”. Isn’t that an interesting way of putting it, he didn’t say, “Lord if you are willing, heal me”, he said “Lord if you are willing, make me clean”, he used the religious term.

So the religious and the social implications were much more important for this guy than just the physical healing, it wasn’t the physical thing that was really driving him, he just wanted to be part of society again. He wanted to be able to live in the city and go to the Synagogue, and do all the things you and I do. The Old Testament law mandated segregation. The Old Testament law said, “this leper is unclean, he cannot come into the house of God with everyone else.”

So what does Jesus do? What is Jesus going to do here? The Old Testament law says this person is a leper, he’s a leper to the religious institution, a bit like my friend who had been through divorce and then married and lost a baby, was a leper to a particular religious institution that he went to. What is Jesus going to do? The bible says, “moved with compassion Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the leper and said – I am willing, be made clean – and the leper was healed”. Because of his circumstances religious law made him an outcast. Jesus comes along against the law and touches him.

Jesus was moved with compassion for this man, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said, “I am willing, be made clean”. And then Jesus says, “look, don’t tell anyone” (yeah right), this leper went out and told the world, this leper was over the moon. And so the crowds flocked to see Jesus. This man who’d healed the leper, this man who’d preached with authority, so much so, that he couldn’t even enter the towns and cities anymore, he had to teach out on hilltops and in fields because there were no spaces in towns and cities big enough to take the crowds. Well that’s a surprise isn’t it!

The religious law says, “this guy is an outcast”, Jesus the Son of God comes and says, “he may be, but I am willing, I will touch him, I will heal him, I will bring him back into God’s family, I will bring him back into society”. What a surprise! A Jesus like that and the walls couldn’t contain the people that wanted to see him. This is called grace, it’s something that by and large you do not find in a religion when religion is about rules, but then Jesus wasn’t a religion, Jesus still isn’t a religion.

My hunch is religion is something that people invented. I heard someone say recently that religion is a picture of God painted by the Devil. What a really good description, so many people think of Christianity as a religion when the word religion equals rules, ritual, things that you have to do and the word religion. The definition that they carry around in their heads and their hearts, doesn’t include joy, just doesn’t include peace, doesn’t include an abundant life, doesn’t include fun, doesn’t include all the good things that God’s put on this earth.

That’s what people think that religion is, and Jesus comes along and he blows all the religious rules out of the water and says, “I’m willing, I’ll touch the leper, I’ll heal him, I’ll bring him back, I’ll love him, I’ll show people what God is really, really like.” Doesn’t that blow your mind away? Blows me apart, that’s this Jesus, that’s what he’s like.

Over these next few weeks we’re going to take everyday on A Different Perspective, just another picture, another look, another story of the historical account of life of Jesus, and my prayer is, that it’ll blow your socks off, the way it blows my socks off.

Taxes. We all pay them – they’re a fact of life. But what if the tax collectors were dishonest? What if they collected tax for an occupying power and lined their own pockets? How would we feel about tax then?

It is just great to be with you again today. One of the things I really hate doing each year, is my tax return. It’s not that I begrudge paying taxes, and most times I get a refund from the tax man. It’s just the effort of working through my affairs, and I don’t know, putting it all together, just something I don’t like doing.

Now we live in a system in the 21st Century which, by and large is a fair tax system. We may argue that maybe we pay too much, or the balance across societies isn’t equitable but at least it’s applied even handedly and consistently. So as much as tax may not be our favourite part of life, we live with it.

But how would we feel, if the people collecting the tax were dishonest. I mean, if they were able to just increase tax because they wanted to and we had no recourse, or if they took bribes to reduce our tax, or if they applied one standard to you and another to me. My hunch is, we wouldn’t be very happy with those people at all.

Over these next few weeks we’re going to spend some time heading towards Easter, looking at this whole question of, who the heck is this Jesus? There are so many claims about Jesus, and counter claims, and stained glass window sort of images of him, and you know, who is this Jesus the whole Easter fuss is all about?

And the way we’re going to look at that, the way we have been this week and will continue on over the next few weeks, is just to step through some, just some real life stories that are in the historical account of Jesus’ life. Things that he dealt with, things that we have to deal with today, and one of the things that Jesus dealt with was tax collectors.

Now we have a picture of what tax is in our society, tax is a fairly clean, paper based, hands-off cash transaction. We know that we have to have tax, what with hospitals and schools, and police, and defence forces, and all the services that we need to have as a society, we have to pay taxes for. And yeah we don’t like paying tax but we all say, “of course we have to pay tax.”

Tax was a different proposition in the first century in Israel. In the first century in Israel, Israel like most of the other countries in the civilised world was a part of the Roman Empire. Rome had conquered the known world, they weren’t only the super power, they actually invaded and conquered all the countries that were known, and that included Israel.

Now Israel saw themselves, because they were, God’s chosen people, this land had been promised to them. Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and right through the Old Testament history it’s all about how Israel was brought into God’s promised land. They resented Roman occupation but to make it worse, Rome was brutal sometimes. The world power, they had a brutal army, they ruled with an iron first.

