While thinking about wath Jesus meant when he used the word euangélion (εὐαγγέλιον), or its aramaic equivalent B’sartha ** you do not have permission to see this link ** and about Jesus’s subsequent very public suffering, humiliation, shame and deeply traumatic and shocking torturous death, it occurred to me there is a deep paradox here. 

On the one hand, as we said, Jesus preached that the Kingdom of God is within us and around us, that God was our father, that he was accessible to everyone, just be turning inward and addressing him as such, that he would answer prayer (‘ask and it will be given unto you’, ‘your Father in heaven knows your needs’ etc) and, in the beatitudes, he told poor, suffering, needy, hungry, thirsty people they would be comforted, happy, satisfied and that they would be see God and inherit the Kingdom.  He told Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well that he would give her water that would prevent her from ever thirsting again. To accompany this good news (or Gospel), he went around healing the lame, giving sight to the blind, feeding hungry crowds miraculously and even raising the dead! 

Yet, on the other hand, he ended up being humiliated, tortured and murdered in the most awful way.   He was cruelly and publicly betrayed by one of his closest followers and friends (sarcastically with a kiss) and deserted by the rest of them.  It is clear that he was seen a failure – a failed messiah, even by his followers:  “we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, today is the third day [since he was crucified]”  (Luk 24:21).    Not only that, while on the cross, he cried out “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” (and if he quoted any more of Psalm 22, which I think he probably did, he also would also have said are “why you so far away that you can’t hear me?”).  We are told that he used Aramaic word or Eloi – God rather than Father and thus now appeared to publicly proclaim the inaccessibility of God, he screamed in agony and almost certainly shed tears, and to add to further irony to the paradox, he even complained that he was thirsty!  Then he died!   Is it any wonder that the people and the rulers “derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God” ? (Luk 23:35)

All this doesn’t sound too much like good news!   So, what are we to make of this paradox, this awful irony?  It’s tempting to turn our faces away from Jesus’s awful suffering and see him as a failure, as Judas did and as the crowds did and as even his other friends and followers did initially.  

However, the ‘messianic secret’ motifs in the synoptic gospels suggest that, sometime into Jesus’s preaching of the Gospel (and after Peter had recognized that Jesus was the promised messiah), Jesus “began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” Mar 8:31).   So surely the second part of the Gospel – the good news  – is the paradox that Jesus appeared to fail in his mission (by human standards); experienced the worst human physical suffering; the most profound shame; a feeling of failure (by human judgement), disappointment, aloneness and the depths of human despair.   And then…., as Jesus himself said,…  glory!!  Luk 24:26  Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?

In this way, one could say that Jesus literally acted out the beatitudes and showed them to be fulfilled in his own life and in doing so he also demonstrated, by his resurrection that there was further good news:  life after death – in glory.    So, accoring to the synoptics, one of the great purposes of his life was full identification and partaking in humanity with all the different types of suffering that entailed.  This accords with Pauline and non-pauline episteles eg Heb 4:15 For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.  And we still haven’t got to the atonement yet!  

So, in summary, we could conclude that the full meaning of the Gospel is the good news that God is our Father; that he is available and accessibility to everyone without the need for mediation, provided we come to him in sincerity, humility and repentance; that we will be forgiven and that if we are suffering, we will be comforted; that Jesus can fully identify with whatever suffering we are going through because of what he suffered on the cross; that the conscious ‘I’ in each of us (that is our soul) will survive death and get new bodies and that we will become part of a greater final expression of God’s Kingdom in which somehow, all of his ‘enemies’ will be defeated.