Jesus did pretty well to foresee that if the Jewish Authorities rejected his Gospel of peace, they would in time listen to the zealots instead, with disastrous results. It is inconceivable that he should have looked further ahead than that. And the last thing we want to do is to get bogged down in the provincial attitude of mind of Jesus’ day; neither in the provincial politics of the time, nor in the religious ideas of the time, in particular in the idea of sacrifice for sin, which is almost absurd to the modern mind. To us, Goethe’s view, expressed in Wilhelm Meister, that all sin has to be expiated in this world, makes more sense.
What is far more important for us is to try to imitate, so far as we are allowed to, the sense of indwelling he was convinced he had with the Deity, the Creator; so much so that he called him “Father”. Then we can discover what our vocation is, whether it is a vocation of healing or of something else; and equally importantly to discover the means for putting it into practice. It stands to reason that if a man or woman does not believe in God, there is not the remotest chance of them doing anything for God. To do anything for God requires the most intimate cooperation with Him that the mind can imagine, because actually God is not very interested in what we all do. In antique language, “works never save a man”. If clergymen had imagination, they would see that speaking with authority is the modern version of the imitation of Christ.