© 2017 Dolfo-Guzman
© 2017 Association Francophone des Lecteurs du Livre d'Urantia
Jesus is, without a doubt, the most important character who ever appeared in history. Malik Charles (1) said:
“The greatest thing about any civilization is the human person, and the greatest thing about that person is the possibility of his encounter — with the person of Jesus Christ.”
The encounter with “Jesus the man”, “the book made Word” (2) offers us this inestimable gift. It is through; His faith, His courage, His common sense, His curiosity, and His desire to know and understand his neighbor, that I have tried to make a succinct approach to “Jesus the man of Nazareth”, a subject oh! how important and complex.
Antoine GREYS, after Nicolas POUSSIN Greuze Museum (Tournus)
¶ “HIS CURIOSITY”
As a little boy, he often asked his parents questions on topics such as geography, astronomy, history, natural sciences, nature, etc., etc.
In fact, he was very, very curious. A constant question mark for both his parents and everyone around him.
Later, as the years passed, he continued to ask many perplexing questions concerning both science and religion. Jesus was a keen observer and acquired much practical knowledge during his wanderings away from home. He diligently stored up knowledge concerning men and their way of life on earth.
During his sixth year and with the help of his mother, Jesus had thoroughly learned the Galilean dialect of the Aramaic language; and now his father began to teach him Greek. Jesus occupied a large part of his leisure time in the study of plants and flowers during the day, and of the stars in the evening. What a balance for the pleasure of the eyes and the rest of the soul. As he grew, he learned all the farm tasks, milking the cows, making cheese, weaving, playing the harp (his favorite musical instrument). He acquired a keen sense of numbers, distances, and proportions. He was happy to have conversations on cultural, educational, social, economic, political and religious subjects with older people.
When he was ten years old, Jesus entered the synagogue’s high school. There he constantly caused trouble by his persistent questions. He stirred up more and more agitation in Nazareth. His head teacher was greatly intrigued by the boy’s curiosity, his insight, and his thirst for knowledge. During all his years in the synagogue, he was a brilliant student.
At the end of school, the Chazan of Nazareth pointed out to Joseph that he feared “that he had learned more things from Jesus’ penetrating questions” than he had been able to teach the young boy. His curiosity, his thirst for knowledge and understanding extended to the questions he asked on the third day in the temple in Jerusalem, questions which often called into question the customs and traditions of those times.
Later, during his voyage around the Mediterranean, he had countless opportunities to feed his curiosity by getting to know all kinds of men and women from different cultures.
¶ “HIS COURAGE”
All life of an evolutionary creature is beset by certain inevitabilities, one of which is courage. Is strength of character desirable? Then man must be brought up in an environment which forces him to face hardships and to react when he is disappointed.
Jesus began to experience strength of character at a very young age. Indeed; let us recall the fateful day when a messenger brought the tragic news of the death of his earthly father to the home in Nazareth. Following this tragedy, he became head of the family overnight when he was only fourteen years old. He willingly accepted the responsibilities that fell upon him so suddenly and worked so well at the carpenter’s bench that he was never idle. He was forced to bear his mental and spiritual burden alone, his problems being too complex for his companions. He never became discouraged and lived from day to day, fulfilling his immediate responsibilities.
Tintoretto (1546)
No youth between fifteen and twenty years of age has had or will have to solve more difficult problems than He. His valor was often heroic, his courage was marked by judgment and controlled by reason, which greatly inspired those who enjoyed his company.
At twenty-five years old, after having given himself completely to his loved ones, Jesus prepared, not without sorrow, to leave them. A few years later, on Mount Hermon, he powerfully defeated his implacable and very real enemies in a struggle for the sovereignty of his universe and triumphed over the multiple proposals of his adversaries.
On January 16, A.D. 29, he performed the most daring act of his earthly career when he chose ten devoted women to spread the Gospel and care for the sick. He then authorized them to establish their own organization and made the emancipation proclamation that freed all women forever. During his life, the Master was not seriously troubled by fear, doubt, or sophistry; he combined the solid and intelligent courage of an adult with the sincere and confident optimism of a believing child. What courage Jesus the Man had during the purification of the temple when he began to open with a majestic step all the doors of each stable and drove out all the imprisoned animals, thus defying all authorities and expressing his revulsion for all forms of injustice and speculation at the expense of the poor and the ignorant.
What courage when he responded nothing to the false accusations made against him during the long and cruel hours of humiliation!
He did not even use his persuasive eloquence to defend himself and remained silent with divine dignity. He accepted and was convinced that His Father wanted him to submit to the natural course of human events. Jesus was truly fulfilling the Father’s Will in Paradise.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, when he falls face down and prays to His Father to confirm His Will, Jesus courageously accepts to drink this cup.
When men and women think of Jesus offering His life on the cross, they can no longer afford to complain, even about the harshest trials of life, and even less about the small vexations expressed by the many purely imaginary grievances.
He constantly exhorted, “be of good courage”; this is the
¶ “COMMON SENSE”
Jesus preached temperance and taught common sense. He pointed out that an excess of compassion and pity can degenerate into serious emotional instability and that enthusiasm can end in fanaticism; that thus the problems of life must be given their proper proportion.
Jesus always had good sense to advise his apostles when they encountered difficulties during their evangelization, for example, to know how to appreciate the value of rest, the effectiveness of relaxation, to understand that the best method to resolve certain tangled problems is to leave them aside for a while, not to resist evil, not to fight injustices and injuries but not to passively tolerate wrongdoing. He never ceased to warn his disciples against the unfortunate practice of reprisals, he did not tolerate the idea of revenge, of settling scores. He deplored the fact that people held grudges, he rejected the idea of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. He disapproved of the whole concept of private and personal revenge. Return good for evil, assert one’s will in such a way as to dominate the situation and triumph over evil with good - a positive and just method -. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.
