Jesus spent most of his adult life as a blue-collar worker, crafting benches and tables. Then one day he decided to change jobs.

I write these words on a plane, sitting next to a man named Timothy whom I just met, a distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University. Timothy’s father grew up an illiterate untouchable in India, who learned to read and write because Jesus changed jobs (…)

He told me how his father, David, was brought up in a Dalit (outcaste) family in Maharashtra, India; he knew that his generations were cursed by the gods of Hindu pantheon to be left in this state of rejection both by religion and by citizens of upper castes. As an illiterate, untouchable Dalit, David could not enter the temple of his village, so he set out on a forty-five-mile pilgrimage by foot to get a glimpse of the nearest Hindu temple of any significance. He had to wait in line three weeks. Standing in line, not knowing if he would be allowed in, he met a missionary, who told him that Jesus taught he had not been cursed by God but was loved by God. David had grown up forbidden to enter a temple or bathe in a river on an auspicious day to keep them undefiled for higher castes. It took six months for David to absorb the notion that God loved him.

When David decided to follow this Jesus, he was beaten by his family and thrown out of his village. He returned to the missionary, who gave him shelter and taught him to read and write. He eventually graduated from Union Biblical Seminary in Maharashtra, and then he planted churches as well as ran a boarding school for little girls rescued from temple prostitution. For his seventieth birthday, David decided to adopt a leper colony outside of Poona, India, and build a crèche and church among the lepers. Every Thursday he and his wife would go to Yarvada prison in Poona (where Mohandas Gandhi was once confined) and pray with inmates on death row.

Timothy graduated with an engineering degree, and MBA from Duke University, and an advanced degree from Moore College Sydney, and he currently serves as distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University. He explained that vast amount of higher education in India have their roots in the Jesus movement.

The Stanford family who began that university where Timothy is now a scholar also supported in its early day the church in Menlo Park that I now serve. The ripples do not stop.

One day a carpenter left his shop and began to teach.

What would the history of our world be if Jesus had not changed careers? Imagine that he stays in the shop: there is no teaching ministry, no crucifixion, no rise of the church, no new Testament scriptures, no monastic communities. The reason for which Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale got founded does not exist.

It is a mark of Jesus’ impact that the scenario is simple, literally, unimaginable.