“Jesus & Co” = Jesus and Community.

Why not say–Jesus and disciples?

Immediately in our year with Jesus, we are confronted with a fact that is implied by the Gospel accounts and is true-to-life. Jesus was part of a larger regional community.

Church conversations most commonly refer to “Jesus and his disciples.” This makes sense, because it is in this social context where most of Jesus’ teaching and healing activity was done.

Travel to a feast, however, would include the community from Capernaum and its surroundings. Regarding one Feast-travel-community during Jesus’ youth, Luke refers to it as a “caravan” and describes the people in the community as Joseph’s and Mary’s “relatives” and “friends/acquaintances” (Lk 2:44).

We also encounter relatives and friends surrounding Jesus during his last journey to Jerusalem such as the mother of James and John, (we would safely assume) their father Zebedee (Mt 20:20), Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and others (Mt 27:56).

While these folks would also qualify as disciples, it is clear that larger family groups were traveling to the Feast. It is important to understand at the outset that the economy of Israel had its own schedules and activities in which Jesus participated rather than led.

Like the people in our lives, there was a web of relationships around Jesus. Certainly, there were loyal disciples as the Gospels relate, but Feast-travel was one context where Jesus was part of a larger community, thus, “Jesus & Co.”

We live in space and time. We occupy space, and we pass time–days and distance. When we travel, space and time overlap. We apply both minutes and miles as measures. “How long is your commute?” Are we asking for space or time or both?

Enter twenty-first-century space and time. The provocative and compelling ideas of the authors of modern science fiction imaginatively reorient us to space and time. They give us teleportation devices and time machines to leap through miles and minutes overcoming our present space/time limitations.

Almost imperceptibly, we diffuse the leaps into the day-to-day of Jesus’ experience. I have talked to a number of people during this project, who one-after-another acknowledge with sheepish grin that it is instinctive to teleport or time-machine Jesus from event to event  without considering the limitations of his space and his time. How did he get from one place to another?

Days and even months pass in just a few summary phrases in the biblical accounts as they do in all literature. We live, however, in the minute-to-minute and day-by-day of the routine and frustration of present experience.

While reading a good story, it is easy to forget that life moves more slowly, sluggishly even, as you live it, and naturally speeds up when you narrate it.

SpendaYearwithJesus with its time-limited narration is an opportunity to engage Jesus’ experience more like our experience, even in our experience.

Along the way, we remember that Jesus did not have a teleportation device, he walked; that  Jesus did not have a time machine, he passed time like us.

In fact, he never broke the rules of space and time and human relationships for his own advantage.