Some of the popular conceptions of Jesus today make him a religious figure who some find hard to embrace and follow. Listen to this sermon that sorts through these conceptions before presenting a picture of Jesus that many find more compelling and attractive.
Second Scripture Reading—Matthew 4:12-23
The popular poet and essayist Kathleen Norris once confessed that she went through a period in which her Christian faith “seemed to be missing its center.” She knew that at the center was supposed to be Jesus, but for her, Jesus had become a “stumbling block.” Not long before, she had started to attend worship services, and she found herself turned off by all the churchy language about the crucified Christ. The rhetoric she heard didn’t give her the spiritual message or wisdom for which she yearned. When Norris shared with a monk the challenge with which she was wrestling, he responded by saying, “Oh, most of us feel that way at one time or another. Jesus is the hardest part of the religion to grasp, to keep alive.”
The well-known religious scholar Marcus Borg has helped us to understand why it is that Jesus can be so hard to grasp and keep alive. For some, it’s because Jesus has become associated with “a fear-based Christianity that” emphasizes our own sinfulness and guilt under the continual “threat of hell.” For others, Jesus is hard to grasp and keep alive because he is described in ways that would seem a far distance from life as we experience it. This Jesus has a kind of magical divinity that extends from his virgin birth to the implausible miracles of his ministry and then finally to an even more implausible resurrection from death. In facing these portrayals of Jesus, what is a reflective and discerning Christian to do? How can we conceive of Jesus as someone we can follow and place at the center of our faith? For me, when it comes to constructing a compelling and meaningful faith, I first have to de-weaponize and demystify the Jesus commonly presented to us today. I don’t want a faith that turns Jesus into a blunt instrument for inflicting me with guilt and beating me into submission. I also don’t want a faith that lifts Jesus so high up into the clouds that he no longer seems human at all.
We might wonder whether such a Jesus even exists. Marcus Borg persuasively argues that such a Jesus does indeed exist, and in order to encounter this Jesus, we have to make a distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. On the one hand, there is the pre-Easter Jesus who is often called the historical Jesus. This is the Jesus who lived and breathed as a Jew in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. On the other hand, there is the post-Easter Jesus whose memory and spirit continued to live after his death. It was not until this post-Easter Jesus developed in ancient oral traditions and writings that Jesus became known by titles such as “Messiah,” “Son of God,” “Lord,” “Savior of the world,” and so forth. Borg notes, “There is a near unanimous consensus among mainstream biblical scholars that these titles are post-Easter and do not go back to Jesus himself.” Jesus would never have talked that way. Rather, the titles were the later additions of his followers who were testifying as to what Jesus had come to mean for them long after his death.
Borg argues that it is necessary to make this distinction between the pre-Easter and the post-Easter Jesus because otherwise you get a confusing picture of Jesus in which “everything that is said about the post-Easter Jesus is projected back onto the pre-Easter Jesus.” What results is a miraculously powerful, divine Jesus who ascends so high above us in the clouds that we can no longer relate him to our own experiences. What results is also a Jesus whose image and meaning becomes reshaped by doctrines such as the belief that Jesus died for our sins—an idea that the pre-Easter Jesus would certainly not have held about himself.
Once we have put Jesus through this process that de-weaponizes and demystifies him, then I think we are left with a picture of Jesus that is at the very least compelling and attractive. If I were to give a Cliff Notes summary of the life of the pre- and post-Easter Jesus, I would say that pre-Easter Jesus grew up in Nazareth and then as a young man left his hometown to become a prophetic teacher whose words and actions empowered people to experience both life and God in a radically new way. No longer was God mediated to them through priests and rulers. Instead, they came to realize that the spirit of God was available to them right there. Through the captivating and provocative stories and sayings of Jesus, they realized that one could gain a taste of the Kingdom of God in the present and this Kingdom was the exact opposite of life as they had known it under the Roman Empire. In this Kingdom, the last were first, and the last were all invited to the banquet table. No one was excluded regardless of whether one was a sinner or a tax collector. All the religious, social, and political hierarchies of the world disappeared. In both word and deed, Jesus made God real to those living at the very bottom of society.
