Snapshots - Jesus through the Lens of History

Teenage Rebels Finding a Cause - John and Jesus

    Teens tend to hang together. Friends offer the best place to air growing angst with just about everything. Nature plans this carefully so that each generation gets the chance to crave change and strive to evolve to a higher and better life. If you are a parent of a teen, perhaps seeing it this way can be a comfort. And then again, nothing usually helps except enough time for maturity to rear its long awaited self. Nothing was different for Jesus, John and their families. 

    Let’s start the snapshots at this point with the teen John, the slightly older by six months, and his cousin Jesus. Their moms had spent emotional pregnancies together and the families probably lived in the same or nearby villages, visiting often and certainly at holiday times. This extended family would travel together each year to the Passover celebration at the Temple in Jerusalem. The boys, also, would have come of religious age at twelve in the same year, having both studied intensely the same information in the same way. Their experiences up to now would overlap and be distinctly similar.

    Now that they have become teens, what might be the obvious and not so obvious points where life begins to rub them the wrong way? How will each of them respond and act out? For now, let’s begin by looking at John.  Zooming in the camera a little we notice that John’s dad is a priest in the local synagogue and serves frequently in the Temple at Jerusalem. Being a priest is hereditary and John would be expected to follow in his father’s conservative footsteps.

    Here’s a quick political snapshot we will explore more fully later. The high priests in the Temple at Jerusalem were collaborators with Rome. They helped keep the peace between Jews and Roman soldiers – a thankless and much distrusted position. Remember, this was a turbulent time of insurrection. We will catch up on the importance of all this later. But for now we can immediately see the result in recorded history.  John must have heatedly rebelled and said, No way! because he became a dissident, and we can catch a quick snapshot of him out in the wilds preaching about apocalyptic end times. He was becoming a strident political radical. His dad and mom must have been shocked and really ticked off. 

    For now, however, we will leave John eating locusts until we can travel back and take more snapshots. Then we can explore more fully his influential ministry and the profound impact his apocalyptic vision will have on his cousin, Jesus and how Jesus changes the message with his personal vision.

    For these two teens however, this is just the beginning of their idealistic dreams of changing the world.