They’re going to kill me

Michael Grant, author of Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels writes, “He must have seen what lay in store for him.”**

I heard a story from a part of the world where religious hostility is intense. A young man left home. While away, he crossed a religious boundary. He knew that when he returned to his town, his family would kill him for his religious choice. He said his fateful good-bye to his friends and returned home. A few weeks later, his friends received word he was dead.

Jesus made the comment, “No prophet can die outside Jerusalem…” (Lk 13:33).

The Gospels relate the hostility: first Herod tried to kill the infant Jesus because of the visit of the Magi (Mt 2:13, 16) then the Pharisees and the Herodians because of Jesus’ healing fame (Mk 3:6; Mt 12:14) then Jesus’ childhood neighbors in Nazareth because of Jesus’ rebuke (Lk 6:29) then Herod Antipas because of John (Lk 13:31) then the chief priests because of Jesus’ teaching fame (Mk 11:18).

Jesus’ experience was apparently full of conflict, and here we see that Jesus was aware that his situation was not going to have a happy ending or was it?

** Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1977), 135.