Heed the Call

Jesus Christ was approximately 30 years old, and he was ready to step from the shadows of a life which to that stage had been lived in relative anonymity.

He had learned of the fate of his cousin, John 'the Baptist', and decided that it was time for he himself to begin a public ministry. It was what he had waited his whole life to do. It was the entire reason for his being alive.

Jesus knew as he began that he would need to start somewhere. And so he set out along the edge of the waters of the sea of Galilee, beginning to spread there a message" that the people should "repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

As he made those first tentative public speeches and teachings, he was mostly alone, and he quickly came to realize that he needed help. He needed people to help him travel, to organize, to simply be his companions on the journey.

Walking along the edge of the Galilean sea he observed two brothers named Simon and Andrew, and he began to talk with them. He talked and taught, telling the brothers "Follow me, and I will make you fisher's of men!" His divine inspiration was so great that the brothers left behind their nets and began to follow Jesus.

The trio moved along the sea a bit and came upon the fishing ship of a man named Zebedee. Tending the nets with their father were his two sons, James and John, and Jesus again began to speak to the men and called on them to join him, which they did.

From this humble beginning has arisen the greatest church in the history of the world. The very church of the one true God Himself, founded by His only son.

Conspiracy, Betrayal, Denial

We are now just three weeks away from Easter Sunday, which along with Christmas Day is the celebration of one of the two greatest events in the history of mankind.

On that day of Easter we will celebrate the great victory of Jesus Christ over death, his rising from the grave into which he entered as a repentance for the sins of man.

But besides that sin for which his death was payment, there was a human process of actual conspiracy and betrayal that served as the mechanization leading to his crucifixion. And near that end there were a series of denials from his most beloved and respected friend and follower.

As the Bible tells it in the New Testament gospel of Luke, with the Passover festival about to begin the chief priests and scribes were looking for a way to put him to death. They feared Jesus' popularity among the people, and that many of his teachings were outside the bounds, some directly in conflict with, the tenets of the Jewish faith.

The Gospel of Matthew tells that they assembled in the palace of the high priest, Caiaphas, and consulted on how best to effect his arrest and eventual execution. Their initial plan was to have this plot carried out after the festival was over, because as both Matthew and Mark tell us, they feared "a riot among the people", such was Jesus' popularity.

Their plots against him came together more suddenly than they wanted because, the fact is, they were not in charge of things. As Luke tells it, Satan "entered into" one of Jesus' twelve disciples, Judas Iscariot, who approached the temple guards and the chief priests with an offer to betray Jesus and turn him over to them in exchange for money.