They had administrative systems, they had centurions and armies occupying the land, and they levied taxes on the Israelites, on the Jews. And those taxes by and large, didn’t fund local infrastructure; roads, tunnels, water systems, sewerage systems, electricity generators, that’s not where the taxes went. The taxes by and large, went back to Rome to fund the excesses of the Roman Empire and the Roman army, which occupied all the known countries in the world.

Well Jews were delighted with this system of tax … not! They resented it enormously! Not only were they occupied, not only were they God’s people, the salt was rubbed into the wound when they had to pay these enormous taxes, and send them back to Rome to pay for the Colosseum, and all the stuff that was happening in the Roman Empire.

To make things just a bit worse the Romans appointed Jewish tax collectors. It was like a franchise operation, you got to take the franchise and you sat at a toll gate to tax trade, or you had different ways of taxing but effectively you are one of the Jews, one of God’s chosen people, if you became a tax collector, you were then taxing your fellow people, on behalf of Rome.

And the tax collectors were really well known to be corrupt, they took bribes, they often levied much higher taxes than were necessary so that they could line their pockets, are you getting the picture here? These people were enforcing rules, ripping off their compatriots and lining their own pockets, and being dishonest. They were the scum of the earth, as far as their fellow Israelites were concerned.

Right, Jesus comes along, Jesus by now, as we pick up the story, has rock star status. He’s been out there healing lepers, we spoke about the leper yesterday and he’s been healing blind people. And he’s been preaching with power and authority, not like the religious leaders of the day, he was really connecting with people. There was something gritty and real about how he presented God’s love when he spoke. The religious leaders who were kind of in bed with the Roman rulers (the priests and the teachers), they were not happy with Jesus.

Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher, he calls fisherman to be his disciples. He gets up and preaches in the synagogue and in the temple, he offends the religious leaders but then he does something that no one, no one in their wildest dreams or imagination could’ve predicted he would do, he calls a tax collector, Levi to be one of his disciples … a tax collector! He’s already got fisherman (that’s bad enough), now he picks a tax collector.

He finished speaking to a huge crowd, he walks away from them along the road and he comes to one of these tax booths on the road (that I was talking about before). And there’s this man Levi in there, and Jesus looks at him and says, “Levi come and follow me.” Levi became one of the twelve disciples. That night Jesus goes to dinner at Levi’s place and Levi invites all his friends who are, well not surprisingly, tax collectors.

So Jesus is having dinner with a bunch of people who are the scum of the earth. Can you imagine the smear campaign that the religious leaders ran against him? Can you imagine what people said? “Here are you saying that you’re the Son of God and you go and have dinner with these tax collectors, the scum of Rome.”

I guess from the religious leaders perspective that was a reasonable thing for them to say. How does Jesus respond to that? How does he bounce back, how does he deal with this as he speaks to the religious elitists, to the people who ultimately led to his demise, who ultimately had him crucified, the same people who ostracised and demonised the tax collectors.

You know one solution in our society for fixing all the ills, is just increase jail terms, you know when people do things wrong, make them longer and longer and just lock them away and just throw away the key, and ultimately we could have everyone in jail; that was the approach of the religious leaders. They ostracised, they pushed away, there was no attempt to rehabilitate, no attempt to connect, no attempt to build bridges.

This is what Jesus says, he says, “look, those people who are well, they don’t need a doctor but those who are sick, well they do and I’ve come exactly for that reason, to be a doctor to these people.” Their religion is about throwing stones, that’s what the religious leaders were doing, people who are wrapped up in religiosity want to throw rocks at other people, Jesus had a different approach.

One of the things that Jesus never did was water down his view of the things that were wrong. He never said that what’s wrong is Ok, but he dealt with those things directly and honestly, not by throwing rocks but by building bridges, not by ostracising but by loving. And when I hear people who say, “I’m a Christian” who want to throw rocks at people and tell them how wrong they are, I just want to scream sometimes saying, “Church stop throwing rocks at people.”

Let’s look at what Jesus is like, what’s he like? He doesn’t throw rocks at people; in fact the other people he never criticised was the religious leaders. It wasn’t about issues and dogma for him. For Jesus, it was about people’s lives, it was about a future for them. I love that about Jesus.

Most times – the law is good. Sometimes, it’s an ass. But imagine if there was a law against helping someone. What would you do? What would I do? What would Jesus do?

Hi, it’s just great to be with you again towards the end of another week. We’ve all heard the saying “the law is an ass.” Now by and large the law is good, it acts as a deterrent more or less, it protects society from dangerous people; it makes sure that justice is done. But sometimes laws don’t fit into particular situations very well. Sometimes a person gets off on a technicality because of a rule of evidence that’s protected dozens of innocent people in the past. And sometimes a person has done something and ends up getting a particularly harsh sentence just because of the way the law is applied on that day.

So what if there was a law, as there are in some places on the earth, that said you can’t help a person in their difficult situation. What would you and I do then?

This week and the next few weeks leading into Easter, we’re just working through a time of sharing some stories to discover who this Jesus is. I used to have some, I don’t know, distorted pictures in my head of what Jesus was like, and by and large those pictures looked like the worst things that I saw happening in the church.

