The times we live in are amazing times for anyone who loves God.

First came John, the son of Zechariah the priest, the man people call John the Baptist; then came Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.

John should have been a priest, but he never got involved in the priesthood at all.  That’s not particularly unusual – ever since the days of Aaron, there have always been some sons of priests who were not physically perfect and couldn’t participate, and others who were godless or not interested in worship.  Yet neither of these applied to John.  Instead, it was almost as if the reason why he didn’t get involved in the priesthood was that he was too godly.  That really got my attention and made a deep impression on me.

As I listened to John’s message, I became certain that he came from God.  Yet why would God speak to the son of a priest who lived in the desert, instead of to a priest who worked in the temple?  Our chief priests never get any messages from God, but this unimportant rebel delivered the true word of God with authority.

It made me start to ask questions.  I love God, so naturally I have been involved with the temple, the priests and the Pharisees all of my life – and that’s quite a long time now.  However, John made me question many things about my life.  Our leaders ridiculed him, but the ordinary people listened to him gladly and became more godly as a result – and very obviously so.  He offered what he called a “baptism of repentance”, and demanded that we all take it.  I’m sure that was where the problem lay: after all, who wants to admit that they are a sinner who needs to repent?  Of course, we Pharisees have told the common people so often throughout their lives that they are sinners who should repent, that maybe it wasn’t such a shock for them – but for us, it hit hard and hurts our pride badly.

What was the result?  Many of the common people repented and were baptised: they learned holiness and righteousness in practical ways, not just airy-fairy theory.  John told people with spare clothes to give them to people who had none.  He told soldiers not to use violence to oppress people, and tax collectors to collect only what they were meant to collect – no more.  And God’s victory was seen when many of them did what he said!

And what about us?  We, the Pharisees and leaders, ignored his instructions because we believed that we were already righteous: we had no need for repentance or baptism.  We held fast to our traditions and refused to listen to some crazy man living in the wilderness.

Oh, what should I do?

I have to admit that if it were only John the Baptist, I could probably have ignored him and kept going the way I have all of my life; but when you add Jesus into the situation, I just couldn’t ignore it.  John announced very early on that he had been sent to introduce someone else who was greater than he.  And now Jesus is acting with such authority: doing impossible miracles; teaching challenging, demanding things.

After hearing some of Jesus’ teaching, I had to talk to him in private.  I had some questions that I hoped he could answer.  I was careful, though: I couldn’t afford to have news of my visit getting back to the chief priests or other leaders, because that could get me into real trouble.  I hold an important position in our nation that took many years to win.  Naturally, I don’t want to lose it – but I can’t just ignore what God says.  I’ll take any chance I get to learn more about the Scriptures, and Jesus clearly has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Scriptures.  Even going at night was a risk, but I thought that the chance to talk with Jesus in person was worth the risk.

Cautious enquiry revealed that when he visits Jerusalem he normally camps on the slopes of the Mount of Olives with some of his followers, so I went there by night and found him.  I did my best to avoid his followers: I didn’t want them either laughing at me or letting anyone know that I had been there.

Jesus hadn’t been on the scene for very long at that stage, but he was already considered a threat by many of the leaders, and I knew that he might recognise me.  So, to show that I was not there as an enemy, I started by saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do the signs that you do unless God is with him.”  I suppose I need to make it clear who I meant by “we”, because it’s not as if the leaders are all the same sort of person.  Some of them are dedicated utterly and completely to the cultivation of power.  They would never admit that anyone was from God unless they had him completely under their control – in fact, to be honest, I don’t believe they care in the least whether someone is truly from God or not.  However, others are more like myself, men like Joseph of Arimathea, and we really do care about God.

Of course, this acknowledgement of Jesus would have got me into even more trouble with some of the leaders – unfortunately, the noisy ones and the ones with real power.  They’re not open to logic at all, and anyone who doesn’t follow their ideas of what is right is automatically their enemy.

Well, Jesus didn’t respond to my praise at all.  In fact, I’ve noticed that Jesus never seems to accept praise: if people praise him, he either very cleverly avoids acknowledging it or denies deserving it.  I heard of one righteous young man who called Jesus “good teacher”, and Jesus asked him why he called him good!  In my case, he confused me by answering, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”  It had nothing to do with what I had said, and I really didn’t know what he was talking about.

