JESUS - WHO AM I?

"Along the way, he asked his disciples, 'Who do people say that I am?''' (Mark 8:27 NABR)

"But who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8:29 -NABR)

 

 

In this and future posts, I'm going to talk about Jesus as man and Jesus as Christ.  In these first few posts, I'm probably going to come across as being heretical to some Christian readers, but as the British say, "Wait for it...".  .  My aim is to be honest in expressing what I understand and sense about Jesus as a human being; what I feel is essential in getting to know Jesus' message.  So this begins a series of post of Jesus as a human being. 

 

 

"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father...

...he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father."

From the Nicene Creed

 

WHO JESUS ISN'T

 

I'm going to start writing about who Jesus isn't and what I don't believe is true about him. I will get back to the questions Jesus posed to his disciples as I go along.

 

What  I don't believe about Jesus is that he is the "only begotten Son of God." That concept is antithetical to and a distortion of Jesus' teaching and Hebrew Scripture.   I don't find the notion of Jesus ascending (physically) into heaven and being seated next to God only to return as the  judge of the entire human spectrum in any way helpful in understanding what Jesus is trying to tell his followers. Frankly, I think that part was put in the creeds to literally scare the bejeezus out of us to make sure we're towing the right line and keeping our thoughts in check.  To put it mildly, I'm not a big fan of the creeds - period. 

[ I'm not advocating that we should get rid of them or ignore them. Rather, we need to understand the role they play in the history of Christianity, what they are and why we have them:

The creeds are a product of a bleak time in the history of Christianity - its acceptance as a religion in the Roman Empire in 313 CE.  They are the product of politics.  The emperor, Constantine, clearly had no idea what he got he got himself into when he legitimized Christianity.  What he ended up with was a bunch of greedy, bickering bishops with their own ideas about Jesus vying for imperial patronage. So he pulls them together at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

The creeds were designed to help the imperial bureaucracy decide who should or should not receive imperial (financial) support. The creeds (and there are several of them and several councils that produced them) became an effective tool to weed out people and churches the empire didn't have to support by declaring those who didn't subscribe the creeds as heretics.  A lot of violence occurred as a result.] 

 

Putting Jesus in a "one-and-only" category is pure heresy and makes it hard for anyone to relate to Jesus on a human level. It makes it hard to understand how Jesus related to the people and the situations of his day.  As noted in the creeds, Jesus has become an "up-there/out-there" being on so many levels, ontologically, theologically, morally, etc. Back in his day, Jesus was just one of us. People of his day understood him to be the carpenter's son. We have lost the theological significance of that fact by creating an idealized, dualistic view of Jesus.

The Jesus that I can relate to is the flesh and blood Jesus of the  synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). The Jesus who is one of us - very human - the Jesus who preached and reached out to sick and suffering.  It is harder for me to relate to the Jesus who was born under a star or the demigod of the creeds [half human/half divine (Even if the councils added True, meaning fully human and fully divine to his human and divine traits, one can do the math. One plus one still equals two, mathematically and theologically.) I will come back to this formula in future posts.] 

  

A MAN NAMED JESUS

 

Jesus had a father and a mother named Joseph and Mary.  He emerged onto the world stage the same way as you and I did.  His parents, Mary and Joseph, had sexual intercourse and he is the product of that interaction.  If that sounds heretical, it's not.  It's life.  Jesus was a Jew from his birth to his death and his teachings are immersed in and emerge from Judaism.

 

So what are we to make of the nativity stories found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke? 
What are we to make of the resurrection stories?  For the moment, not much.  I will get to these questions in future posts, but for this post I want to concentrate on the man, Jesus.

 

We know very little of Jesus' childhood. The gospels of  Mark and John say nothing of it, and it's hardly mentioned at all in the other two gospels.  But as a male human, we can assume a few things; the most important of which is that Jesus grew up and developed into an adult male just like every other adult male did and does; in every aspect of human male development, including puberty.    Need I say more?  

 

We don't like to think about Jesus as a pubescent adolescent, but I'm sure he was. I believe it's important  to recognize that Jesus went through human development like everyone else. It's  because he did that  we can better understand his ministry and the meanings of his teachings.  Jesus arrives at what he taught not because he was some pure, semi-divine observer who never had to encounter our experiences on a personal level, but rather because he went through them, just like we did and do.    Did Jesus ever act up as a child?  Did he need to be disciplined?  He did if he was fully developed human. The idea of a perfect human is just that, an idea, not a reality.  

 

I love the story in Luke 2 where Jesus, as a twelve year old (the age of becoming a man in Judaism), stays in the Temple in Jerusalem after his parents departed and were heading home to Galilee.  In spite of his being considered a "man," his parents just didn't quit being his parents once he turned twelve.   For them, Jesus was still a kid. 

When they find out he is missing after a day's journey (probably on foot), thinking he was traveling along with other relatives, they panic and head back to Jerusalem to look for this missing kid in a large city packed with a lot of religious pilgrims observing the Passover.  In other words, stranger-danger, any parents' nightmare - lost kid for two days in a crowded metropolitan area. 

 

The Gospel of Luke says they found Jesus teaching the teachers, the elders, in the Temple.  The point of Luke's portrayal is to show that Jesus is the Son of God and that he was going about his Father's work, which is the excuse Jesus gives to Mary and Joseph when they asked him why he didn't tag along when they left.

