Through Jesus Christ, there is still hope for the young

RE: "The Great Commission and the church (2)," Opinion, June 25

From my understanding, Judaism’s Messiah is reflective of the unambiguously fire and brimstone angry-God Almighty of the Torah, Old Testament and Quran.

This fact left even John the Baptist, who believed in Jesus as the saviour, troubled by Jesus’ apparently contradictory version of Messiah, notably his revolutionary teaching of non-violently offering the other cheek as the proper response to being physically assaulted by one’s enemy.

Though no pushover, Jesus fundamentally was about compassion and charity.

Therefore, Jesus may have been viciously killed because he did not in the least behave in accordance to corrupted human conduct and expectation, and in particular because he was nowhere near to being the vengeful, wrathful and sometimes even bloodthirsty, behemoth so many people seemingly wanted or needed their saviour to be and, therefore, believed he would have to be.

Also, he clearly would not tolerate the accumulation of tens of billions of dollars by individual people, especially while so many others go hungry and homeless.

Today, when a public figure openly supports a guaranteed minimum income, he/she is nevertheless deemed communist/ socialist and, therefore, somehow evil by many institutional Christians.

This, while Christ’s teachings epitomise the primary component of socialism, does not hoard morbidly superfluous wealth in the midst of poverty.

Thus I can picture many “Christians” finding inconvenient, if not plainly annoying, trying to reconcile the conspicuous inconsistency in the fundamental nature of the New Testament’s Jesus with the wrathful, vengeful and even jealous nature of the Old Testament’s Creator.

I, myself, like to picture Jesus enjoying a belly-shaking laugh over a good joke with his disciples, now and then.

Maybe everything about Jesus was/is meant to show to people that there really was/is hope for the many, especially for young people living in today’s physical, mental and spiritual turmoil, seeing hopelessness in a fire-andbrimstone angry-God-condemnation creator requiring literal pain-filled penance/payment for Man’s sinful thus corrupted behaviour. (It’s somewhat like an angry father spanking his child, really).

He became incarnate to show humankind what the Messiah ought to and has to be. Fundamentally, that definitely includes resurrection.

Frank Sterle Jr