Now when I saw God’s people doing bad things, when I saw high profile preachers in sexual scandals, and the sexual abuse in the church, and the way that some times Christians talk about people. I looked at that and I thought, “If that’s Jesus, got to tell you, I don’t need him in my life”. Stereo types, religion. But come on, who is He? Who is He really?

So this week and the next few weeks as we head towards Easter we’re just going through some stories from the historical record and looking at what He said, who He was, what He did, how He treated people, how He reacted in certain situations. And I hope as we do that it’s useful for you, it’s useful for you in your exploration of this question of who Jesus actually is. These are real life stories not myths, not parables; these are actual historical occurrences of what He was like. And then we can all make up our own minds.

Now Jewish law was quite different to the law as we understand it. Israel in the first century was an occupied country. It was occupied by the Romans and so Roman law prevailed over Israel. But for thousands of years Israel had had its own religious law, the law that was given to Moses, the law that is described in the first five books of the Old Testament; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. They’re the books of the law.

And so there is this funny relationship between Roman law and Jewish law in the first century. They kind of co-existed as “the law”, and part of the Jewish law was the Sabbath, which is Saturday, you weren’t allowed to work on the Sabbath. Now today some orthodox Jews won’t even carry a brief case or drive a car on the Sabbath because they believe it breaks the law. Others take a much more liberal interpretation of what the Sabbath is. Well, it was the same thing in the first century.

There was one particular sect called the Pharisees, the name Pharisees comes from the word parus which means “to separate”. So they were religious, separatists and they took the law to the enth degree. They had books of little rules of things that you could do and couldn’t do and it was just amazing how they took it and tried to live out their faith through this complex set of rules of do’s and don’ts, and they took it to the enth degree.

So what does Jesus do when the law, which after all in this case is God’s law because it was given by God through Moses to God’s chosen people? What does God do, and I say this with all respect, when the law is an ass, or at least when people’s interpretation of the law is an ass?

It was Sabbath, it was Saturday, he was in the Synagogue no work allowed on the Sabbath because God decreed Sabbath is the day of rest. Comes from the creation story when God created the whole universe in six days and on the seventh day God rested, God looked at what he’d done and said “behold this is good”. So Saturday the Sabbath was the day of rest and the day of worship, the day set aside by God’s people for God.

Now they’re in the Synagogue, the religious leaders are watching Jesus intently, because what they see is a man with a deformed hand, a withered hand. You can read about this if you’d like to, (if you have a Bible) later, it’s in Mark’s gospel at the beginning of chapter three. The religious leaders are watching Jesus; would He heal this man against their strict interpretation of the law which said healing was working?

They hated Jesus, they wanted to trap Him, for years they had power and control, they manipulated the people, they were in a cushy relationship with the Romans, there was a whole religious power thing going on here. And the religious leaders did not take kindly to Jesus coming and healing people and showing them the love of God in a fresh new amazing way. And religious people don’t like that much.

So Jesus comes along that day and He knows what’s going on, and he looks across the room and He starts talking and He gets a sense of what these people are thinking and He calls the man over. Just before He heals him He looks at these people and says, “Well, tell me something, is it lawful for you to do a good deed on the Sabbath to save a life?” And somewhere else in a similar situation he said, “Look if you had a cow and the cow fell into a bog on the Sabbath, would you drag the cow out?” The answer of course is, of course you would because a cow is worth a lot of money. The cow could well be the livelihood of a family. So of course they would drag the cow out.

And then Jesus said, “Well why wouldn’t you heal someone? Why wouldn’t you take one of God’s children whom God loves who’s worth so much more than a cow and on God’s day of rest, on God’s day of worship, why wouldn’t you heal this person? And so Jesus touched the man and his hand, his deformed hand was healed. They hated him, the religious leaders hated him.

This story so starkly shows me the difference between religion, which is all bound up in complex rules and power and manipulation, and Jesus, who is there to show God’s love, who’s there to be the very picture of who God is in our lives? And He heals this man and they hate Him even more for it. This simple symbolic act says “This is what religion looks like, it looks like those religious leaders?”

Read about them, you want to see what religiosity is about read about those people, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Scribes, in the first four books of the New Testament. You want to see what God’s like? Read about Jesus, because for Him people are more important than rules. He never watered down the truth, He never shied away from dealing with difficult issues, but at personal peril He put people first.

My hunch is, that when we try to reduce Him to a religion we completely miss the point. Religion ultimately is about ritual and rules, Jesus, the Son of God through everything He did and said, to the way He treated people, in effect was screaming out, “No! No! This is not what God is about, you want to know what God looks like? Look at me, I’m prepared to heal the leaper, I’m prepared to heal the man with the withered hand in the Synagogue.”

Grace compassion, not judgement and ridicule that was His chosen means of touching lives, grace and compassion. Does this ring true in your heart? Does this resonate with you? Doesn’t that touch something inside of you? It does me, if you or I were the man with the deformed hand where we live in a society where the ability to labour meant being able to put food on the table, if you or I were that man, what would we have wanted Jesus to do?