5 Shi’a – 5 Sunni – 1 Risen Messiah

Together They Upset Christians

Just after the respected speaker had made his “second person of the Trinity” comments, all eyes turned to the closed door of the conference room where there was a persistent knocking.

Most of the participants turned to look at the door because they knew that it was unlocked and that anyone could enter. When one person went over to open the door, all eyes could see the stranger. He quickly announced that he had knocked because he wanted to make certain that his presence was welcome. When the conference participants saw his clothing and only sandals on his feet, they immediately recognized that he was an outsider from the Mid East and were anxiously waiting for him to tell them who he was.

His introduction of himself caught everyone totally by surprise and literally blew them away. He said:

“I am Jesus also known by some as ALLAH’s man from West Bank Bethlehem. I heard that you folks were having a conference about how things are going for Christians in the Middle East and that you also had a few Sunni and Shiite Muslims as your special guests. So I thought I would find out if I would also be welcome and would see how things were going for your special guests. So please proceed as if I had not dropped in and just go on with your conference.”

At those comments most of the Christians just sort of stood by their chairs – stunned. (They had all stood up in awe and in respect as soon as he had announced who he was. After a few silent seconds they began clapping for him. But the ten Muslims came rushing to be near him. They lovingly grasped his nail pierced hands. They were excited when they were encouraged by him to closely examine the large wound in his side caused by the Roman sword. A few got down on their knees to get a closer look at the healed nail holes in his feet. And they each sort of melted at how warmly and lovingly he looked at them. Suddenly there was a combination of dancing, clapping, and kneeling in admiration among the Arab Muslims. Then they began crying out sentences in Arabic expressing their overwhelming gratitude and excitement about being able to see him, hear him and be with him.

“Oh Messiah, this is wonderful to meet you!”

“Ibn Maryam, please forgive us for misunderstanding our Holy Quran and not believing you died and rose.”

“Oh Ibn Maryam, thank you for not letting Judas look like you and die in your place on the cross.”

“Wow! Thank you for enduring that torture at the hands of the manipulated Romans and the wicked Israeli leaders.”

“Oh please, living Bethlehem man, please forgive us when you judge us on the last day for rejecting for so long your willingness to suffer and to die for us.”

“Oh thank you so, so much for making sure that it was in our Quran that you’re eminent in this world and will also be eminent in the next.”

“Thank you for making certain that we could know from our Quran that you gave sight to many who were born blind.”

“Just think, we are right here in the presence of ALLAH’s servant who He empowered to raise the dead and to heal the rejected lepers.”

“O Messiah, I have always been so thankful in my heart that AL-Quran told me that ALLAH raised you up to Himself and so you’ve been in His presence for all these years.”

As they were making all of these joyous exclamations about what they knew of the Messiah from their own Holy Book, most of the Christians were taken by surprise. They did not know about so many positive attitudes about the Messiah being planted in Muslim minds by their own Book. As the Christians moved closer and began to ask the Muslims questions, the Bethlehem man made himself as inconspicuous as possible. While everyone became preoccupied with talking about him, he just slid off to the side of the large conference room. Then he quietly walked totally out of the room. He wanted the conversation between the Muslims and the Christians to take its natural course without fresh input from him. After all, the Christians had read enough in their Scriptures for them to be aware of his attitudes about new people coming into his Kingdom who the Scriptures referred to as “other Sheep.” They also had read again and again about his strong shepherdly desire to reach lost sheep and other sheep which were not part of the main flock etc. So he thought that it would be inappropriate for him to continue to be among them in order to say anything further or to be asked any questions.

It is necessary at this point to insert a small bit of background concerning the mind-set from which these Muslims were coming. Due to the prevalent polytheism in and around Mecca at the time of the Prophet and especially among the Mecca Arabs, there was wide spread belief in families of gods. So for centuries the followers of the religion of Islam have had great difficulty in fully accepting the doctrine of Trinity, Deity and Divinity. This has been due to the Quran’s strong emphasis on the Oneness of ALLAH and the strong rejection of any teaching that could possibly imply polytheism. So the Quran appropriately urges Muslims to be very wary of any teaching that would leave a window open for Muslims to believe in anything that would resemble families of gods and additional deities.

