Jesus Christ is the central figure of Christianity. The principal sources of information regarding Jesus’s life and teachings are the four canonical gospels which are also the most important Christian scriptures – that is, the New Testament versions according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The following details of Jesus’s life are considered to be historical and accurate: that he was a Jew who was regarded widely as a teacher and healer; he was baptised by John the Baptist, and was crucified in Jerusalem on the orders of the Roman Prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, on the charge of sedition against the Roman Empire.
In a beautiful parable of the sower and the seed, Jesus tells us that three things are needed to belong to God’s kingdom: awareness, understanding, devotion to God and commitment to the faith. Once, a man asked Jesus, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ ‘The most important one’ answered Jesus, is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
Jesus’s teachings stirred the hearts of the masses, and both orthodox Jews and the Roman occupiers feared that this would undermine their authority. Jesus prophesied very accurately, the events that would follow: He taught His disciples about the Will of God and about the ‘new covenant’ God will bring to humanity through Him. The purpose of this ‘new covenant’ is to restore those who accept it into a renewed fellowship of forgiveness and love with God. What is this new covenant? Jesus, the Son of God who was born as a man, would himself pay for the sins of all humanity by being crucified unjustly on a Roman cross. Three days later, He would rise to life, having conquered death, to give hope to a hopeless world. It happened exactly as Jesus taught, and His disciples were witnesses to an amazing miracle. Their teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, died and three days later rose again to become their Messiah.
*Dec 25 is Christmas Day
Dada J P Vaswani is a humanitarian, philosopher, educator, acclaimed writer, powerful orator, messiah of ahimsa, and non-sectarian spiritual leader