The life and teachings of this pre-Easter Jesus were so profound that even after his death his spirit and memory continued to live in the lives of his followers. As they sought to live out the Kingdom of God in egalitarian communities where everything was shared and held in common, Jesus came to be described with the same titles that were used to describe the Roman Emperor. Thus, Jesus became known as the Son of God, Lord, and Savior. I take the use of these titles to mean that just as the Kingdom of God was the opposite of the Empire of Rome so too was Jesus the opposite of Caeser. As Jesus says in Matthew, “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them…but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.” With this understanding of Jesus as one who rules our hearts from below rather than conquering us from on high, I can concur with the post-Easter belief that Jesus is indeed a savior. I can also concur that in Jesus I see the embodiment of God when I witness his love and compassion for “the least of these.”
For me, it is this de-weaponized and demystified Jesus who I find compelling and who I choose to follow. I read recently about how one of Desmond Tutu’s spiritual practices is to imagine himself as being part of the scripture that he is reading. I tried to do that with our scripture this morning. I imagined that I was with Simon and Andrew as they were doing the hard manual labor of casting their net from the shore into the sea. As I listen to the conversation around me, the news on everyone’s lips is that John the Baptist has been arrested. The news makes all of us feel both frightened and upset at the same time. We are frightened because it adds to our sense that we live in a violent and insecure time. We are upset because we don’t want to live in a world like this, a world in which we feel threatened and intimated. In the midst of this situation, what becomes attractive is courage. We hear that Jesus has decided not to be intimidated by Herod. He’s continuing to preach to the peasants of Galilee. He’s continuing to announce the coming of a new Kingdom completely unlike the current one we know so well. The message and ministry of Jesus are so remarkable that people say he is the fulfillment of the scripture in Isaiah that says, “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” To feel and hear the excitement over this dawning light has primed our spirits for what is to happen next. Jesus, the great light himself, appears before us. His courage, his vision, his entire way of life call out to us. They energize us. They uplift us. They inspire us in ways we have never before experienced. When he invites us to follow him, there can be but one response. We drop our nets determined to experience what can only be described as a “new life.” Joyfully, we leave behind us the old life of fear and despair so that we can be in the presence of one who seems to embody the very spirit of God.
To truly feel like followers of Jesus today, however, we have to be able to do more than simply imagine what it used to be like. For Norris, one of the places where she feels the presence of Jesus the most is when she worships in her church. She says, “Just a look around at the motley crew assembled in his name, myself among them, lets me know how unlikely it all is. The whole lot of us, warts and all, just seems so improbable, so absurd, I figure that only Christ would be so foolish, or so powerful, as to have brought us together.” In this church, I would say that we too are a motley crew, and we are a motley crew that doesn’t just do stuff together within the walls of the church. Over the past three years when we have gone to Olympia, I am always impressed by how diverse our band of rabble rousers is. We have people of all sorts of ages and backgrounds invading the capitol with our message of justice and peace. For me, it is one of the highlights of the year.
Norris also recalls another experience that revealed to her the living presence of Jesus. She was staying at a women’s monastery, and she happened to be the only guest that night. The sisters invited her to join their procession into the church. The procession is referred to by the Latin word “statio” which is a term the Roman Army used to describe the military posture of taking a stand. In a sense, these nuns for centuries had been turning the violence of the Roman Empire on its head with their processional march that evokes the very epitome of peacefulness. This ancient ritual was given a unique additional meaning when Norris was invited to participate. It was “an uncommon act of hospitality” to have a layperson from outside the monastery join with the sisters. In the procession, the women marched two by two with the older sisters in front with their walkers and canes setting the pace for everyone else. The prioress of the monastery marched with Norris to help guide and instruct her. As they moved forward, she whispered, “We bow first to the Christ who is at the altar, and then we turn to face our partner, and bow to the Christ in each other.” May Christ continue to be alive and relevant to us today, and may we continue to find Christ in each other. Amen.