BACK TO BASICS: JESUS CHRIST

      This is the third in the back to basics series. Today we are going to think about Jesus whom we call Christ.

      “Christ” is an ancient Greek word; its Hebrew equivalent is “Messiah,” and in English Christ and Messiah mean….? It starts with “A”. Anointed. To call Jesus “Christ” or “Messiah” is to say that he is the one anointed by God to fulfill the promise of salvation made by God through the various Hebrew prophets.

      I grew up listening to stories in Sunday School and later on in church about Jesus. (pronounced Je-SUS) for the culture in which I grew up, if you didn’t know how to pronounce it that way, you weren’t authentic. So I still remember how to pronounce it, because that’s the way they pronounce it in heaven. I grew to love Je-SUS, because I learned when I was little that he was gentle and loving, I learned when I was a teenager that he exposed hypocrites (and there is nothing nearer and dearer to the heart of a teenager that the exposure of hypocrisy), and I learned as a young adult that he went to parties, and I learned in my middle years that he dealt with set backs and disappointments and pain. Every year the agenda to love and follow Jesus has become more and more of the core of my life.

      We know about Jesus from basically four sources: the gospels included in the canon of Christian scriptures and written during the last third of the first century. Also from some passages in the letters of the Apostle Paul. There is a paragraph in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus. There are also a number of other gospels speaking of Jesus written in the second and third century but not included in the canon (official list) of our Bible.

      For the past 15 years or so a group of scholars called the Jesus Seminar (Marcus Borg) have struggled with how much of this writing can be called historical, i.e., recorded by two or more independent sources. (With this definition of history, it is possible for something to be historical but not necessarily true, or for something to be true but not historical.)

      Historically (that is by at least two accounts) we can say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of humble parents, that he began as a young man to teach, heal, and engage in symbolic actions signifying that the reign of God was about to break into human living. He restored the practice of people eating together and reinterpreted the Passover meal as a central ritual of his followers. He was opposed by the religious officials, executed by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate on the cross. On the Sunday after the Passover, his followers found his tomb empty and later reported that they saw him alive and heard him speak. This much is historical and I believe is also true.

      The gospel writers were not trying to write history; they were trying to give a testimony to what they had seen or been told by eye witnesses. Finally it won’t be the historical details that convince us that Jesus was the Christ; it will be our own coming to faith, which happens not by the brilliance of our minds but by the grace of God.

      Some 20 years ago the great Yale historian of theology Jarislov Pelikin wrote a book called Jesus Through the Centuries. He showed how the notion of sin (and faith in the Jesus who saves us from that sin) have changed with each historical epoch.

      Jesus is described by Gospel writers as the suffering servant, who brings salvation by accepting punishment for the way the people of God have turned away from the law and the prophets and have turned on each other.
Early on Jesus is described as the King of Kings. Sin was obedience to a lesser king. For Francis of Assisi Jesus was the perfect divine and human model to save us from the corruption of too much power and too many riches. Over the centuries, as the sense of fragmentation and brokenness has changed, Jesus has been described as the one to save us from the sins of that age.

      Some among us have been around long enough to remember the preaching that was an echo from the Victorian Era a century ago, when the really serious sins were the sexual ones---the ones that couldn’t be tracked due to the decline of chaperoning and the advent of the Ford coupe. Jesus as the sinless savior, then, is the one who by selfless example shows us how to avoid temptation and the indulgence of our baser instincts. Those are the sins that the conservative preachers still rail against, at least until one of them gets caught committing those most serious of sins, and then things get quiet for a while.

      We in the mainline church need to learn from the conservative wing of the church that there are personal, private sins which need to be resisted and forgiven. But we need to let go of their preoccupation with the sexual nature of sin, as if a naughty thought is somehow worse that allowing your brother or sister to go hungry.

      We tend to make Jesus into the savior of the church instead of the savior of the world. Bible editors insert headings into the text like “Sermon on the Mount,” as if Jesus were a preacher appointed by the bishop to a circuit called Galilee. We make Jesus into a clergy person. And the sin he saves us from is not being a good church member.

      I believe that God had something bigger in mind. I believe that God so loved the world (translated from the Greek cosmos---universe) that God sent the only son to be the savior of it all. After 16 billion years. To an obscure country with an obscure culture on an obscure planet in an obscure galaxy. Why then? Why here? Who knows? Will God repeat the event in other times on other planets in other galaxies? Our geo-centric scriptures don’t invite us to entertain that question, so any answer is shear speculation. Who knows? What is important is that this savior called Jesus is sufficient for us.

      For the past two weeks we have been saying that God the creator is the ground of all being, not an entity within the created realm. God does not create matter and then say “I’ll be an object, too.” God does not create force and then say: “I’ll be a force, too.” God is the ground of being and to think of God as a being like other beings is idolatry.

      Now comes the exception: for a brief period of 30 some years, the fullness of God became incarnate in Jesus. Full human but fully God. Not half human and half God. And while exercising the full authority of God, taught and healed and then suffered and died like a mortal. To get us back on course. To show us once more what the divine creator has intended and was leading toward.

      And so I’m going to tie the meaning of my life to this Jesus. If I try to stand outside of myself and survey religions (I like Mohamed better than Buddha, I like Confucius better than Moses, etc), I may come to some interesting intellectual conclusions. But the arbiter of my musings is always me or some quality that I have set up: one is more loving than the others, one is more just, one is more practical.

      I can’t give meaning to my life. I can’t be my own transcendent reference.

      So I accept that Jesus is the one God anointed to save me (us) from sin. And I acknowledge that our understanding of sin and salvation is evolving as we evolve. I rather suspect that the most serious of our sins today have to do with the arrogant use of our financial and technological power against the weak, and our devastation of the environment. We don’t feel guilty enough about what we do to primitive economies, and the meek and silent species that go extinct every day by our thoughtless actions. Or what we leave undone on their behalf.

      But Jesus our savior is going to save us from our sin, first by intensifying our guilt, and then by forgiving our trespasses, as we (like Zacchaeus the tax collector) make financial and environmental restitution.

      Jesus teaches me that forgiveness has to be at the core of anything that is relevant, and that little gets accomplished until people get to the place where they can break bread together. Jesus teaches me that I am no better or important than the weakest and the meekest in the sight of God. Jesus teaches me that I can become wise enough to recognize my foolishness and can do what I am called to do and leave the rest to God.

      So I am going to follow that Jesus. I’m going to build my life on him because he is a solid rock. I’m going to try to know him better, because he knows me better than anyone else does. And I’m going to encourage you to do the same.