Jesus loves manly hiking expeditions too.

I forgot to mention in my last post that in my head John the Baptist is Samuel L. Jackson. If that helps set the scene as I see it then all the better. So here we are, mad-man John (played by Mr Jackson) has been a ranting and raving about the coming of a saviour and then Jesus rocks up gets baptised in some quirky right-of-passage, then the Holy Spirit joins the party and God proclaims (loudly or quietly) that he's happy for Jesus to go ahead and get on with the proceedings.

I wonder what the Holy Spirit that descended looked like exactly. Matthew describes it as 'like a dove' but also says that it is 'lighting on him'. I don't know how you would identify that as a holy spirit or how you would decide to call it that, maybe Jesus gave some insight.

So Jesus follows the spirit in it's dove/spotlight form in the desert. After 40 days and 40 nights of not eating or drinking he's tempted by "The Tempter" (Matt 4:3). With the power of scripture knowledge alone Jesus repels this threat by spouting sound reasoning. I don't know about you but if I don't eat or drink for 40 minutes I start hallucinating so I would say that it is entirely possible Jesus could have gone a bit loopy from breathing in too much sand after 40 days. But what strikes me as more interesting is that Jesus went alone, that's part of the point - that he was alone in the desert with no food and drink. So the only account of these events would be his own and Matthew the Tax collector laps it up. A man walks out of the desert over a month after he wanders in following a spot light, says he was tempted by the devil but resisted and that angels looked after him and this logical number cruncher hears the tale and runs with it. Must have been the way he told it!

After stopping briefly to fulfil yet another prophesy Jesus decides it's time. This is it. Jesus is ready to teach. This is big, Jesus, Son of God, teacher of teachers, is ready to give his first advice to the world. What pearl of wisdom did he hit them with? "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." (Matt 4:17). Wow. I bet that was a refreshing change for the punters. I bet afterwards he wished he had just waited a little while and thought about what his first lesson was gonna be so as to sound less like the preacher with the sandwich board that stands in the city centre (that's downtown for you american folk). But I guess he had 30 odd years to come up with his first lesson so maybe that was exactly what he wanted to say - I guess it's direct to the point!

Back to those prophesies for moment. He's getting through them pretty quickly! Matthew being the facts man he appears to be is very keen to point out every two seconds that pretty much everything Jesus does was fore told at some point. The cynic in me wants to say yeah well the prophesies would be well known and you could certainly go about trying to ensure you fulfilled a lot of them. But this is an impressive rate of completion by anyones standards. I'm not gonna go researching the exact ins and outs of the prophesies but suffice to say I'm impressed.

Ok, back to the story. No man is an island and Jesus needs some cronies, so one day when he's walking along the beach and spots two guys and he decides these guys are gonna be his new best mates. Humour me for a minute. You're a fisherman, it's all you know, one day so chap struts up and says 'alright lads, come with me and I'll help you do something more with you life', so you jump up and go...?! No. You think 'cheers mate but I'm pretty good at this finishing lark and you're a bit odd.' But no, they just up and go. Maybe he gave them a tenner and a portion of chips to sweeten the deal? As if that wasn't strange enough the same thing happens again when he ask two more guys! I bet Zebedee was really pleased that his two sons wandered off to follow this loon, leaving him with nets to fix and debts to pay (to one of matts mates) (that's totally made up Zebedee may or may not have been rolling in dosh). It's an impressive skill though, to ask folk to leave their lives and follow you and for them to just do it. Maybe he asked loads of people and they all turned him down but he just decided not to tell anyone.

Jesus goes about teaching and healing people (Matt 4:23). Matty boy is very blasé about the whole performance of Jesus' first miracles, he doesn't even say that anyone else was amazed, I guess healers were two-a-penny back then. He does say that it was enough to get Jesus a following though which set him up for something that every christian in the world loves to rave about - his hiking expedition.

Last weekend myself and the Manvas crew took a little hiking trip out to the Malvern hills to do manly things like make snow angels and snow babies and to admire the pretty foliage, it was really good to get out of the hustle and bustle of life with a few mates and get up high to gain some perspective. Jesus was a hiking man too, so to get away from the crowds he climbed a hill and waited for the boys to arrive. If they weren't in Galilee they probably would have made snow angels too - they could even have asked Joseph what the real one looked like. Now it's time for Jesus to flex those teaching muscles, I bet he wishes he'd come up with this sermon for his first venture into teaching but hey - nobody's perfect ;)

I've never been a fan of The Beautitudes (Matt 5:1-11). I think my problem extends from my least favourite hymn verse, from 'All things bright and beautiful' : "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, god made them high or lowly and ordered their estate". What I hate about it is that it effectively translates to 'ok so you're poor, but don't go being jealous of the rich or being angry at the injustice, this is how god made your life so put up and shut up' which I think is a terrible message that leaves the masses open to all sorts of exploitation by people in 'authority'. This was also how I always viewed The Beautitudes and I think it's all down to the word 'meek'. The meek shall inherit the earth is pretty much the most quoted part of the this chapter. Now to me 'meek' means spineless, weak, submissive - see where my line of thought is going?

But to read them properly shows that it's not like this at all. It took a sharp (virtual) punch to the nose from a friend for me to actually consider them properly. You see, before I always thought that Jesus was saying people with these attributes are the people god likes most, the people who will get to go to heaven, therefore be more like these people: more meek etc. But I'm not so sure that's the case at all. Maybe Jesus was saying that these are the people who will most benefit from what he has to bring to the table. These people will feel blessed because all of their short fallings and all of their problems and frustrations will be resolved, maybe he isn't saying be more meek so you feel more blessed, but that is you do feel meek then you're about to be blessed with a great relief. Maybe.

So that's where I'll leave it for today. Oh so much more to come from The Sermon in the Malverns, I mean On The Mount. If you wanna laugh the following link is a clip of one of my favourite films, based on said sermon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiDmMBIyfsU. Don't forget - "Blessed are the cheesemakers"...