As a seeker of truth and enlightenment it is easy to consider the veracity of Jesus as a person who lived and breathed and taught divine truth, to read his words and the stories of his life, seeking to understand his teachings and his way of living as we do the words and lives of other wise and good and inspired figures in history. As Christians we generally give him more credibility due to the divinity that we believe he embodied, therefore giving considerably more weight to what we find in the pages about him and his life than we do to other long ago divinely enlightened individuals whose words and lives we read about. And that is good.
But are we missing something?
"Some
of us, when young, were presented with a writing book. At the top it
had a line of...writing; below it had blank lines on which we had to
copy it. How utterly discouraging were our efforts to reproduce that
perfect pattern! But then the teacher would come and, with her hand,
would guide our hand over the lines and we got nearer to the ideal.
That is what Jesus does. He is not only the pattern and the example.
He helps and guides us and strengthens us to follow that pattern and
example. He is not simply a model for life; he is a living presence
to help us to live.
“It
may well be that our Christianity has lacked an essential something
because we too have been looking for him who is alive among
the dead”
~William
Barclay, The Gospel of Luke, pp.292-293
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