Who is Jesus?

The season of Advent has begun during which Christians remember afresh the coming of Jesus the Messiah over 2000 years ago. The Jewish Holy Scriptures had foretold this event hundreds of years previously.

Two thousand years ago, many Jews keenly anticipated the coming of the Messiah. They understood that he would be from the line of King David, who was considered the best of the numerous Kings the Jewish nation had known. They believed that this Messiah would be a King par excellence and would prosper his people and defeat their enemies. At that time, the Jewish community sensed the Messiah would come soon to deliver them from their Roman occupiers.

As the nativity plays remind us, Jesus was born of Mary in Bethlehem, the town of King David. Indeed his bloodline went back to King David, then back to Judah, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham. His human lineage was impeccable, agreeing as it did, with the messianic prophecies.

What most Jews didn’t see was that their Messiah would be in some inexpressible manner intimately linked to God himself in a way that no one else has ever been. As the life of Jesus, his teachings and miracles got underway, his uniqueness became increasingly apparent.

Jesus speaks of himself as having been with God prior to his conception; as having come down from God; as being on a specific mission and once that mission was finished he would return to where he had been before.

Was the Messiah simply to administer justice for the Jews and deliver them from their Roman occupiers? No. The mission that brought Jesus to live as a man amongst us is our salvation and deliverance. We all need to be delivered from the consequences of God’s perfect justice. God sees our lives as wrongly lived, his justice requiring each of us to be condemned. God, however, has intervened on our behalf.

A verse from John’s Gospel explains: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’

Jesus came to save us not to condemn us. He did this by dying in our place on a cruel Roman cross. I believe that to receive God’s gift of deliverance in this way should top our own Christmas list.