Jesus

Sun Myung Moon regards Jesus of Nazareth as the greatest of all the religious founders. He has made an exhaustive study of his life and work; his speeches about Jesus take up many volumes. He does not view Jesus from the conventional Christian perspective as the Savior who fulfilled everything through his atoning death on the cross. No, Father Moon’s Jesus knew he had a much greater mission—to live and establish God’s Kingdom on earth during his lifetime. The crucifixion cut short his mission, frustrated his aspirations, and prolonged the centuries of suffering and wars while the Kingdom tarried until the days of the Second Coming. It is through this lens that he views scripture passages about Jesus’ person, preparations for his coming, his relations with his family, his ministry, the cross, and the resurrection.

Father Moon knows Jesus as the “man of sorrows.” He asserts that even in his youth, during the 30 years prior to beginning his public life, Jesus was misunderstood and ridiculed by his family and his village. The fact that Jesus never married, when it was customary for all Jewish men in their twenties to do so, is taken not as a mark of special holiness but rather as the painful lot of a man of questionable birth and strange behavior who was not regarded as marriageable.

When it came time for Jesus to begin his ministry, all Heaven’s attempts to prepare the Jewish people to welcome him ended in failure—notably the ministry of John the Baptist. Consequently, Jesus was never able to preach what he set out to preach: the gospel of the Kingdom of God in plain language. Instead he had to speak in obscure parables. He was never able to do what he set out to do: lead a spiritual and political movement to win Israel’s independence from Rome and establish God’s Kingdom throughout the world.

Jesus’ sorrow only increased as the forces opposing his ministry grew stronger and he was compelled to take an alternative course, the way of the cross. His grief was exacerbated by the weakness of his disciples, who fled and scattered leaving him alone at the end. In the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed desperately, knowing the sorrow of God and the sufferings of generations to come that would ensue if he took that path and died without completing his original mission. But by that time the people’s rejection was unalterable; the die was cast and he obediently accepted the cross as God’s will.

Yet Jesus never changed his heart-felt love for the people, even for those who were killing him. When he forgave his enemies on the cross, it was an earth-shaking moment that changed history forever.