@Rhakim great post!
Could you elaborate on the wisdom and truth beyond mere human understanding that came from the teachings of Jesus?
I haven't thought about it systematically in a long time, it would take me several days or weeks to do real justice to a full-on "Jesus" post.
But some of the things I would include in there is the understanding of what holding onto possessions does to a person and why we need to remove ourselves from that.
The understanding of what seeking power does to a person and why we need to abandon that route.
The concept of loving one's enemies and how that heals your own heart, not just helps the other person.
The self-awareness of how we are all guilty sinners and thus have no position to judge another eternally, the need to focus on our own errors before we try to fix others, and what that means when we think of anything from religious divisions (hatred of Samaritans) to civil penalties (stoning of adulterers).
The actual practical acts of love he showed to Samaritans, to Gentiles, to women, to tax collectors, to sinners, to prostitutes, to every kind of person his society was teaching him to despise, and the beauty of the parables he used to hit home.
Seeing the futility of "eye for an eye" and willingness to go the nonviolent route instead.
The ability to be fully embedded in the deeper truths of Judaism in terms of love of God and love of neighbor and all the aspects of positive community and even religious ritual together, yet being able to parse that away from the food laws and sabbath laws and cleanliness laws and animal sacrifices and religiously imposed ethnic divisions that were only getting in the way and making people more separated from each other and from God.
The power of the parables - especially The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, The Rich Man and Lazarus, The Sheep and the Goats. These aren't just famous because Christianity is a major world religion, I think if they were completely independent stories not connected to any particular person or religion, they still would be famous today because the message within each one is so powerful, and so counterintuitive to the way the world wants us to work.
Even the willingness to accept persecution and the knowledge that the faith grows greater and more legitimately and even spreads with more force and power from enduring persecution rather than from participating in it.
I'm sure there's more but that's what came to mind immediately. And not that I'm perfect at following all that (worse than usual recently), but how clear it is to me that I'm better off when I do.
On top of that, just how incredibly on-point his parables and sayings are, how powerful, how tightly worded, how revolutionary on so many different levels....and this is all coming from one young nobody of common background? We're not talking about Plato, an aristocrat who was educated at the feet of the most famous philosopher in Athens. We're not talking about Buddha, born into a royal family with access to the best of everything and then spending years in meditation to digest and reformulate it all. And I think Jesus's teaching stands up quite favorably to either of theirs, or anyone else's. We're talking just some random guy from a random background, still relatively young, who told us how to be human with more precision, humility, and wisdom than any educated or powerful man ever had. That feels God-given to me.
