What would Jesus have looked like if he was born in Australia? How would people have responded to Jesus if he walked among our streets, if he visited our cities and towns?
Australian writer Norm Habel once wrote a book called A Bloke Called Jesus. He told the Bible story of Jesus, as though Jesus had been born in Australia, and lived and died in the Australian outback. He told the story using Australian colloquial language.
Some people were shocked. They thought it was disrespectful to Jesus to speak of him as a bloke. They thought it was disrespectful of the Bible to change it, and set the stories in Australia.
We have a picture in our mind of what Jesus looked like – even though no one ever took a photograph or painted a picture. Our mind picture shows him walking through the countryside in his long flowing gowns. But this picture seems to tell us that Jesus lived a long time ago in a country and culture that was very different to our own. It also suggests that everyone could see that he was someone different and someone special.
Yes, Jesus lived on earth 2000 years ago, and his world was very different to our world. Yet when people saw Jesus and met Jesus he did not look anything out of the ordinary. They did not at first think of him as anyone different.
When Jesus first started travelling around the towns, the people asked: Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother a woman named Mary? Isn’t he the brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Are his sisters the women we know? (Matthew 13:55-56). When Andrew first told his brother Peter about Jesus, he said, We have found the one who was written about in the Scriptures. He is Jesus, son of Joseph, of Nazareth. And Peter retorted: Could anything good come out of Nazareth?
As far as his fellow Galileans were concerned Jesus was just an ordinary bloke from one of the local towns. When Jesus started preaching to them, some of them started rubbishing him.
If we translate this story into our own times and our own surroundings, Jesus comes as an ordinary Aussie bloke. He is one of us. He does not look any different.
But the fact that he is one of us is very important. Because Jesus came to share our lives – and the lives of every person in every time and every place.
As people started to listen to what Jesus said, they heard him say amazing things. They heard him tell of the Kingdom of God. They learned from him that they could speak to God as their Father. As they watched what he did, how he helped and healed people in every kind of need, they saw that he had the power of God to help and the love of God to care.
Gradually some of them started to realise that this local boy was much more. Gradually they came to believe that he was also the Son of God, and that he had come as the promised Messiah, and that he was their Lord and Saviour. Peter finally declared: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. (Matthew 16:16).
As we in Australia listen to what Jesus says, and as we see what he does, how he brings the love and the power of God into the lives of modern day Australians, we too realise: He is an ordinary Aussie bloke, but he is much more. He is God coming to us. He is the one who does everything that we need and everything that God has promised. He is our Saviour. He is our Lord.
Pastor Jim Pietsch
St Mark’s Lutheran Church
Melton
St Mark’s Lutheran Church
Melton