The “Good News”
The Gospel, a Greek term meaning the “Good News” has a noble and loving heritage as the “hope for the world,” proclaiming, “peace on earth, and good will toward men.” (Luke 2:14)
Even if you don’t believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, you must admit He is the single most influential person of all time. Because He changed the way everyone – even atheists – thinks.
The carpenter is the first person in history to teach that we should love everyone we meet - regardless of race, creed, or gender. He said we are all “Sons of God” and that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one.”
Two thousand years ago this was a revolutionary thought. Unlike the Good Samaritan, the morality of the day would have left the victim on the side of the road. (The Hebrews taught us compassion, but they usually meant compassion for other Jews). Slavery was commonplace, and even talking to the “woman at the well” was beneath the dignity of a Jewish man. Yet the carpenter made of point of doing so, permanently engendering a philosophy of equality among the races and the sexes.
And, of course, He told us to forgive. Now, nearly all Americans think this way - even atheists and people of other religions. Jesus practically invented tolerance.
Here’s a list of revolutionary concepts that the carpenter introduced:
• The Good Samaritan: This simple parable changed the world forever. Jesus taught us that not only should we love our neighbor, but that our neighbor is everyone around us.
The Greeks were intellectual giants, bringing us the concepts of art, literature, theater, astronomy, biology and most importantly democracy. But most of you would be astonished that some 70% of people living in ancient Greece were slaves. In their democracy, the demos only included Greeks men born from that city. It did not include other men (or even Greeks) that they enslaved - and it didn’t include women.
The rest of the world was pretty much the same – if they showed compassion at all, it was only to their own people or their own family. Indeed, look at the myths and you’ll see how cruel people were to siblings and parents in their own family.
• Separation of Church and State: Most people attribute this to Thomas Jefferson, but Jesus was about two thousand years ahead of the “American Sphinx” when He said, “Render unto Caesar’s that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.” (Mathew 22:21)
• Limited Government: St. Augustine in his epic The City of God introduced the idea thatthere are two realms of existence – the spiritual and the earthly. He said that the earthly “city” was limited, but that the inner consciousness was protected from political control. Again, this would have been a foreign idea to the Greeks, Babylonians, Romans, Aztecs, etc.
• Women as equals: The carpenter completely ignored Jewish purity laws and talked to women, even foreign women. Five revolutionary examples:
• The Woman at the Well. The disciples “marveled” that Jesus was even talking to her. Read John 4:5-27 and pay close attention to the treatment the woman expected.
• Mary Magdalene and Martha and Mary: Not only did Jesus speak to the woman at the well, but He also went a step further, taking the unprecedented step of accepting women into his inner circle - and then taking time to teach them - something an ancient Rabbi would never do. He told dozens of parables in which women and men were equals, even stories where women got the better of men.
• Daughter of Abraham. “Son of Abraham” remains a beloved phrase in Jewish culture, meant as a male badge of dynastic purity. Not once in the entire Old Testament did anyone ever utter the words “daughter of Abraham.” But Jesus did so in Luke 13:16, forever smashing this misogynistic idea.
• Easter Sunday: Who did the angel and our Risen Lord appear to on Easter Sunday? The fearless disciples? No – a pair of ordinary women. This narrative is so unlikely that it proves the veracity of the account. Back then, a woman couldn’t even be used as a witness in a court of law. If the disciples had lied about the story of the empty tomb, why would they include the humiliating detail that they, the men, were cowering in a house, while the women braved the Roman soldiers? Think about it.
• The Adultrous Woman: Most importantly, the carpenter defended the woman caught in adultery. He made the moral comparison that her sin – a sin of which she admitted – a sin that demanded the death penalty, was no greater than the cruel but judicious anger of the men that condemned her. Then He championed that woman, sending the self-righteous men away in shame. That brave act of mercy is one of the most pivotal acts of Western culture, forever forging our capacity to forgive.
Compare that mercy to the present-day culture of the Middle East. Adulteresses are executed by the sword - even today - now, in the 21st Century. It happens in public, in the middle of town, for everyone to see. I know – I’ve been there.
You could complain that equality has taken too long, and that women – even in the West – are still not treated equally. I totally agree. Others might argue that followers of the carpenter (or people who claimed to be followers) have had sexist, even horrible views towards women. Unfortunately, religions are made up of human beings, and human beings are often quite horrible.
I would contend that if, over the last two thousand years, everyone embodied the ideas of the carpenter – the first person in history to treat women as equals – we wouldn’t have had that problem.
• Tolerance: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” (Mathew 7:1) This one of the carpenter’s central themes. From the Pharisees to the Sadducees to his very own disciples, Jesus was quick to remind us that we should let God judge, not ourselves.
• Equality: Thomas Jefferson claimed that “All men are created equal” because of “unalienable rights” and that this concept was “self evident.” But it’s not self evident at all. Indeed, even today, most cultures do not truly embrace this revolutionary idea, and they certainly didn’t back in 1776.
The preciousness and sanctity of every human life is a uniquely Christian concept. It did not occur until Jesus.
• Equal Status of Lovers: Before the Christian Middle Ages, the idea that the desires of a woman should be held as higher importance to a man’s was incredibly rare. The idea that women could be equal partners, was invented by Christianity.
Look at what the Greeks thought about romantic love – nearly every hero that fell in love was destroyed because of that love. Indeed, of the 30+ Greek plays we still have today, not one of them has love as its subject. Read Medea and you’ll see what it was like to be a Greek woman. Aristotle thought women incapable of friendship, and Plato wanted to abolish marriage altogether. Christianity alone treats men and women as equals. (Matthew 19:6)
• Abolition: Christians were the first people in history to organize an anti-slavery movement. (Galatians 3:28) “There is neither slave nor free…for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
• Invention of Invention: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) The Greek term used here for “word” was logos, or logic.
Modern secularists have done a superb job making everyone believe that science and Christianity are enemies and always have been. Far from the truth, the concept that the universe was ordered but not magical catapulted scientific thought greater than any other culture.
“faith in the possibility of science…is an unconscious derivative of medieval (Christian) theology.”
Alfred North Whitehead
Science and the Modern World
Compare that thinking to ancient China, which was much more stable and wealthier than medieval Europe:
“there was no confidence (in China) that the code of natural laws could ever be unveiled and read, because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read.”
Joseph Needham
Medieval Catholics invented the university system and the first hospitals. Almost all important early scientists were Christian. The Persians gave us Algebra, and the Greeks a host of early sciences, but there are virtually no important contribution from early Islamic or Hindu scientists.
“So vast, without question, is the divine handiwork of the Almighty Creator!” Nicolaus Copernicus
Even to this day, patterns are sought by scientists to unravel our complex universe, looking for “beautiful” mathematical relationships rather than “ugly” ones. Why? Because even secular scientists see the inherent order of the cosmos, an order that is “bordering on the mysterious,” according to physicist Eugene Wigner, “and there is no rational explanation for it.”
Western culture abolished slavery and gave women the right to vote. It is generous to the poor and accepting of other religions. It embraces diversity and promotes liberty. All of that progress comes directly from the teachings of Jesus.
