Michael Grant, author of Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels writes, “He must have seen what lay in store for him.”**

I heard a story from a part of the world where religious hostility is intense. A young man left home. While away, he crossed a religious boundary. He knew that when he returned to his town, his family would kill him for his religious choice. He said his fateful good-bye to his friends and returned home. A few weeks later, his friends received word he was dead.

Jesus made the comment, “No prophet can die outside Jerusalem…” (Lk 13:33).

The Gospels relate the hostility: first Herod tried to kill the infant Jesus because of the visit of the Magi (Mt 2:13, 16) then the Pharisees and the Herodians because of Jesus’ healing fame (Mk 3:6; Mt 12:14) then Jesus’ childhood neighbors in Nazareth because of Jesus’ rebuke (Lk 6:29) then Herod Antipas because of John (Lk 13:31) then the chief priests because of Jesus’ teaching fame (Mk 11:18).

Jesus’ experience was apparently full of conflict, and here we see that Jesus was aware that his situation was not going to have a happy ending or was it?

** Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1977), 135.

Imagine you’re a student of Elizabethan literature. Suddenly, one day in your seminar class, your professor is joined by none other than … William Shakespeare! You’re speechless. You fumble for words, for just one intelligible question for the “bard.” You are in the presence of the greatest writer of his age!

Peter, James and John had that experience. They met the greatest writer of his and their age–Moses. Every Sabbath, Sabbath after Sabbath, they gathered and read Moses’ writing!

The Gospels relate how Jesus took Peter, James and John to a high mountain to pray. The summer seems a likely time since winter on the mountain would be quite inhospitable. As they were praying, Jesus’ clothes glowed bright and white, then “Elijah with Moses” appeared (Mk 9:2-8).

This moment was something beyond the modern-day celebrity “meet-and-greet.” Can you imagine meeting one of your heroes from history?

If you met Moses, would you ever be able to read the books of Moses the same again? You would know something that no one else knows. What the author looked and sounded like!

I can imagine that Peter, James and John had a hard time keeping it to themselves at first. Of course, Peter eventually did tell (2 Peter 1:16-18).

The disciples felt exuberant. (Yesterday in the SpendaYearwithJesus storyline) Jesus confirmed that he was Messiah!

Shortly thereafter, their hopes were shaken by Jesus’ comments about dying and raising.

Exuberance and disappointment.

In the summer of 2013, my brothers and their families, my parents, and my family were planning to go to Orlando. We had taken a trip two years before and it was great. So we were excited to get together again.

You can imagine our disappointment when my dad called to let us know my mom was not going to be able to make the trip. The fact is, my mom had been under treatment for myeloma cancer for almost five years. We thought she was stable, but we were wrong. Our excitement to go to Disneyworld turned to concern for my mom’s condition.

Exuberance and disappointment.

We can connect with the disciples’ and Jesus’ experience. We can feel the uncertainty of human experience — both the exuberant uncertainty of happy opportunities and the weight of grief in a terminal diagnosis.

Perhaps Jesus’ disciple-optimists were thinking about implications of Messiah’s leadership (of course, not without its challenges: dying and raising as a metaphor rather than literal prediction). The disciple-pessimists were probably concerned about their future.

Either way, I don’t think they got much sleep after the news of that day.

It went by so fast

On a fall Saturday in 1994 at a rooftop restaurant in Atlanta, Ga, I asked my girlfriend to marry me. She said, “Yes.” Actually she said more than yes, but that’s another story. After that 6 hour long evening, my fiancee and I said to one another, “It went by so fast!”

All year, Jesus’ closest disciples try to understand the man to whom they gave their loyalty. They see crowds gather around Jesus, and towns cool to his presence. They witnessed the mixed support of civic leaders and opposition of religious leaders.

In Jesus’ experience from Passover to Passover, today is a turning point — the stuff of speeches and books. Yet in only six verses (Mark 8:27-33)…

Jesus reveals his demise.

The disciples expected greatness. They could not mistake the foreboding nature of his words.

The limits of a human day

Jesus’ experience, like ours, is wrapped in the limits of a human day. Today is a big day in Jesus’ experience, but it passes like any other day.

The sun sets, emotions calm, people sleep. The sun rises, a new day, new emotions. And naturally …humanly… memory slides slowly from vividness to oblivion.

Today is a turning point in Jesus’ story. I wonder if his followers felt about this day like my wife and I do about the night of our engagement. The event passed so quickly.

Like important days in our lives, however, the significance accumulates with time.

Join the story at SpendaYearwithJesus.com

I enjoy following the Olympics. The competition, the athletes’ backstories, the surprises, the heartbreaks, and even the behind-the-scenes operation of the games.

During periods of Olympic interest, it strikes me to ask, Why didn’t Jesus talk about sports?

Jesus talks about life — farming and fishing, fields and trees, building a tower. Sports were not off-limits to the religious people of the day. So why doesn’t Jesus talk about sports?

Simply put, sports did not make a significant imprint on Jesus’ experience or culture.

One reason is that Jewish participation in Greek sports posed some major incompatibilities in the participant’s “athletic suits,” and Roman sports were rather violent.

So even though first-century Jewish historian Josephus writes about a sports complex (a hippodrome) located in ancient Jerusalem, this stadium does not factor into Jesus’ story.

Jesus apparently had other interests and occupations, even though sports were a part of ancient life.

Knowing the context helps us frame and tell Jesus’ story.

Connect with Jesus’ experience.

“His progress is so rapid.” I share in that conclusion about the way Jesus traveled, but what makes me think that way?

The quote is from scholar C. C. McCown, who noted concerning his walking experience: “The writer knows from having made both journeys on foot, but not in one day.” So why is it that Jesus makes the trip in one day while McCown did not? Which time-frame is normal?

Even in 1938 when McCown wrote, the western world was speeding up and McCown’s perspective of Jesus with it. I tend to think that if it took the human McCown more than one day, then the same for Jesus.

Here’s the funny thing. This is one time I’m willing to concede Jesus’ divinity. Being rushed is human. Being divine means something higher is driving steadying you.

C. C. McCown characterizes Luke’s central section in the full quotation as follows:

The opening verse pitches the dominant tone for the whole narrative: with the cross before him, Jesus turns his face steadfastly from Galilee toward Jerusalem (9:51, 53). His progress is so rapid, in the concise account, that the very first night brings him to Samaria to sleep, not in the city where first shelter was sought, but in some village to which he moves on after a rebuff (9:52, 56). Whether the route was from Tell Hûm either across Esdraelon by way of Tabor to Jenîn or Qubatîyeh, or down the Jordan Valley by way of Beisân to some village in the mountains south of it, this would be no small achievement, as the writer knows from having made both journeys on foot, but not in one day.++

++C. C. McCown, “The Geography of Luke’s Central Section,” Journal of Biblical Literature 57, no. 1 (1938): 53.