Death is dead.

Begin with part one of this series here.  Or, read this, and if it happens to interest you then go back to part one later.

The grasshopper-eating vagrant is down by the river again. People are gathered around; some are watching from a distance with folded arms, others are pressing in, water to the ankles, straining to get a closer look.  Some are well dressed, others look as if they've just awoken from a drunken slumber somewhere nearby.  It happens today that a certain young man has joined the interested crowd. Perhaps he's standing next to you and the warmth of his arm on your skin is lessening the shiver.  Then, suddenly, he steps forward to be put into the water, joining the ranks of those who've gone before.  He's placed himself as one of them.

***

Let's call the baptizer John, and the guy who just left your side to be baptized--let's call that one Jesus--just to make things easier for the sake of the story.

John caught sight of Jesus and stuttered.  He knew this was the one Isaiah wrote about, the one who the people--sick of war and destruction and hate and evil and ignorance and selfishness and craving--cried out for in desperate hope.

"Look!" John screamed out at the top of his lungs, pointing, wide eyed, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29)

And for a just little more than three years this Jesus walked around the western Mediterranean healing sick people, forgiving sins, and leading a little group of a dozen or so men and women into what it meant to live as truly human.

He made people angry.  Especially the religious people.  Much like today's religious elite, many of those in first century Israel-Palestine were judgemental, hypocritical and closed-minded.  They would have none of this radical Jew, largely because this Jesus hung out with the "sinners" and the betrayers and ignored many of the trappings of popular Judaism.

That's an important point.  Jesus was a Jew, through and through.  He was circumcised on the eighth day, had a Bar-Mitzvah, learned from Rabbis, let his followers call him a Rabbi, taught about the coming kingdom of Israel's YHWH, and said that he was to fulfil the whole of the law and the prophets.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
Matthew 5:17

And yet the popular Jewish religious elite accused him  of breaking the sabbath rest because he healed the sick on the seventh day.  He was their מָשִׁיחַ (messiah--a really, really charged word for the Jews) the one they'd longed for all these years.  And now they rejected him.

He went on [...] and entered their synagogue. And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?"—so that they might accuse him. He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.
(The Gospel According to Matthew, 12:9-14 ESV)

This "Pharisaism" accounts for the rap that Christians get today, in part because those who appear in the popular media as representatives of the "faith" are no less religiously arrogant than the Pharisees of ancient Judaism.  We get judged as being a collection of proud, loveless Nazis (ironic that we use that word).  This judgement is often warranted.  Indeed, "of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst" (CS Lewis).  Jesus warned of it, "don't let yourself become like the Pharisees, don't let even a little bit in or it will ruin all of you."

But Jesus just kept on.  The oppressors couldn't stop him from loving the outcasts.

Not even when they took him and whipped him and kicked him in the face and spit on him.

Not even when they drove spikes through his wrists and ankles and asphyxiated him on a tall piece of wood.

The last lamb was dead.

His last words on the cross were τετέλεσται, which, when translated, means "it has been completed."

The sacrifices were all through.  And they still are.

More to come, part five on the way.