New Testament Reading—Luke 3: 15-22
As you heard during the announcements, we are currently doing an adult education series entitled Saving Jesus. In large part, the series features scholars and religious leaders who have been either heavily involved or heavily influenced by historical Jesus scholarship. For those of you unfamiliar with this scholarship, it is an attempt to discern what is likely historical and non-historical in the accounts of Jesus found in the Bible and other sources. Scholars have methods for doing this that can be seen as analogous to how a lawyer might interrogate a witness.
One might look for other accounts that either contradict or corroborate the witness’s claim. One might seek to uncover the likely motives of the witness in giving the account. Finally, one might try to reconstruct the original scene in order to determine the plausibility of a claim. Such methods have been used to assess everything from the virgin birth to the resurrection. The responses to this scholarship have long been varied, and today we present a few of those responses to you.
(Lynn Renner, Tom Renner, Claudia Martin, and Ed Martin performed the following selections. The selections were adapted from the statements of actual people as recorded in John Dominic Crossan and Richard Watts’ book Who Is Jesus?: Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus.)
I have been a nun for over forty years! In this time of my life, I find that the church has betrayed me! These wonderful things biblical scholars are discovering and recovering about Jesus and the early church are things we should share and be revitalized by.
-A woman from Michigan
I’m just a poor half-illiterate security guard who happens to believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God…Who chose these scholars to intellectually cut and burn the Gospel of God? Don’t they see how they’re hurting God’s faithful?
-A man from Alabama
For me, learning about who the historical Jesus likely was and wasn’t “has reinforced my own belief that growing involves ‘unlearning’ as well as learning and that this can be very positive and even exciting… Rather than diminish my faith and love for Jesus,” this kind of thinking “has surely strengthened it and opened up a whole new appreciation of what it means to be a follower of his.”
-A woman from Massachusetts
After reading about the historical Jesus, our group both embraced and mourned what we had come to learn. At one point one of us said, “He’s taken away Christmas, he’s taken away the miracles and now he’s taking away Easter as well.” We cannot help wondering if the glorious music and art these tales have inspired would have resulted if those Biblical passages had been seen as just ‘stories.’ However, we are also aware that they haven’t really been taken away. In some sense, it is possible to embrace their truth more fully now that the stories are not burdened with a literalism they cannot sustain.
-A group in Ohio
When I was a sophomore in college, I attended an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church with an outstanding preacher named Moses Harvill. The church had a more conservative theology than your average UCC church, and it provided an interesting contrast for me as I read about the historical Jesus in my first New Testament course in college. One service at the church had a particularly strong impact on me. The night before I had been in the dorm room of a friend who had also worshipped on occasion at the same church. We had a lively discussion about who Jesus was. Much to the shock of my friend, I disavowed more traditional notions of Jesus’ divinity. In the worship service the next morning, the entire sermon was a response to historical Jesus scholarship and its threat to these notions. The line that I vividly remember from this sermon is this. Full of passion, Harvill declared, “I might not know the historical Jesus, but I do know a personal Jesus.” Harvill was referring to the Jesus who had been his personal savior and who he experienced in his everyday life. For him, this was all that mattered, not what some ivory tower scholars thought. (Although, Harvill himself was a graduate of Yale Divinity School.)
Well, what is a good Christian to believe? Is one to go with the historical Jesus or the personal Jesus? Who is your Jesus? As indicated in some of the comments earlier, many of us can feel kind of liberated from feeling like we no longer have to believe in the virgin birth. We may also feel like the historical Jesus scholarship helps us to appreciate Jesus and his message more fully. Maybe Jesus wasn’t really all about afterlife. Maybe Jesus was really more about creating a better world here and now.
But what about the people who feel like their faith is threatened and shattered by those who question a literal belief in the resurrection or some other basic tenet of their faith? Earlier Tom read the lines of the security guard from Georgia who was clearly very upset and angered by such questioning. We could imagine this man to be a good person. Someone we could hold up as a model for our children, but yet he is utterly threatened by any difference of opinion regarding his faith. His faith has been his security blanket, his means of coping with the world and making sense of it, and suddenly he feels that it is being torn away by someone with no appreciation for what it means to him.
For those of us Christians who take the Bible seriously but not literally and who believe that our faith can be an evolving faith, I see no need for us to slink around quietly in constant fear of offending someone else because we hold a different belief. Yet, at the same time, I think we can be empathetic and possibly even learn something from our more literal counterparts who look at the historical Jesus and no longer see the personal Jesus of their own cherished faith. Perhaps, they look at the historical Jesus and see a cold and detached intellectualism? Perhaps, to borrow the language of Ed Martin from last Sunday’s adult education session, they see more of a deconstruction of faith than a reconstruction of faith.
In considering such views, I would propose that the answer is not that we pit the historical Jesus against the personal Jesus like two action figures seeking to completely destroy each other. Rather, I think the answer is to reconcile the historical Jesus who withstands the test of critical thinking with the personal Jesus who gives everyday life meaning and purpose. The end result of this reconciliation may well be a Jesus whose very humanity gives us hope. What do I mean by this? Consider the baptism of Jesus. One historical Jesus scholar claims that “nothing is more certain about Jesus than this: that he was baptized by John in the Jordan River.”[i] In addition to being directly or indirectly attested to in three of the gospels, the reasoning behind the claim is this: For the gospel writers, such an assertion would have gone against one of their own transparent purposes for writing the gospels. Jesus’ baptism would have posed a challenge to their exultant claims about Jesus. For Jesus to be baptized by John would infer that John was superior to Jesus and that Jesus was in need of having his sins forgiven through the waters of baptism. Not surprisingly, we find Mathew and Luke adding details to Mark’s earlier account of the baptism to clean up this potential embarrassment. In Matthew, John protests saying that it is really he himself who needs to be baptized by Jesus. In Luke, John says that someone more powerful than himself is on the way and that he is unworthy of untying the thong of this great person’s sandals.
At first, some of us might find it unsettling to think that Jesus would have had any sins at all to be wiped away. I myself often like to think of Jesus as being a kind of perfect, idealized person, but then it recently occurred to me that this view of mine may say more about me and what I value than it says about Jesus. I will spare you the psychoanalysis of my perfectionism this morning, but I will share with you something that helped me get over this uncomfortable feeling that I had about the idea of an imperfect Jesus. The famous psychologist Carl Rogers once shared how he would prepare himself to see a client. He said, “There is something I do before I start a session. I let myself know that I am enough. Not perfect. Perfect wouldn’t be enough. But that I am human, and that is enough. There is nothing this [client] can say or do or feel that I can’t feel in myself. I can be with him. I am enough.”
Maybe Jesus didn’t need to be perfect? Maybe it would be better if he wasn’t perfect? Maybe there is something liberating in knowing that Jesus was right there with us when we ourselves were baptized with all our own imperfections. Maybe, for Jesus, being human was and is enough. And, maybe that is exactly the kind of personal Jesus we need today. Amen.
[i] John Dominic Crossan and Richard G. Watts, Who is Jesus?: Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 31.
