Jesus – the greatest man who ever lived

As I type these words, it’s Christmas day, a day when most of the world celebrates and remembers the birth of Jesus. Although he almost certainly wasn’t actually born at this time of year, December 25th is when we traditionally remember the nativity story.

For many people who aren’t Christians, this may be the only time of year they think significantly about Jesus.

Throughout the past year I’ve gone through what we call the Sermon on the Mount, which contains some of Jesus’ best-known and most influential teachings. In it he taught that every human being has the potential to rise above their natural instincts as earthly creatures and aspire to be like God.

He described how this must begin with a wholesale change in the way that you think – about God, about other people and about yourself.

Every decision you make and every action you take should be with eternity in mind.

What does that mean?

It means that you’re willing to make sacrifices in this life – to put others first, to go without nice things, to react with grace and humility when things don’t go the way you wanted – in order to prioritise the next life.

What is this next life? It’s the Kingdom of God, a new world order which Jesus will put into place when he returns to the earth, which will last forever and in which every inhabitant will be immortal – and most important of all, God himself will be there, living among us.

That’s the hope Jesus brought, and all of his teachings were intended to enable you to be among those people who live with God in eternity.

The life you live now is a period of trial and testing to see who is and who is not interested in being part of God’s Kingdom.

That’s why, even though your focus should be on the next life, what happens in this life is still of paramount importance.

The way you live now shows where your priority truly lies.

There are two mistakes which Christians can make.

First, to focus entirely on this life. Feeding the poor, calling out injustice, protesting against abuses of power, trying to make the world a better place may all seem like good and right things for a Christian to do – and they are – but if your goal is to create a better world entirely by human effort and ingenuity, that suggests your faith is ultimately in humanity, not in God.

One of the first things a Christian needs to accept is that humanity’s ability to save ourselves will always be limited by our failures to live up to Jesus’ example. Even the most faithful believers sometimes make terrible mistakes – think of David and Bathsheba or Peter denying he knew Jesus – and that’s why a Christian should always be ready to repent and say to God “I can’t do this by myself – I need you”.

Second, to focus entirely on the next life. The temptation can be to go to the other extreme of thinking that only the next life matters, and that everything in this life is temporary and unimportant. It doesn’t matter if people are hungry or sick, or if corrupt governments are killing thousands of people, or if human beings are destroying the planet with pollution and misuse of natural resources. All of these problems will go away when Jesus returns, and we can’t fix the world by our own efforts, so why do anything? Let’s just remain waiting and watching patiently.

While it’s true we can never permanently fix any of these problems, we show that we truly want the Kingdom of God by living as if it’s here now and doing what we can to help improve life for other people either locally, nationally or globally. This also enables us to demonstrate the character and values of Jesus to those people we help and interact with, and hopefully some of them will have their eyes opened to God’s message.

It’s a mistake to think we’re good enough by ourselves, yet it’s also a mistake to think that we’re so incapable of goodness that there’s no point in doing anything.

We all make mistakes and we always will – God knows that – but as long as we come to him and repent, and make a genuine effort to change and do better, he’ll always be ready to forgive us.

Last things

The final verses of Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:28-29) read as follows: When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.

As a young rabbi with no training or authorisation from the Jewish leaders, nobody would have expected Jesus to teach on God’s behalf entirely on his own authority, but that’s exactly what he did, and that’s exactly why the people were astonished. They would have expected him to either give some tentative commentary on the Old Testament or follow one of the existing rabbinical schools of his day.

Instead, he made it clear that what was written in the Old Testament and the commentaries provided by earlier rabbis weren’t the entirety of God’s message to mankind.

Like all prophets sent from God with a unique message, he demonstrated that he really was speaking on God’s behalf by performing miracles, something that would be impossible for anyone who was either deceitful or deluded. Yet he didn’t perform miracles by reciting some incantation or pleading to God, as prophets in the Old Testament sometimes did – he simply spoke and miraculous events came to pass.

He had complete authority to use God’s power for three purposes: first authenticating his message, second showing God’s love, and third demonstrating that an entirely new chapter in God’s story had opened and nothing would ever be the same again.

Jesus

Jesus was the single most influential human being in all of history. We still measure our Western dating system by (roughly) the year of his birth. Historically years would be recorded as “such-and-such event took place in the Xth year of King so-and-so”. We’re currently in the 2024th year of Jesus Christ! Even those who don’t believe in Jesus still use the dating system based on his life – and people have tried to move away from it (the French Revolution for example).

Jesus was the greatest moral teacher who ever lived – both in terms of the lessons he gave and the example he set with his own life. Even Christianity’s most virulent critics find it almost impossible to say anything negative about him as a person, and sometimes find it easier to try and claim he never even existed!

You don’t have to be a Christian to acknowledge the influence and moral example of Jesus. Plenty of non-Christians do so.

If you’re a Christian, however, Jesus is so much more than that. He’s the son of God, the promised saviour of humanity – promised as early as Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve committed the first human sin.

He was the only human being who lived a life of 100% perfect obedience and faithfulness to God. He had every opportunity and temptation to do what would please himself instead – and this was only multiplied when he gained the authority to use God’s divine power – but he made the right choice and was faithful to God, every single time.

It’s easy to take that for granted and forget just how incredible a thing it is. Jesus was the only human being who could claim that he deserved eternal life. That’s why death couldn’t hold him. He was raised back to life – not temporarily like Lazarus or other resurrected people in the Bible – but permanently.

In the last few paragraphs I’ve said “Jesus was…” but really it should be “Jesus is…” because he’s alive today and his mind and character are exactly the same today as they were then.

Yet his faithfulness to God wasn’t just a life of successfully avoiding sin at every opportunity. It was about positively doing the things that God commanded him to do – culminating in his willingness to die in agony on a cross.

That willing death, when he had all the power and opportunity in the world to avoid it and flatten his enemies, is what saves us. The willing death of the only truly innocent man who ever lived is the ONLY thing that can inspire us to repentance – TRUE repentance that brings us forgiveness from God.

Jesus could have had everything, but he willingly gave it all up for us, trusting that his Father would do something he’d never done before: raise a human being from death to immortality.

Jesus earned his immortality. We can’t. We’ve already failed, more times than we can count. But if we are truly inspired to repentance by his sacrifice, we can receive it…as a gift.

It’s the greatest gift imaginable: entirely undeserved eternal life.

So however many gifts you received this Christmas – or if you choose not to do gifts at this time of year – remember this one.

Remember Jesus’ last words as recorded in the Bible (Revelation 22:20): Yes, I am coming soon.

Amen, Lord Jesus.