All Hallows Eve begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed. It is widely believed that many Halloween traditions originated from ancient Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain; that such festivals may have had pagan roots; and that Samhain itself was Christianized as Halloween by the early church. Some believe, however, that Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday, separate from ancient festivals like Samhain.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) ¹⁶ Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” John 1:14-18

“We are…in a curious position when we try to place Jesus in his proper historical context. We know a very great deal about the short, final period of his life and hardly anything about the earlier period. Jesus himself wrote nothing, so far as we know. The sources we have for his public career—the four gospels in the New Testament—are dense, complex, and multilayered. They are works of art (of a sort) in their own right. But it is quite impossible to explain their very existence, let alone their detailed content, unless Jesus was himself not only a figure of real, solid history, but also pretty much the sort of person they make him out to  be. If he wasn’t….he’s not worth bothering with.” (“Getting Inside the Gospels”, Simply Jesus,  N. T. Wright, p. 7)

Jesus was probably born around 4 BCE, according to most biblical scholars. The people who invented the present system for dating our world got it almost right. He grew up in Nazareth in northern Palestine. His mother was related to a priestly line, and her son, Jesus, had a cousin named John. His mother’s husband, Joseph, was from the ancient royal family, the family of King David, of the tribe of Judah. So we know in the course of history when Jesus walked the earth. But Christians still believe that Jesus is alive in the present and that he will play a role in the future to which we are all heading. Still, he is the same, as one Christian writer so eloquently puts it: “yesterday, today and forever.” (Heb 13:8)

Therefore I ask the question, what is Jesus to you today and what will Jesus be to you tomorrow? Millions of Christians today call Jesus “Lord” – while millions or more tend to ignore him. Yet, Jesus pops up all over the place, no matter how much our world tries to deny him. Imagine, though, if Jesus had written something. Imagine if we had texts that Jesus not only spoke, but he himself penned. There are many personal and communal issues that would have benefited from some comment from Jesus – but we have no record of what Jesus thought of them – issues like sexuality — and his definition of the word “is”, like when he said “This is my body”. But that is another devotion for another time.

Perhaps one day we will find some letter purported to have been written by Jesus. Perhaps we will, one day, have a text that not only reports something Jesus said, but are authentic thoughts written by Jesus. Imagine. Thank goodness we do not need such a document trail to believe that Jesus was, is and will be the same to us “yesterday, today and forever.”

Pastor Dave

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:1-5

“It is time, I believe, to recognize not only who Jesus was in his own day, despite his contemporaries’ failure to recognize him, but also who he is, and will be, for our own. That puzzle continues. Perhaps, indeed, it has been the same in our own day. Perhaps “even his own people”—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls…But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?” (“The Challenge to the Churches”, Simply Jesus,  N. T. Wright, p. 5)

How important do you think it is to “get Jesus right”? I believe it remains enormously important to our world, and our society today. It is important to our personal life, our religious lives, and our political life. Some might say “Well, Jesus is who Jesus is.” And that is true. We do not want to make more of less of Jesus than what he truly is. So, to begin with, we believe Jesus was, and is G-d’s Son….G-d Incarnate. The Gospel of John states that Jesus was pre-existent – that Jesus was there at the time of creation – a co-creator with G-d and the Holy Spirit. Other Gospels only state that Jesus either was born in the lineage of King David, or he appeared around the time of John the Baptist, his cousin. 

This is where we start as we investigate who Jesus was. The danger of which we must be aware is this: we must be careful not to make Jesus into our own personal image of him, rather than to understand that he is the image of G-d, come to earth to inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven. As such, Jesus was both a “Son of Man”, and the “Son of G-d”. He was pre-existent – he was there at creation. And he was born to Mary and worked with Mary’s husband, Joseph, as a carpenter. This is just the beginning…but every great story begins somewhere.

Pastor Dave