Jesus Christ, Our God of Surprises

Two thousand years ago, Christians announced to the world that God had become man. It was an incredible claim, far beyond anything in the popular imagination. Greek and Roman deities behaved as if they were human, but Jesus of Nazareth, born from a mother’s womb and reared as a child, was human by all accounts. And there was a second stunner regarding the God-man: He rose from the dead.

Such claims are more astounding than anything that has ever rolled off the tongues of Buddhists, Muslims, or even Hindus with their belief in reincarnation. And pagans were not the only ones who were shocked. Christians, then and now, take a deep breath every time they recall some of the things Jesus said. He called those who demanded miracles from Him “evil and adulterous” (Mt. 12:39). “Few” will be saved, He warned (Mt. 7:14), and those who die in their sins will burn in Hell for all eternity.

Such teaching is hard to reconcile with the mercy Christ showed to a woman caught in adultery (cf. Jn. 8:1-11). The man who forgave His crucifiers (cf. Lk. 23:34) bears little resemblance to the man who hurled more “woes” at sinners than any of the Old Testament prophets (cf. Mt. 23:13-36). What Isaiah prophesied had come to pass: Jesus used His tongue as a “rod” (Isa. 11:4), denouncing the religious elite of His time as “hypocrites,” “whited sepulchers,” and “a brood of vipers” (Mt. 23:23, 27, 33).

The God-man who characterized Himself as tough in His “master” parables, who silenced the Pharisees and Sadducees (cf. Mt. 22:34, 46), and whose countenance caused an entire cohort of Roman soldiers to fall to the ground (cf. Jn. 18:6) is the same individual who took delight in children, described Himself as meek, and displayed a divinely outlandish sense of humor. Walking across the Sea of Galilee on one occasion, He drew even with the boat His Apostles were rowing and would have passed it without saying a word had they not called out in fear, thinking they were seeing a ghost (cf. Mk. 6:48-49).

Similarly, after rising from the dead and approaching two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus, He concealed His identity and asked why they were so sad. “Art thou the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” they replied. “What things?” He asked (Lk. 24:18-19) — as if He didn’t know. After mining the ore of Christ’s sternness, one is delighted to find, alongside it, a vein of mischief!

The surprises continue. Jesus applied His saliva to the tongue of a mute, put His fingers into the ear of a deaf man, and spoke of giving His flesh to be eaten. Such physicality, if we may call it that, would be puzzling, even bizarre, were it not for the picture He painted of Himself as a bridegroom, coupled with His reference to marriage as consummated when bride and bridegroom become “one flesh” (Mt. 19:5) — that is, in the Eucharist.

Christ is the only religious founder whose coming was foretold. Messianic prophesies number in the hundreds. Alfred Edersheim, an expert on Jewish history, wrote in his book The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883) that the rabbis at the time of Christ’s birth had identified 456 passages in the Old Testament that describe the coming of the long-expected Messiah. We read in Hebrew Scripture of a suffering servant who is to be whipped, mocked, spat upon, and pierced through the hands and feet, as well as the heart. Not a bone of His body is to be broken (as was the case with the thieves crucified on either side of Jesus). He would be counted among the wicked, His executioners would cast lots for His clothing, and His body would not undergo corruption.

According to the late Peter W. Stoner, former chairman of the Departments of Mathematics and Astronomy at Pasadena City College and the science division at Westmont College, in his book Science Speaks: An Evaluation of Certain Christian Evidences (1958), the mathematical probability of one person in the first century fulfilling just eight of the clearest and most straightforward Messianic prophecies is one in 10¹⁷ (one in 100,000,000,000,000,000).

And yet, contrary to expectation, Jesus the Messiah was not a conquering military hero. What happened on Calvary came as a complete surprise even to those closest to Him.

The humiliation of the cross is perhaps less unimaginable today than it was originally, knowing, as we now do, how many of the Christian faithful were to suffer torturous deaths at the hands of Jews and Romans. Again and again over the centuries, those who have spoken religious truth to secular power have gone to the gallows; saints such as Thomas Becket and Thomas More come readily to mind. And we have the words of Plato, the celebrated student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, who scripts a character in his Republic to say that if a truly righteous man were ever to come along, he would be such a thorn in the side of society that he would be subjected to every form of humiliation and eventually crucified.

When He died, Christ left His Church in the hands of a single individual. “Thou art Peter,” He said to Simon, His Apostle, “and upon this rock I will build my church…and I will give thee the keys to the kingdom of heaven…. Whatever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven” (Mt. 16:18-19). Yet this was unexceptional. From the time of Aaron to the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, there was a Jewish high priest, divinely ordained, with the power of life and death over heretics, whose word on matters of faith and morals was final.

Those Jewish priests who wound up following Our Lord would have welcomed the all-male priesthood He established when selecting His Apostles because, again, this was what they knew. Christ could easily have ordained women. The Greeks, as well as the Romans and Egyptians, had priestesses.

Jesus, however, was anything but a knee-jerk follower of Jewish tradition. His failure to wash His hands ritually before meals cut sharply against the grain, and He waved aside a ban on Sabbath cures. Recall, too, that the Samaritans and other social outcasts appear as role models in His parables.

