Samara’s Reviews > Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions > Status Update

Ch3’s Q: what— or who-can put the world right?
Answer (summarized): Someone fully divine and unhindered and perfect in His power and life. Also someone fully man, able to take on the full scope of the consequences of brokenness — mortal, vulnerable, killable.

“And so he wrote himself in. Behold who Jesus is, how he loves you and how he came to put the world right.”

Our relationship to God, then, is more like Shakespeare’s relationship to Hamlet. How much will Hamlet know about Shakespeare? Only what Shakespeare writes about himself into the play.

So after he raises Lazarus, the leaders have a meeting, and by verse 53, John says, "So from that day on they plotted to take his life." …He knew the only way to interrupt Lazarus's funeral was to summon his own…He knew what it would cost him to save us from death. Maybe he was able to feel the jaws of death closing in on him. And yet knowing and experiencing all that, he cried, "Lazarus, come out."

If God is that unhappy with the world as it is, why doesn't he just show up and stop it? …But that question reveals a lack of self-knowledge.
The Bible says— and we know deep down—-that so much that is wrong with the world is wrong because of the human heart…if Jesus Christ had come to earth with the sword of God's wrath against evil, none of us would have been left to tell about it.

[In John 11:38] we read it as "Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb." But this verse contains a Greek word that means "to bellow with anger," and somehow no translator feels that he or she has the freedom to say what every commentator and Greek expert says the text is saying. Jesus is absolutely furious. He's bellowing with rage—he is roaring.

I once heard a preacher say, "No one has yet discovered the word Jesus ought to have said. He is full of surprises, but they are all the surprises of perfection."

He has tenderness without weakness. Strength without harshness. Humility without the slightest lack of confidence. Unhesitating authority with a complete lack of self-absorption. Holiness and unending convictions without any shortage of approachability. Power without insensitivity.

Despite being absolutely approachable to the weakest and broken, he is completely fearless before the corrupt and powerful.

Despite his claim that he is the resurrection and the life—that he is God—he responds to Mary in this way because he is fully human as well. He is one with us. He feels the horrific power of death and the grief of love lost.

You could denounce him for being evil, or you may flee from him because he's a lunatic, or you can fall down and worship him for being God. All of those reactions make sense; they are consistent with the reality of his words. But what you can't do is respond moderately.