A DEFINING DAY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

THE START  OF CHRISTIAN ERA

The Khamseen is an oppressive and strong desert sandstorm that is experienced in Israel and the Levant.  It  is strongest in April and May sometimes lasting up to three hours enveloping the entire country with very fine sand giving the environment an eerie kind of darkness even at  noon.

The Khamseen was blowing on that Friday,  the third day of April in 33 AD. 

It was also the day Jesus Christ was crucified. 

The  week commemorating the last week of Jesus on earth is dubbed  "holy week".It is  the most solemn period in the Christian calendar. It begins on Sunday with a ceremony depicting Jesus Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem with a charged crowd waving palm leaf branches and chanting Hosanna,  words traditionally used to welcome a king. The chants of Hosanna were  a conscious recreation of an old Testament prophecy that the king of Jews would come to them mounted on a donkey as a sign of humility. 

 The holy week ends with the tribulations and eventual crucifixion of Jesus and his miraculous resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Hywel Williams, a British historian considers the crucifixion of Jesus as one of the most defining moments in the history of the world. In his 2006 study, Days that shook the world, Hywel argues that probably even at the cross and at the moment of death Jesus believed in the imminence of a divine intervention hence his last words on the cross - “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”.

Jesus was crucified with the title “King of the Jews” mockingly posted above his head on which he wore a crown of thorns.

The synoptic gospels of Matthew Mark and Luke portray Jesus as a figure who spoke of the kingdom of God using parable aphorisms and similes whose language and references drew on their  Jewish agricultural and daily lives. The gospels also make it clear that Jesus, during a very brief public ministry of probably no more than a year proclaimed the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God and anticipated that God would intervene and pass a final judgment before establishing an Israel free of foreign domination.

The Passover week placed Jesus in danger. He had already told his followers  that the great temple would be destroyed as part of the fulfillment of God’s new kingdom; Consequently, he entered its precincts where the annual temple tax of was paid and overturned the tables and harassed the dealers. He was not a military threat which is why his disciples were not killed but in his own person and message he was undermining a precarious Jewish Roman agreement with the Jewish high priest on how to keep the peace.

 After his death some of Jesus followers claimed that the tomb in which he had been placed was empty. They also said they had seen the risen Christ not as a spirit but as a body. An impracticability  and a novel idea and incapable of being explained and understood or believed in any language, whether Greek, Latin or the Aramaic.Paul in his mid-first century epistles opted for the awkward phrase “spiritual body” to describe this risen Christ.

But it was this belief which explained why Christianity spread and why converts  were ready to die for it. This now continued with the development of a Christian church, an Ecclesia or community called out of all worlds. The apostle’s creed developed by the early church said that Jesus Christ had pre-existed his actual birth and had always existed with God the father. He had therefore become flesh and been incarnated before finally being resurrected to life eternal.

Both the incarnation and the crucifixion were fresh, appealing ways of presenting the idea of God since they showed his vulnerability: first as an infant and then as a man nailed to the cross. 
But in the person of Christ that philosophical insight became embodied in the life of the person who was now acclaimed by his believers as the son of man and as Kyrios- Lord. 

The belief that the covenant God of the Old Testament had through Jesus established a new covenant with humanity was the good news acclaimed in the New Testament.

Within a short period of time, Christianity became the most global of all the major religions showing a unique capacity to exist among a very wide variety of different cultures in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The process had started as an aspect of European colonization as missionaries followed in the wake of conquering armies.
The uniqueness and appeal of Christianity’s doctrines however were centered around the crucifixion contributed to its survival in local soil long after the end of Christian empires.
The blood of  martyrs is the seed of Christianity; thus the crucifixion of the Christ has led to the growth of Christianity, described once by Pope John Paul 1  as a communion of faith and love that confesses Jesus Christ  as the son of God, the lord of history, the savior and redeemer of the whole world.