Now, thinking like a parent, I wouldn't have taken Jesus' response lightly.  In fact, Luke hints that Mary and Joseph didn't either.  Luke says of their response, "But they (Mary and Joseph) did not understand what he was saying."  That's putting it lightly and, in my book, is code for "they were royally torqued."  From a parental point of view, Jesus comes across as a smart-aleck kid, and I have a feeling the proverbial rod was not spared when they found him. 

 

This, of course raises an interesting question:  Did Jesus ever mess up?  Did Jesus sin? 

 

Yes.

 

I can feel the stones and kindling wood being picked up as a I write, but again, "Yes."  

 

I'm not a big fan of the word sin.  I don't find it very helpful.  People mess up and do wrong things.  We can be purposely hurtful and unintentionally hurtful.  We get angry for both the right and wrong reasons and we can become downright evil. All those attributes might fit the bill of sin, but I like to sort them out a bit.

 Did Jesus ever do any of that?  I'm sure he did. 

 

I'm not sure if he had ever done something that would come close to qualifying as evil.  Most of us haven't done that, but most of us have entertained evil thoughts at one time or another, and I'm sure Jesus did also.  In the fact the Gospels say that he did during his temptation in the wilderness.  Let's be honest, one is not being tempted if one never entertained a tempting thought, and the Gospels do not mitigate their accounts of Jesus being tempted.

I would also remind the reader that Jesus said if a man so much as lusted in his heart after another woman, he already committed adultery, thus equating sinful thought with sinful act. I'm not sure there is a big difference between lusting and being tempted.  So I think we can put the notion of a sinless Jesus to rest. Jesus knew what he was talking when he was talking about sins.  

More importantly, Jesus never claims to be sinless or without fault. After all, he is the one who teaches us to pray, "forgive us our sins."  I don't see him excluding himself from the "our" in that prayer.  Making Jesus into a sinless being is something theology has done.  In fact, the Gospels portray people taking issue with Jesus, friends and foes alike, because he did things they saw as wrong, as sinful.  The gospels usually cover for Jesus by making editorial comments like, "Jesus did this to show... "  Nice try, but I'm not buying it. Jesus messed up from time to time like the rest of us. 

 

If Jesus never did anything wrong/sinful, he wouldn't have been able to address wrongdoing and what is truly evil in the forthright way that he did. He wouldn't have been able to forgive people without their asking.  I don't think Jesus had to experience every known bad behavior humans have engaged in. 

Most of us haven't had a lot of those experiences, but Jesus would have had to have some.  He would have had to have sinned enough to know the feelings of separation it causes, the hurt, the fear, the self-loathing that can result  and what it's like to recover in order to have talked about it in the way he did and stress the importance on being forgiving. You can see his first-hand knowledge at work in his parables.   The fact is no one can talk about the things Jesus talked about without having had some experience with them. To argue that Jesus is God and knew all about sin without having to experience any of it as a human is to make the whole Jesus story into some kind of divine joke.

So how did this very human Jesus come to see God as his Father, his Abba - his Daddy?

 

I believe Jesus comes to this profound understanding of his relation with the divine through Judaism; namely, the Genesis story and the story of God's relationship with Israel in the Hebrew scriptures.   Jesus comes to see the presence of God everywhere he turns.  God is at hand - very close to him. The kingdom, the realm of God, is at hand - very close to everyone.  God is his Father.  God is our Father.

Jesus possessed a clarity about being human during a very unclear, murky time, just like now. Jesus understood immense importance of understanding he and all of us exists as the image of God, and this knowledge, this intimacy with God shaped Jesus' perspective of his fellow human, his ministry and mission to connect all of us, all that is, to and in the oneness that is God. 

 

WHO DO PEOPLE SAY JESUS IS?

 

Jesus is a lot of things to a lot of people.  For Christians Jesus is God, Jesus is the only-begotten Son of God, Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the Christ, Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus is King, Jesus is High Priest.  For others, Jesus was a prophet, Jesus was a rabbi, Jesus was a zealot, Jesus was an errant Jew.  Then there are those who say Jesus wasn't - he never existed. 

 

WHO DO I SAY JESUS IS?

 

Jesus is a historical figure.  I believe Jesus walked on this earth as a fully developed human male in every sense of that term because, in spite of their being edited and biased, the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke - I'll get to John later) contain the ring of truth about who Jesus is. Through them one sees a person who found God intimately connected to his life and tried through his own example, his own life, to get his followers to understand that they and we are God's daughters and sons, that God is our "daddy" also. Jesus' story rings true because it applies. His message is as fresh today as when he first spoke it.

I cannot say where Jesus is today.  I can tell you what I believe or, perhaps better said, what I sense as opposed to what I know. What I sense is that Jesus's physical body has been absorbed back into the Earth from whence it was made and that his spirit has been absorbed back into God - that Being - that Verb - in which we live and move and have our being, the source of his life force; that Jesus came into existence and departed it as all of us have and all of us will. 

Does Jesus exist today?  Jesus is not physically alive on Earth. That's a fact.  In that sense he no longer exists, but I sense there is more to life than just physical existence, more than being a walking, talking, eating, and defecating animal on the surface of a planet for a mere blip in time.

I feel it is a possible probability (as far as a faithful agnostic can go) that Jesus lives and remains essentially human and is one with us right now in the timeless dimension of Being, otherwise known as the Now of God. 

 

Until next time, stay faithful.