id="ulink_2be94ac5-cf16-56e4-94a4-e842a0dcc95f">If you’re barely holding on, come clean. Tell somebody. Tell everybody if you have to. Check yourself in somewhere. What is it ever going to mean for you to gain the whole world if you lose your soul in the process? (I feel like I’ve heard that before somewhere.10)
I say the system has to be changed. It has to be destroyed and replaced not with another system but with an entirely new way of life. I see it happening, and it gives me great hope. I see leaders getting help and refusing to stuff it anymore. I see communities embracing their brokenness and the brokenness of their leaders, and healing is taking place. I see honesty. I see people who want to be fully alive. I see people who want the life Jesus promises and who are willing to let go of ego and prestige and titles to get it.
I can’t begin to tell you how much better my life is today than it was several years ago. I continue to dig things up and process new insights and learn about my insides. The journey continues.
I’m learning that a lot of people give up. They settle. And they miss out. Anybody can quit. That’s easy.
I’m learning that very few people actually live from their heart. Very few live connected with their soul. And those few who do the difficult work, who stare their junk in the face, who get counsel, who let Jesus into all of the rooms in their soul that no one ever goes in, they make a difference. They are so different; they’re coming from such a different place that their voices inevitably get heard above the others. They are pursuing wholeness and shalom, and it’s contagious. They inspire me to keep going.
I was sitting in the storage room last week at Mars Hill. The room was filling up for the service at 11 A.M. And I couldn’t wait for it to start.
Because Jesus is healing my soul.
At the center of the Christian faith is this man named Jesus who actually lived. If there wasn’t a Bible, there are still lots of historians, some from the first century, who talked about this Jewish man who lived and had followers and died and then, according to his first followers, was alive again.
As his movement gathered steam, this Jewish man came to be talked about more and more as God, fully divine as well as fully human. As his followers talked about him and did what he said and told and retold his stories, the significance of his life began to take on all sorts of cosmic dimensions. They realized that something much bigger was going on here, involving them and the people around them and all of creation. Something involving God making peace with the world and creation being reclaimed and everything in heaven and earth being brought back into harmony with its Creator.
But before all the big language and grand claims, the story of Jesus was about a Jewish man, living in a Jewish region among Jewish people, calling people back to the way of the Jewish God.
When I first began to realize that Jesus was Jewish, I thought, No way; he was a Christian.
But as I have learned more about Jesus, the Jewish rabbi, I have come to better understand what it means to follow him. So in this section of the book, I want to take you deep into the first century world of Jesus.
Torah
Jesus grew up in Israel, in an orthodox Jewish region of Israel called Galilee. Now the Jewish people who lived in Galilee believed that at a specific moment in human history, God had spoken directly to their ancestors. They believed this happened soon after their people had been freed from slavery in Egypt and were traveling in the wilderness south of Israel. Their tradition said that while their ancestors were camped at the base of Mount Sinai, their leader, a man named Moses, went up the mountain and received words from God.
They believed not only that God had spoken to Moses but that God had actually given Moses a copy of what he said.
They believed that the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—were a copy of what God had said.
They called these five books the Torah.
Torah can mean teachings or instructions or simply “way.”
They believed the Torah was the way, the truth, and the life.
They believed the best way to live was to live how the Torah said to live.
And so the central passion of the people of Jesus’s world was teaching, living, and obeying the Torah.
Now the question among the rabbis, the teachers, of Jesus’s day was, how young do you begin teaching the Bible, the Torah, to kids? One rabbi said, “Under the age of six we do not receive a child as a pupil; from six upwards accept him and stuff him [with Torah] like an ox.”1
Education wasn’t seen as a luxury or even as an option; education was the key to survival. The Torah was seen as so central to life that if you lost it, you lost everything. The first century Jewish historian Josephus said, “Above all else, we pride ourselves on the education of our children.”2
So around six years old many Jewish kids would have gone to school for the first time.3 It would probably have been held in the local synagogue and taught by the local rabbi. This first level of education was called Bet Sefer (which means “House of the Book”) and lasted until the student was about ten years old.
Sometimes the rabbi would take honey and place it on the students’ fingers and then have them taste the honey, reminding them that God’s words taste like honey on the tongue. The rabbi wanted the students to associate the words of God with the most delicious, exquisite thing they could possibly imagine.
The students would begin memorizing the Torah and by the age of ten would generally know the whole thing by heart.
Genesis.
Exodus.
Leviticus.
Numbers.
Deuteronomy.
Memorized.
Remember, the text was central to life for a Jew living in Galilee in Jesus’s day. If you have read the accounts of Jesus’s life, have you ever noticed how everybody seems to know the Bible? Jesus quotes a verse, or a phrase from a verse, and everybody seems to know the text. This is because from an early age Jewish people were taking in the words, and they were becoming a part of them.
This memorization was also necessary because if you lived during that time, you didn’t have your own copy of the text. The printing press wasn’t invented until 1,400 years later. (When you stayed at a hotel in Jesus’s day, the Gideons hadn’t gotten there first.) Probably your entire village could only afford one copy, which would have been kept in the synagogue in a closet called the Torah ark. There is a good chance you would only see the scriptures once a week, and that was when they were brought out of the Torah ark to be read publicly.
Rabbis who taught the Torah were the most respected members of the community. They were the best of the best, the smartest students who knew the text inside and out. Not everybody could be a rabbi.
By age ten, students had begun
