Publicity

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)

What are some more implications found in these words of Jesus' brothers?

Go to Judea so that Your disciples may see Your works. That implies several things.

• Your disciples can't see Your works in Galilee, only in Judea.
• You don't really have disciples in Galilee; they must all be in Judea.
• The things You do here don't count. Only if You perform Your works in Judea are the things You do effective proof of Your claims.
• The real reason You perform signs is just to gain publicity.
• You are confused and are trying to live in secret when You should be more open. Because it only makes sense that You must have publicity to be successful, You should take our advice on how to get real publicity.
• Since we insist that You should be known publicly, why are You not showing Your self to the world in the places where the world pays attention to people?
• You need publicity, and the only place to get valid publicity is in Judea where all the important people live. Remaining in Galilee where the people are mostly poor or politically powerless is a cop-out and an act of cowardice.
• You teach others to not be afraid and to trust God but You Yourself are afraid and You are hiding from the very leaders who only can give You the publicity You need. Why do You insist on remaining at odds with them and defy their authority? Shame on You.

The main issue within their comments was more about publicity, not validity. They based their opinions about their brother on their own assumptions that were both tainted with years of resentment and were strongly influenced by their own desires for legitimacy, acceptance and popularity with those in power. Jesus was hurting their reputation and they were very irritated about that.

There are very many subtle lies embedded into these comments that are so common with most of us that they are often quite hard for us to detect. The many assumptions built into their comments are so common that they are accepted wisdom – the wisdom of the world. Some of these lies are obvious in contrast with Jesus' life and teachings and are easier to spot, but many of them are so 'normal' that we struggle to believe they are really false. We need the Holy Spirit to give us discernment and humility and a willingness to challenge these same assumptions that influence our own relationships with those around us.

What role does publicity play in the life of a true disciple, a follower of Jesus? What does Jesus' example teach us about this factor in society? Is publicity bad, good or something neutral that must be very carefully dealt with to avoid becoming distracted from the true purpose of life?

Clearly, Jesus at times performed certain miracles apparently to draw attention to Himself – publicity – in order to challenge deeply entrenched paradigms of society and religion that had to be exposed. But just as clearly at other times He also turned circumstances away from drawing attention to Himself and even commanded His disciples to disperse when they got caught up in emotions of intending to exalt Jesus in the world's way. Jesus repeatedly refused to participate in the 'normal' means of getting publicity while other times He seemed to intentionally attract it. What can we learn from His example?

And what about some of the other assumptions woven into these comments of Jesus' brothers? The insinuations they were making were certainly not very complimentary, but then feelings of bitterness usually produce sarcastic statements. I know, I have had that weakness much of my life. But these symptoms are revealed to me to allow me to acknowledge these underlying problems deep in my heart and let God into those areas of pain and false beliefs to repair the damage while He works to restore His image in my soul. God uses the stories of others to bring light to the issues within our own hearts so we can have opportunity to come to Him for healing and be restored to wholeness in Him.

In Jesus' answer to these assertions by His brothers there is even more hints about the issues of publicity that we need to learn. Most of His life Jesus avoided publicity and even during His years of ministry He carefully managed how much publicity was allowed to develop around Him. In telling His brothers that His time was not yet come, He was directly addressing this issue of publicity. It was not yet time for His publicity to fully blossom, for He already knew that when He opened up all the stops and allowed His publicity to go unchecked, it would very quickly bring about His death. But the timing of His very public exhibition through His death had to be in God's time, not something Jesus was to chose for Himself.

The context for all of this is vitally important to understand. Jesus' purpose in coming to this earth was for one thing primarily – to reveal to all intelligent beings in all the universe the real truth about God and especially what God meant when He informed His created beings that the natural consequences of sin was death. (Romans 6:23) Because God had never yet allowed anyone to die that kind of death, the question about God's honesty in this had remained open for millennia and doubts about God's truthfulness and trustworthiness had swirled around His created beings with many tragic results. Satan up to the time of Jesus had believed that since he had avoided death this long that he could live for eternity. He actually believed that he had found a loophole by which he could defeat the claim of God that sin results in death; for as long as there was doubt in anyone's mind about the real cause of this sin-death, then if God allowed anyone to suffer it that death it would only serve to plant seeds of rebellion in the hearts and minds of those who would assume that this death was caused by God.

Satan assumed that it would be an easy thing to keep doubts about God's character and truthfulness alive in at least some minds and this had thus far served as his insurance against suffering this death. But God had set up a secret plan that would actually cause the devil to destroy his own protection he had invented and had depended on to avoid death while he used fear of death to keep so many others under his control.

The Godhead had decided long before to allow Jesus – God Himself – to demonstrate what the second death, the consequence of separating from God, i.e. sin, really looks like. God chose to demonstrate to the entire universe through His own human body the truth about this 'second death' rather than allow anyone else to demonstrate it, so that He could finally remove all doubts in the minds of His created beings about the true cause of this death. And by removing these doubts it would also allow those who had chosen the path of rebellion to remove themselves from existence through the second death while allowing those who had chosen to be loyal to God to be free of all suspicion that this death had been imposed by God on rebellious sinners.

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Hebrews 2:14-15 NIV)

When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, "Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades." (Revelation 1:17-18)

The timing of Jesus' life and death was very important to the working out of this secret plan to extricate the universe from the fear of death and the subtle lies about God that had been so effective in protecting Satan from the natural consequence of sin. It was from this much larger context that Jesus informed his brothers that His time was not yet ripe. It was vitally necessary that He have the full time He needed on this earth to demonstrate as far as possible the truth about how God feels towards sinners and what His character of righteousness really looks like before He would then demonstrate what real death looks like. That is why Jesus refused to allow His publicity to advance too quickly before His Father indicated that it was time to die. To suffer a premature death before this demonstration was complete would be to short-circuit the very plan put in place to end the whole problem of sin once and for all in the day of final judgment and revelation.

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.