The Problem With Common Sense

Therefore His brothers said to Him, "Leave here and go into Judea, so that Your disciples also may see Your works which You are doing. For no one does anything in secret when he himself seeks to be known publicly. If You do these things, show Yourself to the world." (John 7:3-4)

Sometimes it is too easy to miss a very important point in Scriptures because we already think we know the outcome of the story and the lessons we expect to be learn from it. Knowing the factual end of a story often short-circuits not only our ability to really enjoy much of the suspense and the sequential progression of the emotions and unfolding drama, but it prevents us many times from really getting into the minds and feelings and attitudes of the players in the storyline.

The Bible sometimes lets us in on what is really going on behind the scenes, and that is extremely important for us to know. However, in the process it is easy to think we know the the main point while possibly missing things far deeper or more significant because we don't spend enough time immersing ourselves in the interactions, the tensions, the culture and the implications of what is really taking place. I believe that it can be extremely helpful to sometimes discipline ourselves and try to place ourselves inside the heads and feelings of various people in a story while ignoring what is coming next in the story so we can better perceive how those people would have felt and thought, them not knowing either the outcome or what was really going on from heaven's perspective.

I also believe that the Bible gives us very important clues to be able to do just that if we are willing to take the time to key in on them and allow them to guide us through a story. It is also vital that we ask for the Spirit of Truth to take our minds deeper into the story to reveal otherwise hidden concepts or vital lessons that may be personalized for our lives and our current situations. This is why a study of the Bible can always be totally fresh and new, for each time we come to it, even though we may be reading something we've read hundreds of times before, we have never been in the same set of circumstances or the same internal arrangement of emotions before. Consequently the perceptions and applications of a given passage can suddenly take on dramatic new meaning while the Spirit may use some surprising passages to bring crucial insights to us just when we need them.

I have been reading and rereading the first half of this chapter for several days to allow it to become more familiar to me while listening for whatever God might want to show me here. As I have done so I am beginning to see more and more connections and implications and can sense more clearly some of the dynamics that may have been in place between Jesus and His biological family. Other than His parents who had experienced direct revelations and had personal dialog with angels before His birth, Jesus' family generally did not view Him with much awareness of His divinity according to what I have seen. But that would be very understandable given the extreme reality of Him being the Son of God rather than a true son of Joseph. This sort of claim forces everyone to make hard decisions about what they are going to do in relation to this man who claims to be far different than any other human who ever existed. And Jesus' brother's and sisters were no exception. In fact, they had to grapple with these issues from a very early age more than most people have to do.

This is where it can be extremely helpful to try to get into the minds of His family members and allow ourselves to ponder the implications of what it might have been like to live in the same house and grow up with Jesus in a very rough part of the country. It might be easy to say that we would love to have grow up knowing Jesus and observing His perfection beginning to become more and more obvious over time. But if we really begin to understand the true nature of how repulsive purity and love can be to a sinful human who feels exposed and condemned by such things, we will begin to sense that life in the Joseph home might have been anything but loving and peaceful, especially with older siblings that may have likely been present from a previous marriage of Joseph as many believe may be the case. This would also have created further tensions of having step brothers or sisters as well as younger siblings that may have been born of Mary after Jesus was birthed.

Either way, the presence of a child who not only consistently refuses to sympathize with any devious activities or suggestions by other children, but who acts so humble and gentle and compassionate toward everyone that it is nauseating to the average kid in the neighborhood, only tends to invite hostility and harassment on a regular basis. And being related to the odd kid who is always the spoiler for any mischief that others want to indulge in would make them embarrassed simply by that association. So it was likely that Jesus' siblings early on tended to try to distance themselves from being identified too closely with Him in order to establish their own identity as more in tune with the average people rather than the strange kid who never seemed to fit in very well but happened to be their brother.

This situation that went on for many years would eventually have deepened their embarrassment and even hostility and anger toward Him over the years. The more different Jesus became as He grew older, the more irritating it became to His siblings and sometimes even to His mother who was sometimes influenced by their complaints about Him. This tension that had likely been there from a very early age would be a ripe breeding ground for sarcastic and deprecating remarks on a regular basis. Jesus' brothers just couldn't make much sense out of the way Jesus related to people and couldn't grasp what motivated Him inside. From their perspective, many things that He said and did simply did not agree with common sense.

And that is precisely where we too get into trouble in trying to analyze the life and teachings of Jesus. Much more like His brothers than we might realize, we try to squeeze what we see in Jesus' life into the mold of our own common sense and are forced in the process to often tweak the meaning of many words and ignore the implications of much of what He said and did. But as we do this we are unconsciously blinding ourselves with deception because we are not allowing the Spirit of God to orient our minds and hearts to perceive reality from heaven's perspective. But it is only from heaven's perspective that much of what Jesus said and did make real sense or become congruent with each other.

But heaven's sense and our common sense are most often going to very different and even in conflict with each other. Given that we are much more comfortable with the common sense that we have grown up being taught to depend on more than trusting in the 'nebulous' leading of an invisible 'Spirit' immersing us in the Word of God, we usually try to judge and interpret everything based on how much sense it makes to us from our frame of reference and those around us rather than allowing God to challenge our deepest assumptions about reality that are by default fundamentally flawed.

In this case, the brothers of Jesus were simply expressing what most of us would assume to make sense and what most of His disciples may have assumed at that time as well. If a person claims to be a great deliverer, a rescuer, the champion needed to deliver people from extreme hardship and distress, then he needs to make himself obvious and display his power and exercise His charisma so that people will be rally around him and assist him in achieving success for their lives. To claim to be the Messiah and yet repeatedly rebuff people's attempts to help Him achieve that 'goal' seemed the height of inconsistency to them. They may have felt that Jesus was missing key information in how to be a real Messiah because of the ignorance He had suffered due to missing out on all the accredited education offered by the established school system of His country. His mother had refused to allow Him access to the teachers who were recognized as the authorities in religion and approved education and had instead chosen to completely home-school Him using almost exclusively the Scriptures as His textbook. As a result of this, many felt that Jesus had possibly become rather unbalanced in His thinking and this was part of the reason that He always acted so weird and different than other 'normal' children growing up.

These comments by His brothers have a lot of implications built into them. I can see years of resentment loaded into these words along with very strong sarcasm and even betrayal to some extent. Just verses before this it states clearly that Jesus was refusing to hang out in Judea because it was too dangerous for Him there at that time. Yet we see His brothers almost taunting Him to go back to the very place where they knew He life was in danger. In saying this they were pitting His actions against their assumptions about His desire to become famous and popular which is what everyone thought the Messiah certainly should do. In effect, they were daring Him to 'show His colors' and face up to the inherent risks of acting on His claims to be who He claimed Himself to be.

John says in the next verse that His brothers simply did not believe in Him at this point. He does not elaborate much on this point, but if we allow ourselves to meditate on this passage we will find our own levels of unbelief potentially exposed as well. The more we come to understand the real claims of Jesus the more we are pushed to either embrace or to reject His radical claims with all the implications of that choice determining the direction of our life. The claims of Jesus are so polarizing that I am convinced most of us don't really feel the real impact of them at the heart level yet. We are so inoculated by religious familiarity that we are not yet convicted of the abrasiveness of what Jesus was all about in relation to our 'common sense' beliefs about life.