The year 31 A.D. Jesus preaches all over Galilee and John the Baptist is beheaded

In the spring of the year 31 Jesus had been preaching for one and a half years when He went to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. Here He healed a man who had been seriously ill for 38 years on a Sabbath. Because the Jewish law forbids people to do any form of work on the Sabbath, some of Jesus’ countrymen thought that by curing someone on that day Jesus had committed a grave transgression of the law.

When Jesus defended Himself by remarking that as the Son of God He was the master of the Sabbath, the people who did not believe in Him became even more hostile towards Him. They thought that by saying this He actually told them that He was on one level with God. When subsequently Jesus let them know that people who did not acknowledge and did not honor God’s Son, did not acknowledge and did not know the Father either, His opponents became even more embittered towards Him.

Not long after this Jesus and His disciples were walking through the corn fields on a Sabbath. The disciples were hungry, picked some ears of corn, rubbed them down and ate them. When the Jewish scribes and the Pharisees heard about this, they considered this a second serious transgression of the Sabbath laws, committed very soon after the first transgression.

When shortly afterwards, on another Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, there were many scribes and Pharisees present who had specially gone to the lecture to see if Jesus was not going to trespass the Sabbath law for a third time. Though Jesus was very well aware of this, He cured a man who had a withered hand.

From that moment on a number of scribes and Pharisees began to wonder how they could put an end to the undesired acts and the undesired influence of Jesus.

Shortly afterwards Jesus spent an entire night on a mountain in the neighborhood of the Sea of Galilee. He intended to use the following morning to select twelve men from among His disciples to form a special group of followers who would accompany Him during the rest of His missionary work and who would continue His work after His death: the 12 apostles. He had already selected five, He wanted seven more. The whole night He prayed to His Father to help Him to make the right choice.

The following morning He appointed in addition to Peter, Andrew, James, John and Matthew the following seven men as apostles: Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, another James, Simon and two men who were called Judas.

Eleven of the twelve apostles came from Galilee. Only Judas, who betrayed him later on, came from Judea. Just like Jesus Himself they were very ordinary people. They had not received more education than all Jewish children received in those days. The religious leaders of Jesus’ time sometimes spoke with disdain about their religious education because they had not received any special schooling in this field.

Not long afterwards He delivered His famous Sermon on the Mount in the same territory. He was listened to by a huge crowd, many of whom had come from far way to listen to His preaching. In the Sermon on the Mount He called a number of sorts of people happy whom we are generally inclined to consider unhappy and pathetic: the poor, the hungry, people with grief, people who are despised. Jesus explained that these kinds of people have a good chance of getting a place in His Kingdom, where He will make the poor rich, feed the hungry, comfort people who are grieving, and see to it that disdained people will be generally respected.

As regards the people who are rich in this present world, who can eat as much as they like, have a pleasant life and are admired by everybody: it is questionable whether this kind of people will take the effort to pay sufficient attention to their creator and His requirements for admission to His Kingdom.

On one of His journeys Jesus entered a town that was called Nain. Here people were busy burying someone who had just died: the only child of his mother, who was a widow. Out of compassion Jesus told the dead child to stand up. To the great joy of the mother and all the people present the dead child really stood up. For the first time Jesus had brought a dead person back to life.

It is clear that by healing the sick, by throwing out evil spirits from demon possessed men and women, and by bringing dead people back to life Jesus wanted to achieve two things. By means of these miracles He wanted to prove that He was really the Son of God, the promised Messiah, savior and king. But He also wanted to show that in the Kingdom of God people would be delivered from diseases, demon possession and even death. He wanted to give a visible demonstration of the grandeur and the glory of God’s Kingdom.

In the meantime John the Baptist had been in prison for many months.

Though he himself had baptized Jesus and had seen God’s power descend on Jesus in the form of a pigeon, though shortly after Jesus’ baptism he had told everybody that Jesus was the expected Messiah, he was obviously no yet 100 sure about it. He wanted to hear it from Jesus’ own mouth. Therefore he sent some disciples to Jesus to ask Him directly: are you the Messiah? Yes or no? Jesus said that He was the Messiah and that His acts and His miracles proved this.

In the course of the year 31, when Jesus had been preaching for two years, it became clear to Him that especially in certain towns, like Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum the results were disappointing. In spite of the fact that He had often preached in these towns and had performed great miracles there, many refused to acknowledge Him as the Messiah. He told His disciples that the inhabitants of the towns mentioned who would continue to refuse to believe in Him would not be admitted into God’s Kingdom on the day of judgment.

