The second sermon in a series on the basics of a belief that is marked as progressive, postmodern and Protestant.
In the year 451 of the common era, there was some serious fighting going on in the church. No mere whining about the the quality of coffee hour, these folks were arguing over the question “Was Jesus human or god?†and there wasn’t just cutting criticism, there was real cutting, with swords and all. The emperor was involved, as were the five traditional patriarchs of the church, with outright hostility existing between the sees of Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria. The Patriarch of Rome and the Emperor Marcian were determined to stop the fighting and restore unity in the church, so an ecumenical council, that is a meeting of all the bishops, was called and held in a town named Chalcedon, in what is today Turkey. Under much duress, the 520 gathered bishops hammered out an agreement on how Jesus was both human and God. The council declared that Jesus was:
the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in personhood; truly God and truly human, of a rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Creator according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the personhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Creator according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the personhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now that that is clear, I think my work is done here.
Or maybe not. The Council of Chalcedon might have, I’m just saying, might have come up with a statement that makes absolutely nothing clear. So what can we know about Jesus, what must we believe about Jesus, in order to still call ourselves Christians? Must we consent to every tenet of the ancient creeds?
A perfect example of the hash we have made of belief can be found in the Christmas story. Or more properly, stories. There are two different birth narratives in scripture, and they are not compatible… both can’t be true. In one we have a couple already living in Bethlehem, no manger at all. They are visited by some unknown number of wise people (not three kings) from the east, then flee to Egypt in fear of Herod’s assassins, later returning to Hebrew controlled land but moving to Nazareth in Galilee. This story is modeled after the story of Moses, for it is Matthew’s goal to cast Jesus as the new Moses, albeit one leading the people of God to a Promised Land that is spiritual rather than physical.
The other narrative finds the young couple traveling to Bethlehem for a royal census, being visited by lowly shepherds, not wise people, then returning to Nazareth, with no slaughter of the innocents. Luke plays up the role of women and the poor throughout his gospel, the birth takes place in a manger, emphasizing Jesus’ affinity with the poor and outcast.
We, in our desire to make things less confusing, have smashed the two stories together. Mary gets the visit from the angel, we ignore the visit to Joseph. The wise people are recast as three kings, and they join the shepherds in the manger, never mind the home birth. We often drop the whole slaughter and flight thing, because it is just too distasteful. I swear one day I will get a Christmas pageant with a slaughter of the innocents! We can tie red ribbons around the throats of the little boys. No?
The good news is that once Jesus is an adult and begins his earthly ministry, three of the gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, which we call the Synoptic Gospels, are mostly in agreement. Jesus is baptized by his cousin, John the Baptizer, begins a ministry of preaching, teaching and healing, announcing that the Kingdom of God has arrived. His teachings threaten the existing elite of Hebrew society and are viewed as subversive by the Roman authorities, and when he brings his message from Galilee and the countryside into Jerusalem itself, he is promptly arrested, tortured and executed. Almost immediately after he is executed, his followers come to believe that he has risen from the grave and is still present with them, at first physically, and later through the Spirit of God. They act on this belief, facing persecution and sometimes death, as they spread Jesus’ radical message throughout the world, first within the Hebrew culture, but later to other tribes and peoples. Christianity spread like wildfire along the Roman roads, especially in the busy urban centers of the empire, where it drew both poor and rich, male and female, slaves and free.
Now, there are folks, scholars even, who claim that Jesus never even existed, that he is completely made up. Of course, there were also people who insisted that King David never existed, that he was a myth. They kept insisting that right up until the discovery and translation of the Tel Dan Stele, an artifact from around 850 BCE that celebrates an Aramean king’s victory in a battle against the forces of King David A three thousand year old artifact took a bit of steam out of the David-as-myth movement.
Now I want to be very clear. I have no doubt that Jesus existed. If they were making him up, they’d have done a better job. For example, Jesus comes off as a total jerk quite a few times. When the Syro-Phoenecian woman wants to be healed, he calls her a dog, seemingly believing at that point that his ministry is restricted to the Hebrews. He gets mad because there isn’t a fig on a fig tree, so he curses it. He sends his disciples out on a preaching mission, and seems to predict that the world will end before they get back. It doesn’t. And the only witnesses at the empty tomb are women, who couldn’t testify in the culture of the time, so they are worthless as witnesses. If you were making it up, you’d make up a better story.
