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Introduction

For 30 years, from his birth to early adulthood,

Jesus of Nazareth lived and worked in obscurity. Then for three short years he taught and worked in public, and his public life is well documented in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Jesus never sought or held public office, yet he and his followers have been politically influential and controversial for twenty centuries. While his ultimate mission was a spiritual one, he nevertheless chose to use a political term—the “kingdom” of God—to define it.

Those of us who believe that Jesus was in fact the one he claimed to be—the Son of God sent by God to reconcile human beings to himself and each other—will tend to attribute the uniqueness and impact of his public life to the presence and power of the supernatural. But even those who do not acknowledge his deity should be drawn to examine the nature and lessons of his public ministry by virtue of its unique and enormous impact from that day to this.

In this regard, I once provided a small group of my political friends who were visiting Israel with a “sealed memorandum” to be opened, read, and discussed only after they had completed their first visit to the Galilean region where Jesus spent much of his life. The memorandum read as follows:

A Special Assignment

Imagine that you have just been parachuted into the Galilee region of Israel to carry out the following special assignment:

• Go into the towns and villages around the lake and recruit a team of twelve people.

• Persuade them to leave whatever they are doing and join you in a venture to change themselves, their community, and the world.

• By formal teaching and example, transform their pursuit of self-interest into the self-sacrificial service of others.

• Equip them to share with others what you will impart to them, so that 2,000 years afterwards more than one billion people will profess to be guided in some way by your teachings and example.

• Fiscal constraints require you to raise your own financial support for this assignment.

• Your initial base of operations will be a carpenter’s shop in a small town called Nazareth.

• You have three years to complete this assignment before you must leave the region and entrust the follow-up to your recruits.

Jesus of Nazareth undertook and successfully completed such an assignment, which is why, if for no other reason, I believe that his life and teachings deserve serious examination, especially by those of us who know from our own experience how difficult it is to create and sustain a public movement of any kind, even on a limited scale and for only a brief moment in time.

So, whether we are believers or not, if we are engaged in public life of any sort there is much to learn and profit from examining the public life of Jesus. And if we are operating at the interface of faith and politics this is doubly so.