jesus

Blog, Poetry, Writers

If I Were Jesus: A Poem by Chukwuemeka Oluka

/

Come to think of it; Jesus was quite humble while on earth If I were Jesus that resurrected from the dead, I would run round the streets of Jerusalem with my disciples I would run shouting, ‘who dey breeeeeet!’ I would walk me like a king before the Jews I would walk with my shoulders high I would walk before Caiaphas, Pilate and Herod If I were Jesus, I won’t ride on a donkey I would ride on their guilt I would rub it on their faces With majesty and power, I would ride If I were Jesus, I would lash out on my disciples They doubted my resurrection story They sold their faith and bought fear Small wonder, they left me lonely at Gethsemane Oh Gethsemane! Many were thy sorrow How can I forget thy torture? How can I forget the pain and anguish? My sweats of blood dotted thy garden Oh Gethsemane! Jerusalem’s Olives Mount Green were thy leaves, green were thy memories Scene of agony, betrayal and arrest Yet Zebedee’s sons found thy garden a sleeping bed If I were Jesus, the chief priests would find unrest The people will find them liars On blasphemy they accused me, The Jews would know the true story If I were Jesus, Would I drink that cup of suffering? If only Zebedee’s wife knew, She wouldn’t dare make the request. How dare me be Jesus, slain The spotless lamb without stain Slain for sin; slain for my gain Jesus Christ is that lamb The Lamb was beaten in gangs On Calvary’s tree, He hangs Jerusalem’s women beheld the pangs Of our dying Jesus on good Friday Now, how good is Good Friday? What is good about the day? Good my sins were washed away Jesus died for my sins This is why I won’t shout, ‘who dey breeeeeet!’ I would reflect on the mystery of salvation All things have become a new edition On Easter, heralds the celebration If I were Jesus, I wouldn’t revenge He forgave me when I was at the edge I am glad, I sing no dirge Jesus died that I may live Heaven is wedded to Earth Man is reconciled to his creator This is why Jesus rose from the dead Halleluiah! This is Easter! Jesus broke the chains of death He destroyed sin forever He rose triumphant from the grave Halleluiah! This is Easter! I adore you, O Jesus, and I praise you By your death, I am born anew By your rising from the dead, you paid my due Halleluiah! This is Easter! How can I celebrate new life at Easter? ‘If I were Jesus’ I will never say again ‘I want to be like Jesus’ I say, instead Wearing a new life in His image

Blog, Reverie

More Arab Muslims than American Christians believe Christ will return.

/

In 2012 a survey conducted by the Pew Research centre found that over 50% of Muslims in Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia believe in the “imminent return” of Jesus. The figure was a little below half in Morocco and the Palestinian regions. Outside the Arab world, more than half of Muslims in countries like Malaysia, Turkey, Pakistan and Thailand say Jesus will definitely come back during their lifetime.   By contrast, however, in America where Trump is deceiving some gullible ‘sheeple’ by wishing them a merry Xmas and claiming that he has brought God back to the White House only 27% of Christians believe Christ will come back. A 2015 poll by the Brookings Institute also found that only 12 percent of US Evangelicals believe that Jesus will return in their lifetime while it even gets more embarrassing as about 65% of college graduates say the return of Jesus is a fairy tale. Rummaging through these facts in an article I read recently had me wondering who is fooling who really among the two largest religions that have simultaneously brought its followers and the world plenty sorrow, tears and joy?? Your guess is as good as mine.

Blog, Essays

Jesus Was Not White.

/

I grew up in a Christian home, where a photo of Jesus hung on my bedroom wall. I still have it. It is schmaltzy and rather tacky in that 1970s kind of way, but as a little girl I loved it. In this picture, Jesus looks kind and gentle, he gazes down at me lovingly. He is also light-haired, blue-eyed, and very white. The problem is, Jesus was not white. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise if you’ve ever entered a Western church or visited an art gallery. But while there is no physical description of him in the Bible, there is also no doubt that the historical Jesus, the man who was executed by the Roman State in the first century CE, was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew. This is not controversial from a scholarly point of view, but somehow it is a forgotten detail for many of the millions of Christians who will gather to celebrate Easter this week. On Good Friday, Christians attend churches to worship Jesus and, in particular, remember his death on a cross. In most of these churches, Jesus will be depicted as a white man, a guy that looks like Anglo-Australians, a guy easy for other Anglo-Australians to identify with. Think for a moment of the rather dashing Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. He is an Irish-American actor. Or call to mind some of the most famous artworks of Jesus’ crucifixion – Ruben, Grunewald, Giotto – and again we see the European bias in depicting a white-skinned Jesus. Does any of this matter? Yes, it really does. As a society, we are well aware of the power of representation and the importance of diverse role models. After winning the 2013 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in 12 Years a Slave, Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o shot to fame. In interviews since then, Nyong’o has repeatedly articulated her feelings of inferiority as a young woman because all the images of beauty she saw around her were of lighter-skinned women. It was only when she saw the fashion world embracing Sudanese model Alek Wek that she realised black could be beautiful too. If we can recognise the importance of ethnically and physically diverse role models in our media, why can’t we do the same for faith? Why do we continue to allow images of a whitened Jesus to dominate? Jim Caviezel in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. IMDB Many churches and cultures do depict Jesus as a brown or black man. Orthodox Christians usually have a very different iconography to that of European art – if you enter a church in Africa, you’ll likely see an African Jesus on display. But these are rarely the images we see in Australian Protestant and Catholic churches, and it is our loss. It allows the mainstream Christian community to separate their devotion to Jesus from compassionate regard for those who look different. I would even go so far as to say it creates a cognitive disconnect, where one can feel deep affection for Jesus but little empathy for a Middle Eastern person. It likewise has implications for the theological claim that humans are made in God’s image. If God is always imaged as white, then the default human becomes white and such thinking undergirds racism. Historically, the whitewashing of Jesus contributed to Christians being some of the worst perpetrators of anti-Semitism and it continues to manifest in the “othering” of non-Anglo Saxon Australians. This Easter, I can’t help but wonder, what would our church and society look like if we just remembered that Jesus was brown? If we were confronted with the reality that the body hung on the cross was a brown body: one broken, tortured, and publicly executed by an oppressive regime. How might it change our attitudes if we could see that the unjust imprisonment, abuse, and execution of the historical Jesus has more in common with the experience of Indigenous Australians or asylum seekers than it does with those who hold power in the church and usually represent Christ? Perhaps most radical of all, I can’t help but wonder what might change if we were more mindful that the person Christians celebrate as God in the flesh and saviour of the entire world was not a white man, but a Middle Eastern Jew. This article was written by Robyn J. Whitaker, Bromby Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Trinity College, University of Divinity and was originally published on The Conversation.

