The late Marcus Borg had pretty much the same experience every semester when he taught the entry level course in biblical studies at Oregon State. He would begin by explaining that he was not teaching a class in religion, but rather, was teaching a class in an academic disciple. He assured the students that they were not expected to change what they believed, but that for the purposes of the course, they would be expected to operate from within the discipline. And every semester, without fail, one or two selective literalists would publicly challenge Borg during the first couple of weeks of the class.
Then, one semester, a senior who happened to be Muslim took the course. As is so often the case in college, he took it because he needed a humanities credit, and it fit his schedule, not because of some particular interest in the subject. He was, in regard to the tension always present in the classroom, completely neutral.
After watching the pattern, so familiar to Borg, unfold, he came to his professor and said “I think I understand what’s going on here. You’re saying the Bible is like a lens through which we see God, and they’re saying that it’s important to believe in the lens.â€
Borg liked this so much that he would later incorporate it into one of the books he co-authored with Anglican Bishop Tom Wright, and it is a helpful frame, maybe the single most important frame, in trying to live into a dynamic faith trajectory that stretches back three thousand years, that includes the primitive and sometimes barbaric, that passes through the Age of Reason and the hubris of Modernity and on to today, to the post-Modern world of the quantum and the deconstructed, each of these major lenses, modes of human understanding.
And so we encounter Jesus in the Book of Hebrews and see him through a weird lens, not the one we are used to, as if the other options when it comes to understanding Jesus weren’t weird enough. The author makes strange choices,including the central locus of today’s reading, the Tent of Meeting.
We have already flagged the theological oddity of the text, understanding that the author, while writing to an audience that clearly understands the Hebrew religious trajectory, is decidedly allergic to the central institutions of that religion. The author avoids the Temple, both the concept and the literal buildings, the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple that reached its zenith under Herod the Great. The entirety of the prophetic tradition develops in relationship to the Temple construct. Jesus touches on the Temple again and again. It is, quite literally, the center of the faith and the location of its God. Yet, just as in last week’s reading, where the author of Hebrews reached past the Mosaic priesthood and used the pagan Melchizedek as prototype for priest, in this week’s reading the author skips past the Temple to the impermanent holy place of the confederated tribes.
We find a description of the outer tent, the day-to-day site of the cultic rites, and the Holy of Holies, the inner tent containing the Ark of the Covenant, only entered once a year by the high priest in an act of atonement.
Jesus has already been cast in the priestly role in the Book of Hebrews, a role he never seems to have claimed in his real life. And in this figurative role, he is described as passing through a sort of cosmic Tent of Meeting, one build by God, not humans, and making the atoning sacrifice. But the ancient sacrifice of the priest was vicarious, neither the blood of the priest nor that of the people. It was the blood of sacrificed animals. Since Jesus has sacrificed his own blood, the author deems this as being “for all time.†There is a bit of messiness as the author mixes in an element of a completely different ritual, the ashes that are mentioned, and we’ll just ignore the fact that a little Greek philosophy wanders into the text here, but hey, we have enough on our plates already.
Now, first, you don’t have to believe in this particular Jesus, high priest and sacrificial lamb. It is my contention that you cannot believe in every Jesus because there are too many and they are just too different, too contradictory, even if we only consider the versions of Jesus found in the New Testament, never mind the thousands of versions of Jesus created since then, from Christ the King to the gun-toting American capitalist Jesus being worshiped in so many churches this morning.
Progressive Christians try to get closer to an original Jesus, with our attention to historical and social context, but even we can get but so far, for the real Jesus is lost behind the diverse interpretations we find in the earliest texts.
But the Jesus we get to, the one we find in scripture, is pretty radical. Christians have historically bickered over how they understand Jesus, fully human, fully God, physically resurrected, virgin birth. Maybe none of that is the point. When Jesus said believe in me, he clearly didn’t mean believe in some Trinitarian or Incarnational doctrine hammered out a century or two later. He meant believe in what I am teaching you and live accordingly.
Maybe Jesus isn’t the end of our faith, but is the lens through which we see God, much as Borg’s Muslim student understood that the Bible, the Tanakh for the Jew and the Tanakh plus the New Testament for the Christian, is a lens for seeing God.
This doesn’t need to lessen our faith, to lessen Jesus. We can still believe that Jesus is an actual experience of the divine-with-us. But we might be able to obsess less about the being of Jesus and focus more on the doing of Jesus.
If Jesus is himself a revelation of the nature of God, a lens and a way of seeing God, then God doesn’t look like the God so many worship. Maybe the God seen through Jesus doesn’t even look much like the God seen in the Book of Hebrews, the kind of God that demands blood.
Maybe God is seen in the absolute quiet, time stopped, as Jesus draws in the sand and challenges those who would kill in the name of the holy. That God, that amazing God, is seen when Jesus heals the contagious because life and cleanliness overflow from him, the absolute power of love, when he teaches the poor. But also when he rages against the powerful and corrupt. When he subverts regulations that are just plain dumb. And when he is nailed to the cross, and still forgives.
We can see God through the lens of Jesus in the same way that Jesus invites us to see him in the face of the stranger, the one who is hungry, the one in prison we are commanded to visit.
The author of Hebrews, writing to Jews in Italy, used familiar images and language creatively, sometimes erroneously, in an effort to help people see Jesus, the anointed one of God who saves. Who knows if this particular letter, so very different from the authentic letter of Paul to the Romans, changed hearts and minds. Certainly the faith took off in the Italian peninsula, among Hebrews and among Gentiles, each learning to see Jesus through the lens of their culture, through the lens of their teachers. And in seeing Jesus, they believed they saw God, experienced God. Maybe God is located precisely in this reflection as Gentile and Jew seek God and encounter one another.
How do you encounter Jesus? What stories speak to you? What does Jesus teach you about the God of the Whale and the God in the Ghetto, the God in the towering cathedrals, and the God in solitary confinement. Where, today, will you find God?