No One Like Him Ever

If you read Mark 1, the second book in the New Testament of the Bible, you get a snapshot of Jesus that puts him in a class all of his own. It would be nice to see him simply as the greatest human who ever lived, except that comparison's don't work.

First, the Bible announces him as the beginning of the Good News. When has there ever been such good news that it lasts for two centuries? Then we find that prophecies were made about him in the Hebrew Scriptures and that no less than John the Baptist devoted his life to announcing him to the world.

The temptation: Jesus resisted the advances of the same snake who brought Adam and Eve down. Nobody had ever done that before.

He chose simple fishermen as his followers, cast out demons without ever having seen The Exorcist, healed people with impossible diseases and preached his message of good news everywhere, so that he was more famous than anyone in the land.

Of course, you could dismiss it all as mythology, except that even his own followers were flabbergasted. You could strip out all the miraculous stuff and leave yourself with the gentle teacher of peace. But what if this was God's way of reaching us when nothing else would work?

What if Jesus is the path back to what we lost when we abandoned the one who made us?