A Word Before We Begin

I have heard the story of Yeshua more ways than I can count.

I was raised inside it — baptized young, Sunday school, the flannel-board and the Christmas pageant, the manger and the star and the wise men in their bathrobes. I heard it as a children's story and I heard it as a creed. I heard the red letters read out like the only part that mattered, and I heard the birth told every December until it went smooth and soft as a worn stone. By the time I was grown I could have told you the whole thing in my sleep, and that, it turns out, was exactly the problem. A story you have heard a thousand times stops landing. You stop seeing it. The most astonishing thing that has ever happened becomes a thing you already know.

And then, years later, after I had gone looking — and I do mean looking; I went at the faith I was handed hard, trying for the better part of a decade to take it apart and see what actually held — I started reading the whole of it again, slowly, from the beginning, in the Hebrew and the Greek, under one particular light. I have written about that light in the first book of this series, so I will not walk the whole road again here. The short version is a single old word I had never heard in my life until I was nearly fifty: the Memra — the Word — the way the old synagogue spoke of the one uncontainable God making Himself seen and reachable inside the world He made. I read the opening of John through that word, and then I could not stop. The rest of the Bible began clicking into place, the way a piece drops in clean and you suddenly see the picture the whole table had been making.

And when I came back to the story of Yeshua carrying that one word — this is what I want you to know, and the reason for this book — it was new again. All of it. The manger I had seen a thousand times turned out to be the uncontainable God learning to be a baby. The carpenter's shop turned out to be the Word who spoke everything into being learning to hold a hammer. The hungry man in the desert, too tired to feed Himself, turned out to be a real emptying — a God who had genuinely set down His power and could genuinely have failed, which is the only thing that makes the temptation anything but theater. The gifts the strangers brought, the old man's warning about a sword, the cloth they wrapped Him in — every one of them already had the cross folded inside it. The promises from the Law and the Prophets kept closing around Him, one after another, before He had preached a word. I had read past every bit of it for forty years. Under that light I was reading it for the first time.

That is all this book is: the life of Yeshua — His coming, His hidden years, and the breaking-in of His Kingdom, from the angel at Nazareth to the glory on the mountain — walked slowly, the way you would walk it if you had never heard it before, by the light of that one word. I am not asking you to take any of it on my say-so. I never do. I am a lay teacher in a small Iowa town with a worn Bible and a stubborn streak; I do the legwork and hand it back to you. Read with the text open. Test every line of it against the whole of Scripture. Where it holds, you will not be trusting me — you will be seeing it yourself, which is the only kind of seeing that lasts. And where it does not, drop it, and keep walking.

But I think you are going to see Him. I think the story you have heard a thousand times is about to happen to you once more, as if for the first time.

Let's begin.