John: Who Is This Man?

Who was Jesus -- visibly? What did men see when they looked at him, when they heard him teach, when they followed him and lived with him? A great many images of Christ today are far removed from the biblical picture of him. They range all the way from "gentle Jesus meek and mild" -- a sort of harmless, gentle spirit whom no one need take very seriously -- to a fiery-eyed radical, all set to burn everything to the ground and overthrow the establishment. In the midst of these contradictory images, our heart longs sometimes to say, "Will the real Jesus please stand up?" That, of course, is who we are looking at in the Gospel of John -- the real Jesus, Jesus as he really was.