Of course the Messiah’s brief appearance among these few Muslims and his conclusively proving to them that he had both died and risen from the dead by showing them his wounds, did not suddenly change their attitude about not accepting additional deities in addition to the one ALLAH. Nor did it give them a sudden willingness to accept the Greek, three persons in one concept known as Trinity. To them the Almighty ALLAH was One ALLAH. He was neither one person nor was He three persons. So their deeply engrained background was not all suddenly erased by ALLAH’s Risen Messiah personally appearing among them.

However, until that dramatic moment of their individually examining his healed wounds and experiencing his personal warmth and overwhelming love for them, they had totally and unequivocally rejected both his death and his amazing resurrection. This was due to their previous complete misunderstanding of the true meaning of one profound verse in Surat An-Nisa in the Holy Quran. But now they realized that the Quran had never intended for this particular verse to be understood totally literally, so that they had been compelled to believe that the son of Maryam (Ibn Maryam) had never died.

Until seeing his wounds for themselves, they had sincerely been convinced that the Quran had absolutely instructed them to fully reject Ibn Maryam’s death and resurrection. However, now that he was standing in their midst, talking with them and showing his love for them through the tone of his voice and with his eyes, and them actually seeing and even touching his now healed wounds, they were immediately overwhelmed with a new liberating insight. Now they fully realized what that one particular verse was actually intended to teach: That it had appeared to the Jews that they had killed him forever.

But that was only conjecture on their part. Why was it only conjecture? Because the all Mighty and all Wise ALLAH three days after his death had infused him with new life and had empowered him to walk out of his tomb alive.

As could be expected, after the initial celebration by the Muslims was over and the Bethlehem man had inconspicuously slipped out of everyone’s sight, the Christians felt duty bound to conduct a quick debriefing of the joyous Muslims. They sincerely wanted to find out how their beliefs had now changed about ALLAH’s Messiah since they had met him and had obviously become convinced that he had both died and had risen from the dead.

Regretfully, the debriefing quickly turned into mostly a suspicious interrogation by certain Christians of the previously overjoyed Muslims.

While the suspicious and sometimes hostile interrogation was occurring the Risen Messiah had found an empty conference room. But fortunately he could hear the conversation between the two groups because the sound system in the main auditorium had been inadvertently left turned on. Even though the Messiah was quietly weeping, he could follow the flow of the discussion.

As a result of the most outspoken Christians having conducted what came to be a suspicious interrogation of their Muslim guests, the majority of the Christians reached their conclusions. They concluded that the Muslims were each totally wrong in four essential areas of their belief in ALLAH’s living Messiah. Consequently, the majority were deciding in their minds that they would later inform the once joyous and excited Muslims that their new found love for the one who they affectionately referred to as ALLAH’s Living man from Bethlehem and their new loyalty to him were essentially irrelevant. Why was their new joyous belief in him irrelevant? Because they obviously had not yet been born again. This conclusion was silently being reached because the majority had decided that the Muslims could not yet be considered either brothers or believers because of not being willing to have enough of the correct beliefs.

When the discussion between the Christians and the previously rejoicing Muslims who refused to be beaten down, was finished, the Muslims went into the dining hall together to have tea. This was while the supposedly mature Christians would conduct their own debriefing of each other of what they had learned from the Muslims about what they now believed about ALLAH’s living Messiah and what they did not yet believe about him.

The true Messiah continued to follow with great sadness and tears the discussion by the Christians of what most of the Christians had wrongly decided about these new Muslim believers in him. Though it was fortunate for him that the microphone remained on in his small room, that the sound system was still on where the Muslims were having their tea proved to be a bitter experience for them. They were crushed in their spirits as they listened to those who they had wrongly expected to be their new brothers. They were shocked that they were expressing such suspicious and rejecting attitudes. But bravely a few Christians courageously defended them.

The majority of the Christians neatly summarized what they had learned from the interrogation of their guests as follows:

They were quite disappointed to find out that each of the Muslims still considered themselves to be Muslims and were not able to realize that GOD wanted them to now publicly label themselves as Christian converts. This would enable them to have a clear, loving testimony to their new correct belief.

They still did not recognize Jesus as Deity or as the Son of GOD in the “correct” way. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge beginning to understand that in a way beyond their total comprehension that he had also defeated sin and death in man’s behalf and had indeed risen from the dead. They too were firmly convinced that he would most certainly be all men’s Judge at the last day.

Even though they had now seen him alive, they could not believe in the Term “Trinity.” Nor could they accept that ALLAH could be separated into three persons so that the Living Messiah was the Second Person of their fashioned by man, three Person Trinity.