When Jesus was having a meal in the house of a Pharisee, a woman who was generally known to be a sinner entered the house with a bottle of expensive oil. She sat down on the floor near Jesus and rubbed His feet with the costly perfume while she was crying profusely so that her tears fell on Jesus’ feet.

For the Pharisee this was another sign that Jesus could not be the Messiah. The Messiah would never allow himself to be touched in such an intimate way by such a sinful woman.

But Jesus understood that the woman believed in Him and He also believed that He would be able to forgive her sins. He forgave her her sins and sent her away with the words: Your faith has saved you.

At the end of the year 31 there were also some women who began to walk along and to work along with the group around Jesus. Among them was Mary Magdalene whom Jesus had liberated from seven demons.

When one day Jesus again threw out an evil spirit from a demon possessed person the Pharisees reacted by saying that Jesus had not received this kind of power from God, but from the ruler of the demons. Jesus denied this grave accusation by saying that it was clear that the organization of the demons was very powerful and if this organization would be divided among each other and one demon would throw out another it would not be able to keep this power.

He emphatically stated that He was able to throw out demons because He possessed God’s holy spirit, God’s limitless power to do good.

By the end of the second year of Jesus’ preaching and ministry the resistance against Jesus from the side of the Jewish priests, scribes, and Pharisees began to increase. The Pharisees demanded from Jesus a sign or a proof which would prove beyond any doubt that He was indeed their Messiah, savior and king. Jesus promised them that later on in time He would indeed give them this irrefutable sign or proof: He would be in the heart of the earth (be dead and buried) for three days and subsequently rise from the dead again. The Bible does not tell us whether the Pharisees understood this answer of Jesus. Either at the moment when He gave this answer or one and a half years later when He was really dead for three days and rose from the dead on the third day.

Jesus told the people a lot of things about the Kingdom of God by means of illustrations: He told them a story about an ordinary event or an ordinary state of affairs, but people who understood the story well or had it further explained to them, discovered that behind the very ordinary story there was a deeper meaning and the story provided important information about God’s Kingdom.

A well-known illustration is the story of the sower. Part of the seed was eaten by birds, part fell on rocky places and died after a while, other seeds were choked by thorns. But fortunately some seeds feel on good soil and grew to be powerful plants.

Later on Jesus explained that the seeds represented His words, His lessons. The birds which eat up some seeds represent the demoniac powers that prevent people from really appreciating Jesus’ words. The seeds which fall on rocky places where they wither after a while picture the situation of people who for while accept Jesus’ words as true, but when following Jesus turns out to be harder than they expected, they forget Jesus’ words again. The thorns which choke the seeds represent the daily cares of people’s daily lives which often prevent people from setting enough time aside to think about the words of Jesus and to follow them.

It stands to reason that the seeds which fall on the good soil and grow to be big plants represent the people who hear Jesus’ words, accept them as true and start to act accordingly.

When one day Jesus and His disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee in a boat, it started to storm terribly and the boat and its crew got into danger. While the apostles were working hard to save the boat and themselves Jesus was sleeping. When they had woken Him up Jesus ordered to storm to lie down and thus put an end to the dangerous situation.

Some days later Jesus was approached by a man who worked in a synagogue and was called Jairus. His daughter was seriously ill and he asked Jesus to go with him to his house and heal her. On the way to the house people came to meet them and said that Jairus’ daughter had already died. But Jesus said: the young child has not died, but she is asleep. He entered the room where the girl had died, together with her father and mother, and just told the girl to stand up. This is what the girl did.

This event forms Jesus’ second resurrection of a dead person.

In those days Jesus also healed many blind people, deaf people, paralyzed people and people who could not talk.

By the end of the year 31 Jesus once again visited his native place Nazareth. But it again turned out that in His own village and even among His own relatives there were hardly any people who believed in Him. The people saw in Him nothing more than their former carpenter and the elder brother of Joseph’s sons James, Judas and Simon. Moreover: the entire village knew Jesus’ sisters and they were very ordinary girls and women.

About this time Jesus began sending the apostles, in little groups of two, to the villages and the towns and commanded them to tell the people the stories which they had heard Him tell the people, and to do the things they had seen Him do. The apostles did what they were told to do and everywhere they called upon the people to repent of their sins, to believe in Jesus and to start living in such a way that they would get a place in the future Kingdom of God.

On one of the last days of the year 31 King Herod celebrated his birthday with his relatives and other important people. His wife and the daughter of his wife hated John the Baptist, who had been put in prison by Herod. At the party the daughter mentioned showed everybody hoe beautifully she could dance. Herod was so impressed that out of pure delight he promised to give her anything she might ask for. Urged on by her mother she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a nice flat platter. Herod felt he could not break his promise and had John beheaded.