Blog, Reverie

Salvation is that simple.

/

Love your neighbour as yourself, there is no commandment greater than these.~ Mark 12:31 Simple and straightforward, many agree that the above commandment is the greatest as rightly stated by Christ himself. In the preceding verse, he had instructed us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”  As we grow older, there is an ever-increasing tendency to question our faith and belief, the persistent worry about how life will end and what portends thereafter is never too far from the mind. Even the extremist atheists cannot deny that they sometimes marvel at our universe and wonder how it all came to be despite various theories of evolution. Tell me you don’t believe in God or gods I can agree but you will never convince anyone that you have no inner voice, that second voice deep inside that queries your action and decision is not just your conscience but it represents a power beyond the physical. It is a greater YOU that connects with a superior being richer in wisdom and knowledge. Some time ago, I came across a CNN news story on how the Pope told the Catholic flock that it is better to be an atheist than a fake Christian. He said:  “So many Christians are like this (hypocrites), and these people scandalise others. How many times have we heard — all of us, around the neighbourhood and elsewhere — ‘But to be a Catholic like that, it’s better to be an atheist.’ It is that: scandal. But what is scandal? Scandal is saying one thing and doing another No other Pope in recent times has questioned the practice of the Christian doctrine viz-a-viz the simple instructions of Christ-like the current Pontiff. This has endeared him to many, believers and non-believers alike including my humble self.  The point made by the Pope somewhat reechoes Christ’s greatest commandment in the book of Mark. One cannot rightly claim to be a Christian by mere word of mouth, it is pure hypocrisy. The instructions of the one we claim to follow were equally lived out by him. I, therefore cannot deceive myself that by going to church and giving huge tithes every Sunday salvation is assured. I am an Anglican but I schooled in College of the Immaculate Conception (CIC), a Catholic school in Enugu the Eastern part of Nigeria. That period of my life helped in shaping my non-denominational attitude toward Christianity. I attend the nearest church unless I have reasons to go to a farther one and more often than not item 7 is involved, else I just go and worship in any nearby church. One decision I still regret was not allowing my daughter to partake in the first communion with her classmates in her 2nd class. That decision was not necessarily because I am an Anglican or that I dislike Catholics, far from it, I just didn’t want to spend so much money hosting a grand occasion as is traditional is Ireland on the first communion. Moreover, I wouldn’t have been around as I was still stuck in Nigeria in pursuit of greenbacks. Silly and selfish as hosting a large reception isn’t mandatory neither was my presence. Now I am more than glad later on this year she will be attending the same Catholic secondary school with her classmates. During the tour of the school and introductory session I attended last month, the principal told us that theirs is a school run on strict adherence to Catholic doctrines, she however also stated that they welcome pupils of all faiths. She went on to say that they teach core values centred around love, respect and caring for each other.  Seated a few yards away from us were a Muslim couple, the woman wore a hijab and her husband I assumed looked relaxed among many Christian parents. The kind of atmosphere I love to savour and I hope to bring up my kids to cherish same too. The guiding principle should always be love, not just in words but in actions, by caring for those around you especially the less privileged. This is what humanity is all about and I honestly believe that salvation cannot be attained without it. It is for this reason that I get irritated at self-pontificating pastors who mount the pulpit daily to recite the scriptures, yet cannot practice what they preach. After all, John queried how one could possibly claim to love God whom we cannot see when you do not love your neighbour who is right here with you. The Pope has seen that some atheists are doing good daily, loving and caring more than Christians, yet somehow these are supposed to be people who do not believe in the divinity of any being. The ones daily being condemned to damnation by our so-called men of God. Yet some of them emulate Christ better than the Bible-wielding preachers.   I sure feel the holy father’s message and I’m sure it resonates with many of us. Life’s journey can be hectic but there will always be periods of quiet and calm when you meditate just by yourself. We should endeavour to use those periods to think about doing good and questioning whether our actions deserve earthly applause let alone a heavenly one.  Altogether there seems to be a consensus that the heavenly race or transition to the afterlife is a solo journey. I sum up mine with simple logic: It is better to believe while here on earth and get there to find out it was make-believe than to disbelieve and get there to find out it is real. In the latter case, however, if you did good while here on earth our heavenly father is kind enough to forgive your disbelief even on that judgment day. That is my extrapolation of the Pope’s message.      

Join our essay competition.

This will close in 13 seconds

Solverwp- WordPress Theme and Plugin

Scroll to Top