Who could fail to be amazed at the unprecedented range and power of the miracles Jesus worked? Instantaneous cures of lifelong leprosy and blindness from birth, turning water into wine, feeding thousands with a handful of loaves, raising men from the dead, including Himself (as He predicted) — all this is Gospel truth.

The miracles taken as a whole are so spectacular that there are some, even in the Christian world, who have denied their existence. Thomas Jefferson plunged so far into disbelief that he published an edition of the Gospels nearly devoid of anything miraculous.

The Sage of Monticello is, of course, an outlier. Theology of the Jeffersonian kind is almost as surprising as the miracles themselves because there isn’t a single non-Christian writer from apostolic times, friendly or hostile, Jewish or pagan, who shared Jefferson’s skepticism. Yes, Jews denied the Resurrection, but the great Jewish historian Josephus, a contemporary of St. John the Evangelist, recorded Christ’s return from the dead. So, too, did the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. Another surprise.

Pilate, governor of the Roman province of Judaea, was a worldly functionary unwilling to risk his career by crossing Jewish authorities. Yet he went to great lengths to save Jesus’ life. “I find no guilt in him,” he told the angry crowd who were agitating for Jesus’ execution (Jn. 18:38). Hoping the sight of a man who had suffered severely would soften their hearts, Pilate had his prisoner scourged. Such punishment would have killed many a man, but not one strong enough to spend entire nights in prayer and fast for 40 days.

When having Jesus scourged failed to accomplish Pilate’s purpose, he fell back on Rome’s custom of releasing a prisoner of the Jews’ choice once a year on the Passover. He must have expected that a majority, having heard Jesus’ words, witnessed His miracles, and received His cures, would choose rightly. Instead, they chose a murderous insurrectionist named Barabbas. Surprise of surprises.

Pilate’s sympathy, however, is far from inexplicable. What Jesus had said about the Roman occupation must have been common knowledge: “Render…to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Mt. 22:21). Josephus tells us that Pilate’s wife, when ill, had been cured by Jesus, and St. Matthew tells of her dream in which she was warned against taking the life of a just man (cf. 27:19).

That said, Pilate’s defense of the Lord, not only before Calvary but in the years that followed, is still astonishing. We know from the eminent early Christian historian Eusebius that the bureaucrat who washed his hands, as if to lessen his responsibility for the injustice about to occur, sent reports of the Resurrection to Emperor Tiberius, along with a recommendation that Jesus be added to the Roman pantheon of Gods! Tiberius is said to have forwarded the recommendation to the Senate, where it was rejected.

A mountain near Lucerne, Switzerland, is named after Pilate. Likewise a square in the city of Rome. He is a canonized saint in the calendar of Greek and Ethiopian Christians, and every year in southern France a shrine dedicated to his memory draws multitudes of the faithful. Beyond all reasonable doubt, Pontius Pilate was a convert.

Returning to Christ’s teachings, few things would have raised more eyebrows than what He had to say about the indissolubility of marriage (cf. Mt. 19:3-9). Romans knowledgeable about their past would have understood His strictness, even if they disagreed, because divorce had been socially unacceptable for the first 500 years of the empire. But among the Jews, the two best-known rabbis were Hillel and Shammai, and the former, known for his liberality, allowed a husband to “put away” his wife for something as minor as failure in the kitchen! Shammai, the strictest teacher at the time, allowed divorce for adultery. Jesus’ Apostles were thus at a complete loss when they heard what He had to say on the subject of indissolubility. Taken aback, they asked why anyone would be foolish enough to marry under such circumstances, and Jesus’ response was just as shocking. He urged them to forget about marriage and remain celibate. “Let him accept it [celibacy] who can,” He told them (Mt. 19:12). A small number of Jews lived celibately in the desert, but the vast majority believed marriage was mandatory for all except scribes, who were regarded as “married” to Scripture.

Two more things about Jesus that few with an open mind would fail to find incredible: (1) the rapidity with which His small band of Apostles spread their message to the farthest reaches of the known world, and (2) the fact that within three centuries the followers of Jesus were able, without drawing a sword, to establish Christianity as the religion of the world’s greatest empire. There is nothing remotely comparable in the annals of history.

And we have yet to mention the many events Jesus foretold, some of them in reference to Peter. He informed the fisherman that he would catch a fish and find a coin in its mouth, one valuable enough to pay the Temple tax (cf. Mt. 17:24-27). It happened. Peter also learned that he would deny his Lord three times.

Some of Christ’s prophesies were not borne out for centuries, as, for instance, what befell Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Corozain (cf. Mt. 11:21-24). All three of these stubbornly unbelieving towns disappeared from the map after Jesus condemned them. Christ also foretold the demolition of the Temple (cf. Lk. 21:6). What makes these prophesies of destruction especially eye-opening is the time of their fulfillment: These events occurred well after the appearance of the Gospels in which they are recorded.

Another of Jesus’ “prophecies in waiting” is that we will always have the poor with us (cf. Mt. 26:11). In spite of all the political nostrums sold to the public by agents of social change — from massive communist regimes down to numberless local “community organizers” — over the generations, Christ’s words continue to ring true.

Jesus Christ is the most-written-about person who ever lived, with twice as many entries under His name in the catalogue of the Library of Congress as under the name of the second most-written-about individual, William Shakespeare. At last, something we would expect! But, fame notwithstanding, the man born of a virgin in a cave far from His home is still the greatest surprise of all time.

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