The theological discipline that considers how Jesus is both human and divine is called Christology, and it comes in two basic flavors, high and low. A high Christology takes the position that Jesus knew everything that the Creator knew at every moment of his existence in the flesh, so even when Jesus acts like a jerk or gets it wrong, there must be some divine purpose. Jesus cursing the fig tree must mean something! A low Christology allows Jesus to sometimes act like a complete goober, just like the rest of us, making mistakes, loosing his temper, learning as he goes. My advice? Get low.
Now many will disagree with me, but I don’t particularly care whether or not Joseph was the father or Mary really was a virgin at the time of Jesus’ birth, much less whether or not Mary remained a virgin and those brothers and sisters in the gospel appear as if by magic. Many of these beliefs developed because of flawed understandings of both human reproduction and original sin. The facts of the birth narrative do not, for me, change how Jesus saves. In fact, I suspect the story goes more like this:
John the Baptizer begins a ministry of repentance in the Jordan Valley. He believes that the Hebrew people and the Temple hierarchy have become sinful, and that the “Day of the Lord,†or day of judgment, is near at hand. His message is not unlike that of the earlier prophets, but following the theology of Ezekiel, John emphasizes the need for personal repentance, and adapts Jewish cleansing rituals. John’s community is a closed community, you’ve either repented and been baptized, or you’re up the creek, and not in a good Jordan River sort of way.
John’s ministry is wildly successful, the people are starved for meaning and values in a culture of aimlessness and sin, of clashing religious sects and brutal Roman oppression. John is so busy, in fact, that he asks his cousin Joshua, who we call Jesus, to start a parallel ministry in Galilee. Early on, however, Jesus realizes that more is going on with his ministry than just repentance baptism, that he clearly has some special connection with the Creator. He has the power to heal and to exorcize unclean spirits, to perform seemingly miraculous deeds. When John is arrested and beheaded, Jesus abandons the closed repentance model altogether. He continues to preach that the “Day of the Lord†is at hand, but for Jesus that day is today. Jesus sees God’s realm as coexisting with our reality. He switches from closed community to the radically open community of the table fellowship. In fact, Jesus takes the basic justice and forgiveness framework of the prophets, and multiplies it by like a billion.
His followers come to believe that Jesus is the messiah predicted by the prophets, but in a radically different way then expected. And just when they are trying to wrap their heads around this, he’s arrested and executed, but then, still with them. In the resurrection, Jesus defeats not only the human systems of oppression and division found in the Temple hierarchy, not only the brutal military rule of foreign powers, Jesus defeats fear itself, by conquering death. All that Jesus taught about living boldly, seizing life in full and giving sacrificially to others, makes perfect sense to his followers. They take this radical message out into the world. The Kingdom of God is here now, if you choose it. Freedom and salvation are here now. To those who follow the way of Jesus, there is a new way to live, and it is fundamentally at odds with human systems of justice and judgment, fundamentally at odds with every human system of oppression, fundamentally at odds with fear.
What Jesus meant when he called himself the Son of Man is unclear, though it is clearly tied into a theology grounded in the book of Daniel, written about 150 years before the ministry of Jesus. But Jesus clearly understands himself to be a child of God with special authority, he clearly believes, if we are to trust the tone of the gospels, that he is at one with the Creator. And as soon as he was gone, his followers started trying to figure out exactly what that meant. At worst, you end up with those who claimed Jesus was completely spirit, that the body was just an illusion. Others argue that God’s Spirit entered Jesus at baptism. And again, these disputes were settled with councils and swords. Which seems to completely miss the point.
Jesus’ message seems pretty clear. If you choose to follow me, you will know life in full right now. But to follow me, you must be willing to give up everything, you must be willing to make doing God’s will your absolute number one priority. You must be willing to forgive a billion billion times, you must love radically, beyond your own abilities, you must be transformed. Jesus didn’t come to make you happy. Jesus came to save you from yourself, to save humankind from the small-minded fearful nonsense that is the bread and butter of our being. When we say there is freedom in Christ, we mean it.
Jesus taught us a way to live. The gospels tell us the story of someone who was very human but also somehow more than human. And whether you choose the seemingly insane language of Chalcedon or Schleiermacher’s understanding of Jesus having perfect God-consciousness, the result is still the same. Jesus called his disciples to live a God-grounded life, a radical life. And we believe that Jesus, the man from Nazareth, is one with the Creator in some way we might not understand, that even after his execution, he was still alive, and that he is alive today in this people gathered in his name, in our acts of love.
Next time you find yourself about to criticize and complain, next time you find yourself acting small and petty, next time you hold a grudge or draw a line in the sand, remember: Jesus came to save you from yourself. He came to save us all, to call us to be so much more than we are, to invite us into life in full, not always happy, but always content and blessed. Jesus called us to be really alive. Blessed be his holy name. Amen.