The Nature of Jesus Christ

1. A man of deep concerns, with a passion to communicate, but he did not hammer away. Rather he clothed his concerns in stories that showed the profoundest respect for the intelligence of his audience*, Jesus spoke on one occasion of casting out demons by God's gentle power (“the finger of God”). The same could be said of his approach to teaching. Not harsh harangue, but gentle, sometimes humorous, sometimes biting image and winsome evocation consistently characterize his effort at counteracting what he felt to be destructive tendencies in the spirit of his time.
2. In the parables, perhaps as nowhere else, we can get a feeling for the priorities of Jesus' concerns. By taking the stories as a whole one begins to sense where the real weight of his thinking lay, where its focal centers were—the points to which it returned again and again. These can be summarized very simply. He felt the world to be radiant with the gracious, forgiving, healing activity of God. It was a disaster to him that the people of his time, the leaders especially, were so hostile to those who were most alienated and therefore most in need of this God. He felt that the "religious" just had to face up to what they were doing, and that they were indeed capable of doing so. The active goodness of God, the summons to faith, to compassion and love, and the urgency that men and women do something about their most obvious responsibilities toward each other— these are the notes that sound again and again through the stories we have just studied.
3. One theme above all, however, surfaces in these parables: the inherent dangers of self-righteousness, the supreme worth of humble repentance. To a too-reverent seeker who had called him good Jesus once replied: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18). In parable after parable he says the same thing. Surely Jesus is the humblest of world religious leaders. It is dangerous, yes fatal, he insists, not to face up to our fallibility and sin and learn to forgive and be forgiven.
4. Surprising is the simplicity and down-to-earthiness of the stories that Jesus fashioned to convey this message. They testify to the way his mind dwelt on the ordinary. If Jesus did speak of an apocalyptic future, a time when God would shatter the fabric of history, and introduce a totally new world, one must say that this was not by any means what preoccupied him. What preoccupied him, the parables would suggest, was the interrelationship of the ordinary and the spiritual. The goodness of God became manifest to him in the bumbling response of a friend at midnight, and the kingdom of God in the everyday miracle of leaven in dough. The profoundest issues of life were forcefully displayed by two men in prayer, and how a man should act could be seen in a scoundrel scrambling for a place for himself in the wake of precipitous dismissal from his job. That we are surprised by this down-to-earthiness of his teaching testifies no doubt to the plastic image of Jesus that has been too long dominant in Christendom.

Source: Step by Step through the Parables: A Beginner's Guide to the Modern Study of the Stories Jesus Told; Their Meaning in His Time and Ours (1981) by John W. Miller.

There is one characteristic of Jesus I would like to add to the list above that the author didn’t. And that is Jesus’ emphasis on the individual not on the group. Take for instance the parable of the lost sheep:

What man of you having a hundred sheep, and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety nine in the open and go after the lost one until he finds it? And finding it, he puts it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And coming to the house, he calls together the friends and neighbors, saying to them, Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that had been lost. I say to you that so is joy in Heaven over one sinner repenting, than over ninety nine righteous ones who have no need of repentance. (Luke 15:4-7)

The italics in the passage are mine. Notice that Jesus talks about a single sheep being lost not a group or collective of sheep being lost. Jesus says Heaven is happy when one person changes his or her life for the better. The sheep herder didn’t have to worry about the other sheep that didn’t stray. If the herder was a collectivist then the lost sheep wouldn’t have been saved because its life didn’t matter as much as the other sheep.  The lost drachma parable (Luke 15:8) is similar to the lost sheep parable.

 

*Too bad most politicians can’t have this attitude.