Quite surprisingly to most of the Christians, despite their new belief in the Risen Messiah, they continued to accept and honor the Prophet Muhammad as a sincere Prophet of ALLAH. In fact, each Muslim would not even consider rejecting him as their Prophet.

There was one additional dimension which the Muslims voiced that made the majority of the Christians quite uncomfortable. They felt strongly that most of these Christians were even now missing the essence of what it means to truly worship ALLAH and to honor His now Living Messiah. By their requiring if not demanding from these men the supposed correct responses that had come from a predominantly ancient Greek list of details to check off before these Middle Easterners could be considered believers in a Messiah born in West Bank Bethlehem and who was both executed and rose from death in the Middle Eastern city of Jerusalem, was not close to being acceptable to these Muslims.

They firmly believed that by men making such man formulated foreign cultural demands that did not come from ALLAH but came from a foreign culture, was actually mocking what the Messiah had been anointed by ALLAH to accomplish. Indeed, they felt that these Christians were mocking the Risen Messiah much as the American President mocks him when he confuses the Messiah who has been exalted for two thousand years with such recent violent movie stars such as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Somebody. They were 100% convinced that U.S. Christian leaders should not follow the precedent set by their own President in his rotten treatment of Muslims in Iraq. They were truly offended that these Christians would treat Muslim believers in ALLAH’s now exalted Messiah in almost as arrogant a way as the supposedly Christian President treats Iraqi Muslims.

Significantly, a few of the Christians stood up for the reasonableness of the Muslim’s criticism of the Christians for being so formula oriented. So this minority of Christians believed that it was their legalistic, rigid brothers who were in more danger of allowing their formulas and preoccupation with deity terminology to divert them from ALLAH’s Living Messiah than the Muslims were in danger with their Trinity and deity resistance. So they cautioned the up tight, rigid group of Christians to allow ALLAH to relate to these Muslims new relationship with His Living Messiah as He, Himself would decide. They should certainly not make the Bush/Cheney/Neoconservative error of thinking that Westerners have a GOD given right to dictate to Middle Easterners what they believe about both Middle Eastern politics and about Middle Eastern religion. With due respect to the enormous contributions that Greek thinking and culture contributed to modern society and to Christianity, they thought that there is the overwhelming likelihood that ALLAH and His Holy Spirit will guide sincere Muslim theologians. He will undoubtedly help them to figure out a reasonable theology to understand the Risen Messiah’s relationship to ALLAH that will probably be at least as correct for them as what was decided upon sixteen centuries ago by certain now long deceased, somewhat argumentive Greek Theologians.

Then, with both tenderness and patience, the more gracious Christians began to take the dialogue in a new direction that seemed to them to be natural and appropriate. They began to bring to the attention of these more rigid Christians certain warnings in the New Testament Scriptures that could apply to their predominantly negative attitudes to the new Muslim believers. So they attempted to show them that in their attempt to be extra orthodox in their obedience to man made teaching regarding the Trinity and to use that man-made tradition in order to exclude new believers from the Kingdom of Christ, they had created a serious problem for themselves. They themselves appeared to be rejecting much practical teaching from the now Risen Christ as contained in the New Testament. When they introduced this perspective, the more rigid Christians became quite agitated.

The more spiritually mature Christians politely waited for a few minutes while the other Christians blasted the absurdity and presumption of such ridiculous and defensive reasoning. But then those who were not condemning continued. “Be careful,” they said, for Matthew tells us (Mat. 7:21) that not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my father who is in heaven.”

So if you are dogmatically deciding that the will of the Father in heaven is to reject these loving human beings who want to embrace His Messiah but who do not wish to offend the One GOD for whom they use the Arabic word for ALLAH, by believing in a manner that too closely resembles trinitariasm or even polytheism. Please remember that ALLAH’s Messiah himself has emphatically stated that he came to seek and to save those who are lost. Yet, you are unwisely ready to deny these men who have been lost from the Messiah the privilege of being found. And you unwisely use as your excuse for denying them that privilege, what Greek Theologians decided upon sixteen hundred years ago. So you are treading on very dangerous ground for taking such a rejecting position.”

