The gospel of Saint Matthew tells how the miracles and teachings of Jesus with his wisdom impressed many. Jesus for the vast majority of people was a great mystery.
The Kingdom of God, the empire or dominion of divine perfections, was manifested in a subtle way during the physical life of Jesus in the world and the simple and common people, due to the hardness of their hearts, could not understand. Jesus as a spiritual teacher knew that the truth itself cannot be grasped directly by human reason, but by the grace from above, by the spiritual gift of understanding; and Lord Jesus played with this to avoid scandals and greater rejections. When Jesus spoke about himself he only presented himself not as a prophet or redeeming messiah but as "son of man" a simple play on words where Jesus implied that he was the personification of the divine perfections of God: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" Matthew 5:48.
And a demonstration of this was when Herod Antipas, ruler of the region of Galilee with the title of Tetrarch, heard about Jesus. Herod was disconcerted and did not know what to think; and this in a certain sense was also a protection that acted in favor of Jesus because Herod had already ordered John the Baptist to be killed at the instigation of Herodias.
The gospel of Saint Matthew tells how fantasy took hold of Herod when they told him about Jesus:
"At that time Herod the tetrarch heard about the fame of Jesus, and he said to his servants, ´This is John the Baptist. He has been raised from the dead; that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.´" Matthew 14:1-2.
The mystery of Jesus, as told in the New Testament, required the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to be understood by the first Christians.
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