I can see now that it must have been an oblique reference to John the Baptist, describing baptism as a re-birth, but at the time I was baffled and took his words literally – and they didn’t make sense that way.

He responded to my confusion by telling me that anyone who wants to be in the kingdom of God needs to be born of the spirit (or did he mean wind?), and that was the re-birth he meant.  I knew that John had talked about the need for us to repent because the kingdom of God was near, and that his baptism was a baptism of repentance, so I could see lots of fascinating connections, but there was no clear, coherent picture.

I felt that I was getting out of my depth, but when it came to teaching obscure lessons, Jesus had barely even started!  “The wind blows where it wishes,” he said, “and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.”  Jesus was speaking to me in Aramaic, but it wouldn’t have made any difference whether he had used Hebrew or Greek instead, because in all three languages the word you would use for wind can also be used for spirit.

It seemed obvious that he must mean wind at the start, because we can hear the wind.  But what did the second one mean?  Was it wind or spirit?  I wanted to think about it more, so I replied with a non-committal “How can these things be?”

Well, Jesus didn’t let me off the hook at all!  Instead, he answered, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”

Now it’s true that I have been appointed a special teacher, but it’s not as if I’m the only teacher in Israel.  Was he talking only to me?  Or was he talking to the leaders as a group and treating me as if I was like the rest?

If that was what he meant, I found that I didn’t like it at all.  I was not comfortable being grouped with men who absolutely refused to listen to Jesus – surely I wasn’t stubbornly blind like them!  Yet at the same time, Jesus’ words did leave me feeling confused, so maybe I wasn’t really listening properly.

Later, it occurred to me that he might have been mocking me, but it didn’t come across that way at the time, so I don’t think he was.  It felt more as if he was trying to show me just how much I should be able to understand from the Scripture, particularly if I claimed to be a teacher of God’s people.

I could tell you every word that he said to me that night on the side of the Mount of Olives under the trees – and there was much more – but there was one particular statement he made that struck me immediately as very important:

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

I’ve thought about it many, many times since, because there seemed to be something special about it.  Yet I couldn’t even be sure who the “Son of Man” might be.  In the Scriptures, it is used a few times just to mean a person, but the most common use is as God’s title for the prophet Ezekiel, hundreds of years ago.

Yet Jesus seemed to be using it as a name or title, and he was talking about something happening to this Son of Man in the future.

Since then – and that’s two or three years ago now – I have slowly begun to feel that I understand some of what he said.  Apart from anything else, I have heard him use the title “Son of Man” a few times in the temple, when it was clear that he was referring to himself.  I’m told that John the Baptist also used it to refer to Jesus, so I feel quite confident about that part of the puzzle.

But what did “lifted up” mean?  He was clearly referring to one time when our people rebelled in the wilderness and God sent snakes to bite them.  When they repented, he told Moses to make a metal snake and put it up on a pole so that anyone who had been bitten could look at the snake and live.[1]  How many hours I spent mulling over that!  I thought of the snake in the Garden of Eden,[2] and I thought of Pharaoh’s baker whose head had been lifted off him![3]  I considered Isaiah’s words about God’s wise servant who would be lifted up, seemingly to a position of importance.[4]  None of them seemed to fit – but nor did anything else.

Even so, I don’t want you to get the impression that I thought only about that little riddle and ignored the rest of what he said.  In fact, I thought and thought and thought.  I still can’t get his words out of my mind.  And when I watched how the other leaders reacted to Jesus, I concluded that he was right when he said that most people love darkness rather than light.

The other particularly striking saying from that night was, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

It seems so full of meaning and offers such a wonderful hope.  I’m sure that if I could really believe it, it would completely change my life – but I just can’t be sure yet, and I can’t even be sure who he means when he talks about God’s only son.  Is it him, or someone else?

I have no doubt that he must be from God, but I still don’t understand enough about him to be willing to risk everything to follow him.  Not yet.

But I’m afraid that things may be building up to a climax that may force me to make a choice before I’m ready.  The chief priests are looking for a fight, and the more moderate ones of us on the council are being pushed aside.

Annas and Caiaphas have already tried to kill him several times, but I’m afraid that they are getting desperate – to the point where I don’t know what they might do!