Then the other side replied. “Listen, it is you liberal Christians who had better look out for wanting to accept a bunch of Muslims into the exclusive Kingdom of Christ. Don’t you realize that all of these one billion 500 million Muslims reject Jesus as “Son of God”? Don’t you realize that you are committing the ancient enemy of Christ’s Church, “syncretism”? Can’t you understand that our Lord said that “small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it,”? And if you would have us open this gate to a significant percentage of the one billion five hundred million Muslims, just because they came to love him and embrace him and to believe that he died and rose again and that he will be their judge, without accepting him as the second person of the Trinity or as deity, that would create a giant problem. It would make the gate far too wide and the road too broad and would allow for too many Muslims into the Kingdom of GOD’s eternally living Christ. After all, his Kingdom is for Christians and not for the last minute Muslims who do not even call themselves “Christians.”

The others replied: We liberal Christians, as you derogatorily refer to us, wish to point out two important things. It is not the name Christian or Muslim that gains entrance for a person into the Kingdom of Christ. For instance, the name Muslim like the name Ishmael, (GOD hears), has an absolutely wonderful, spiritual meaning. It means a person who is submitted to God. But the word Christian was originally used against the followers of Christ, in a derogatory sence.

The second important point is this. If you will go back and review Mat. 7 where our Lord cautions us to enter by the narrow gate rather than the wide gate, in it’s context, that warning comes in connection to warnings about judgmental attitudes. It is stated immediately following an appeal to all of us to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. So it is those of us who are excessively judgmental and rejecting and who are not kind, who are the ones the Messiah was speaking of as being on the broad road to destruction. So we must always remember that our Lord had compassion on the multitudes. He neither ignored them nor rejected them. Instead he emphatically told his disciples to pray to the Lord of the Harvest to send additional laborers among those whom he compassionately called GOD’s “Harvest Field.” And he made this statement immediately after he saw the crowds. Are your eyes unable to see the crowds and do your hearts have no compassion on these multitudes as the Messiah’s heart had compassion on them?

How do you dare ignore the three consecutive parables that Dr. Luke told (Chapter 15) about the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son? Don’t you realize that he told each of these stories as living examples of ALLAH’s own compassion for the outsiders as a contrast to the wicked hardness of heart of that day’s Pharisees and teacher’s of the law? Do you really want to be seen by GOD and his now Living Messiah as Christianity’s Pharisees and teachers of law? Are you actually ready to risk an eternity of lostness for yourselves in order to make certain a wandering sheep who has been lost in his belief or a wandering son, stay wandering?

Do you not recall our Lord’s parable of what happened to the unmerciful servant who wanted forgiveness for himself but did not want it for others? Tragicly he was unwilling to see others receive the forgiveness that he himself had received? So he himself ended up rejected. Do you not remember that the thief on the cross was granted a place in Paradise simply because he showed mercy to the Messiah? The thief did not recognize him as the Son of God or as the second person of the Trinity. But if you, with your hardness of heart are allowed to go to Paradise, he will be there before you though he only understood what seemed to be compassion but had no theological understanding. But if you go to Paradise will you try to use the authority you have awarded yourselves, to have him thrown out of Paradise because of his unwillingness to sign your orthodox doctrinal statement?

Do you treat as irrelevant Jesus’ teaching that it would be better for a large millstone to be hung around a person’s neck than to be drowned in the depths of the sea if that person causes a new believer in the Messiah to stumble?

Do you not remember that Jesus sternly warned his disciples to not get caught up in thinking like religious Pharisees think and incorrectly assume that the traditions invented by men can cancel the teachings of Scripture?

Do you not comprehend the lesson of the parable of the workers in the vineyard who were hired last but who received the same pay as those who were hired first? The lesson being that it is ALLAH himself who decides what any laborer receives for his labors in GOD’s vineyard. It is not man who can dictate to GOD what GOD can and cannot do. So he emphatically taught that we must not be envious when GOD is generous. Another lesson that the Messiah taught is that it may be GOD’s Will for “the last to be first and the first to be last.”

Thus, the discussion ended between those two groups of Christians about the potential destiny of those ten dear Muslims who had now come to love ALLAH’s risen Messiah who had died for them. Significantly, whether the two groups had truly heard the thoughts of each other or not, both the Messiah and the Muslims had listened with deep interest to their dialogue. Not so unexplainably the Muslims felt quite drawn to those few men and one woman who seemed to care more about them than in interpreting doctrine in the most rejecting way possible. Sadly however, the 10 Muslims felt as though they wanted to distance themselves from the more exclusive group as much as possible, despite what they themselves may decide to believe about ALLAH’s Messiah’s relationship to ALLAH.