Stage Directions: Prepare Opposition Both Off Stage and On

Various kinds of activities, then, characterize Jesus' Galilean ministry: preaching, teaching, gathering followers, performing mighty works. A splendid program, we react, calculated to win boundless support from all sorts of people. But did it? We get far off the track if we take a verse such as "the common people heard him gladly" ( Mark 12: 37) and infer from it that Jesus made enthusiastic converts everywhere. An enthusiastic following there was, to be sure, but there was also, apparently from the very beginning, tremendous opposition. People didn't like the sort of thing he was saying and doing. It made them uncomfortable. If some were attracted, many were repelled. If some were pleased, many were offended.

Even those who became followers could be offended. When Jesus first approached Peter, Peter was not attracted by Jesus' "magnetic personality." Not at all. "Get away from me," he said in effect, "I don't want to have anything to do with you." (See Luke 5: 8.) A sinful man, confronted by sheer goodness, feels uncomfortable; more than that, he feels awestruck and overwhelmed. This is too strange a business. Much easier to shut such a person out of your life than to surrender to him. Peter, of course, did surrender finally, but it was a struggle for him all the way.

There was opposition from other quarters as well. The neighbors in Nazareth had very mixed reactions when he came back home and preached in the synagogue.

LOCAL BOY RETURNS, BIG CROWD HEARS HIM, the papers might have said, but they would have had to add:

INHABITANTS SHOCKED, TRY TO KILL SPEAKER

For Jesus didn't give them a nice conventional talk about contributing to the synagogue budget. He read from the prophet Isaiah and then suggested that he -- hel -- was the fulfillment of the sacred Scriptures. The local people, of course, knew better. They had grown up with him. He was only the carpenter's son. What blasphemy!

So they tried to throw him over a cliff.

Suppose you asked a typical Pharisee, a good upright citizen, what he thought about Jesus. The answer would be emphatic.

PHARISEE (belligerently): Him? He's a madman. Why, he doesn't even take our Jewish law seriously! You know what he did last Sabbath? He and his disciples were walking through the fields and he let them pluck grains of corn to eat. On the Sabbath! When it is expressly forbidden by the law. I can show you the exact place if you doubt my word. Not only that, he healed a man on the Sabbath. Broke the law right under my very nose!

But that's nothing compared to what he did the other afternoon. You know Joses' house up the street there? Well, I wasn't there myself, but I have this on very good authority, because my brother was there and saw the whole thing. Four men let a paralytic down through the roof and Jesus looked at him and told him that his sins were forgiven! Sins forgiven? Who is this Jesus to go around forgiving sins? Nobody but God can forgive sins. The man thinks he's God.

And you know what that means to me? It means he's crazy, deluded, and must be gotten out of the way. Dead, buried, and forgotten.

Others might be offended by the company Jesus kept. Their Messiah wouldn't associate with riffraff. He would mingle with the people of influence and position. But Jesus? He was always hobnobbing with the hated tax collectors, and with "sinners"; people even circulated the story that he was a "glutton and a drunkard" ( Luke 7: 34) -- a "party boy," no less!

We can at least infer from all this criticism that when Jesus was around things were never dull. Whatever else Jesus did, he emphatically stirred people up. And this, in turn, made him fair game for the rulers and politicians, who never like to have people "stirred up." Herod Antipas, of Galilee, found Jesus quite a political nuisance and wanted to get rid of him. Even Pilate, procurator of Judea, though he could find no real fault with Jesus, finally succumbed to pressure because of the threat that it might be politically dangerous to leave Jesus alive. All this -- supreme irony -- about a person who said, "My kingship is not of this world" ( John 18: 36).

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