Abraham Willaerts, First half of the 17th century.
Isn’t all this common sense? When he tells us not to judge so as not to be judged, he is making a sociological proclamation imbued with common sense. Jesus did not attack the teachings of the Hebrew prophets or the Greek moralists; the Master recognized the many valid elements that these great educators represented, but he came down to earth to teach something additional: the voluntary conformity of man’s will to the will of God.
Because of his character traits: emotionally active but never unstable, imaginative but always practical, compassionate but not sentimental, exceptional but not eccentric, well-balanced because he was perfectly unified.
Jesus is the perfect model of common sense for all generations and centuries to come and even beyond the boundaries of time and space.
In its light, its peace and its earthly existence “The spirit was the psalm and Jesus was the song” — K. Gibran- (3)
“His desire to know and understand his neighbor”
“No one holds the place that Jesus occupies in the heart of the world. Other gods have been worshipped with devotion; no other man has been so devoutly loved.” — Knox, John — (4)
An old proverb says: “for a stone to become precious, it must rub against other stones”
It has long been recognized that prolonged deprivation of human contact has a disastrous effect on the human psyche. No man is an island, alone in himself; each man is a piece of the continent. A part of the whole. — Marvin Gavryn — (5). Jesus the man loves humans, no matter who they are: rich, poor, believers, unbelievers, strong or weak, intelligent or ignorant. Wherever he went his desire was always to know and understand human nature.
Already at a very young age Jesus began to make contact with all sorts of people, each as different as the next, as many travelers from different countries came and went to his father’s repair shop.
“Truly, his love surpasses that of a brother.” For it is eternally true that anyone who feels misunderstood or unappreciated has in Jesus a compassionate friend and an understanding counselor.
“Have no fear” was his password. Jesus loves humanity with a double affection - human and divine; he loves men with a fatherly love. He devoted one evening to social life with the elderly and another with the young. Wherever he went, he spread comfort, he emanated an effective and attractive goodness because his soul was saturated with love. Jesus teaches that: the worship of God and the service of others are the very substance of his religion. Indeed, being attentive and sensitive to human need creates authentic and lasting happiness: at the same time, this benevolent attitude protects the soul from the destructive influences of anger, hatred and suspicion.
The purpose of his journey around the Mediterranean basin was to know men. This journey was the most captivating of Jesus’ earthly experiences. Jesus’ usual technique of social contact was to ask questions to draw people out of their reserve and bring them into conversation with him. At the beginning of an interview, Jesus asked the questions and, at the end, they questioned him. He was as adept at teaching by asking questions as at answering them. As a rule, it was to those he taught the most that he said the least. Those who benefited most from his ministry and personal contact were overworked, anxious, depressed people who found great relief in the opportunity to pour out their souls to a sympathetic and understanding listener. He never ceased to tell his apostles and disciples to devote themselves to the welfare of their earthly brethren with untiring affection.
Jesus teaches that in appealing to men we must be fair, self-controlled, and duly reserved.
“Love one another with love as I have loved you and serve your contemporaries as I have served you. Through the spiritual fruits of your life, force souls to believe the truth that man is a son of God and that all men are brothers. Getting to know one’s brothers and sisters, knowing their problems and learning to love them, is the supreme experience of life.”
¶ “HIS FAITH”
Faith is the supreme affirmation of human thought. Jesus’ faith was the fruit of the insight born of the activity of the divine presence—his thought adjuster. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual: it was entirely personal and purely spiritual. In a religious genius, a powerful spiritual faith too often leads directly to disastrous fanaticism, to the exaggeration of the religious ego, but this was not the case with Jesus. His faith had grown to such a degree of confidence that it was devoid of fear. He did not resort to faith merely for consolation in the midst of difficulties or for encouragement in the face of the threat of despair. Faith was for him not a mere illusory compensation for the unpleasant realities and sorrows of life, nor a mystical meditation.
Janmot 1840 — Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon
Nothing could tear Jesus from the spiritual anchorage of this fervent, sublime, intrepid faith. He had the bracing assurance of possessing a stoic faith; in every trying situation of life he unfailingly demonstrated complete fidelity to the will of the Father. The great contribution of Jesus to the values of human experience was not to reveal so many new ideas about the Father in heaven but rather to demonstrate so magnificently and humanly a new and higher type of living faith in God. By assimilating the faith of Jesus, mortal man can have, in time, a foretaste of the realities of eternity.
This sublime faith became a living experience of spiritual fulfillment and attained the purity of a child’s trust. It was so ab-
solute and devoid of doubts that she was reacting to the charm of contact with her companions and to the wonders of the Universe.
Someone said that the repeated reading of a single volume has formed more than one man. Now, the life and teachings of Jesus the Man are the example that we should all try to put into practice, starting with ourselves, to spread within our own family and then to all the beings that we are led to meet here or elsewhere. The road is long but it is worth it!
Let us never doubt the power of Our Father’s love, but only the sincerity and scope of our own faith. It is in small things that great things are born. The actions belong to us, the consequences belong to God.
SANA CODE IS SAUCIUM. (heal our wounds)
REGE CODE EST DÉVIUM. (direct our lost steps)
UBCIS TUAE RADIUM. (a ray of your light)
Dolfo-Guzman November 2008
¶ References
- Lebanese diplomat and politician
- The 5th revelation
- Lebanese poet
- Scottish church reformer Quotes are from The Urantia Book