Jesus’ time management has always been a bit suspect for me. Let’s imagine Jesus had a life coach and he was going to map out his ministry. The first issue would be 33 years. Now we’ve got patriarchs living well over 100, 33 seems a bit brief for definitive revelation. Maybe we can maximize and have sweet baby Jesus do some miracles (see Talladega Nights ).

No, we don’t get the ministry thing rolling until about age 30. Then we get three years with a hand picked group of disciples that consistently appear to learn very little from him during that short time. Again, a good life coach might have begged to at least push the public ministry from 21 to 33 if God isn’t going to give us more time. No. Request denied.

The time culminates in a betrayal, a crucifixion and resurrection. Now Jesus shows up after the resurrection and we would hope he would now be a fount of useful information for us or at least answer a bunch of questions we might have. In Luke 24:36-49 Jesus in fact does all the talking, and gives us some of the most important nuggets of information we want, but it’s not the stuff that I was necessarily looking for.

The first thing we see is the reaction of the disciples, fear and doubt. Now this is completely normal, natural and expected, and very much in keeping with both divine and angelic appearances throughout the Bible.

Usually we get the command to “fear not” but Jesus comes at it in a different way. “Why are you troubled? Why do doubts rise in your mind?” It is as if Jesus has expectations for his disciples that they should know him and that they should know better, which of course they should. A hallmark of the post resurrection messages is the repetition that this was, over and over again told to them by Jesus and that they hadn’t or couldn’t understand. Again, this is the “trouble seeing” problem of something beyond our expectations that we human beings deal with all the time.

Jesus offers physical, experiential evidence of who he is and their demeanor changes to joy and amazement. The outline of this passage is simple in one respect.
1. Jesus knows his disciples need an experience of the risen Jesus, and he gives it to them. 2. They also needs to point them to the Hebrew Scriptures and locate himself within that context.
3. He then gives them a plan and
4. promises to equip them for that plan.

What is interesting that instead on elaborating on what their resurrections will mean, whether it will help them catch fish, find fish better, or whether or not they will need to eat with new, imperishable bodies, he keeps pointing them backwards. What they need to know is a new interpretive filter to the Hebrew Scriptures and that will be enough.

Now again, just like with time thing, this seems backwards. Don’t we want some new vision all written down by Jesus himself? Can’t he scratch something onto notes or golden tablets or two new stone tablets to replace the ones that Moses got? Why back to the Old Testament?

We might even complain that this is culturally backwards. Repentance and forgiveness of sins proclaimed to all the nations, but the nations don’t know the Hebrew Scriptures! That doesn’t seem right. Maybe it will be good for the Jewish people, but not the other nations. Why should they go back and have to learn about all that stuff in the Old Testament? Why should they have to then figure out what to do with circumcision, dietary laws, the history of the sons of Israel, etc? It all seems very strange, very counter-productive, very illogical.

What’s more, if the Hebrew Scriptures were so clear about it all, why were the experts of Jesus day in those Scriptures the most resistant to him? In fact, most of them were the ones who put Jesus to death in the firstplace?! These were also the ones that Jesus was wrangling with and arguing with almost constantly.

Maybe Jesus should just take a bit more time and write a set of Scriptures, or at least leave us a Study Bible of the old ones with footnotes and things that would say things like “shellfish are cool now” or explain that whole Canaanite genocide thing. Nope. He doesn’t do it.

He opens their mind to THOSE scriptures with shellfish prohibitions and genocide and all, and wants them to focus on three things that quite admittedly seem like minor elements of them if you can find them at all. He wants them to open those Hebrew Scriptures along the lines of three things:

1. that the Messiah must suffer,
2. that the Messiah must rise from the dead,
3. that repentance and forgiveness are to be proclaimed to all nations.

In order to do this work the Father is promising something that will cloth them with power to accomplish it. Well that’s a good thing because from what we’ve seen of this group they certainly need something more than what they’ve had before.

Again, if I am to evaluate this plan I would have to suggest that Jesus get a new one. My plan would stipulate:

1. Jesus give more time to training the disciples. They clearly failed with the whole arrest, abandonment thing.
2. Jesus write a book. Eye witness accounts tend to vary on details which leads people doubt which or what is true.
3. Jesus include in that book a lot more information about what happens after you die and/or are raised again. These books really sell well and are very popular (See Lauren Winner on Love Wins). We have lots of questions too. Are we old? Are we young again? Is there sex? How about eating? Do we get everything told to us or do we get to discover it? Is the Internet in the new creation? etc.
4. Jesus do a book tour. There will be lots of follow up questions that will need to be answered not the least of which to clarify a lot of questions about those pesky Hebrew Scriptures he keeps trying to get us to read.
5. As publicity stunts we might revisit some earlier suggestions, stones to bread, playing “catch” with the angels from the pinnacle of the temple, running for political office. Three clearly solid suggestions.

The really shocking thing, however, is that Jesus’ plan works. Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached to the nations and non-Jews will embrace those old Hebrew Scriptures as their Bible and they will do so in droves. So many in fact will come to it despite persecution, a world of questions, and frankly a whole bunch of lousy behavior by Jesus’ followers and some additional bad ideas but the darn thing in fact works out.

Ironically here we stand today puzzling over the same appearance issues, divine-plan-time-management questions, fears and doubts, and second guessing Jesus repentance and forgiveness plan including the whole “power” thing. Do we buy in?

What’s maddening about the whole business is that it is so uncompromising. Working the plan only halfway through always seems to complicate it and make it more difficult to follow but working it fully seems absolutely nuts sometimes.

This, however, is exactly what we see from Jesus again and again and again, consistently throughout everything we know about him. He never accepts a half-way relationship, it’s always all or nothing and a great many people choose “nothing” or keep trying to ride the fence. But this is him, take him or leave him.