JESUS AS MORTAL MAN: How Did He Define Himself?

Many Christian faiths make much of authority, applying tradition and requiring education in order for priests and preachers to actually minister to our needs.

How did Jesus define himself in that regard?

Do we have record that his "education" was necessary in order for him to minister? We know he was educated formally in the traditional ways of his culture. We also know that in his race and culture, actual priesthood authority - the authority to perform the ritual and ordinance of the specifics of Judaism - was lineal. Jesus was not a Levite and his works were not the works of priesthood ordinance.

Yet Jesus spoke of his calling and role often. Whence came that calling and role?

We often speak of ourselves as hearing the call and needing to move into a role that is in harmony with that calling. It seems that in traditional churches a blending arises in which priesthood necessary to perform ordinances like baptism and marriages are interlocked with duties around preaching and sermonizing. In many Christian churches those who hear the call then move into formal preparation and study designed to achieve authoritative and credentialed authorization as ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yet that seems not to be the path taken by Jesus himself and we are left pondering how Jesus saw himself and his path?

There's an interesting clue found in the 4th chapter of Luke in which Jesus returns to his hometown and endeavors to qualify himself to those who knew him as a child. This is an interesting moment in the record of Jesus' ministry because its theme is that of qualification to be recognized as someone of spiritual authority in one's own community. As recorded in Luke, Jesus declared the following about himself:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears."

Of all the proclamations and declarations made by Jesus in the Gospels regarding whom He is/was, this is the most personal and the most powerfully self-defining. This declaration rises above the rhetoric and orthodoxy of other New Testament passages where there appears to be evidence of historical evolution from what Jesus actually said to what became traditional Christian orthodoxy (Catholic and Protestant) with it's idealized portrayals of Jesus as God-come-to-earth. There does not seem to have been any need to put orthodoxy into Jesus' mouth in the 4th chapter of Luke.

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