Perhaps the worst things that happened to Jesus’ legacy is that we Christians turned him into a god as in the second person of the Triune God.
That may strike Christians as being totally heretical, but I ask that you bear with me. What Christianity is largely based on is what others have said about Jesus throughout the centuries, beginning with the First Century. As I have said in recent posts, Jesus understood as “true man and true God” is true only to the extent that such a claim can be made about all of us; in that, according to Genesis, all of us are created in the image of God. To that extent Jesus is no more or no less divine in nature than the rest of us. As I have mention in many homilies and posts, what is true about Jesus is true about us and what is true about us is true about Jesus.
The idea that Jesus is the only-begotten Son of God is rooted in polytheism, where gods and goddesses were know to have sexual intercourse with mortals and produced demigods who could eventually aspire to being worshiped as immortal gods and goddesses. In Jesus' case this became even more convoluted as Jesus is the product of a supposedly sexless encounter with the spirit of God "overshadowing" a virgin who remains a virgin when giving birth to Jesus. As a one-off birth, this is not a miracle, but rather an asexual fantasy. This is not to say that God's spirit wasn't active in Jesus' birth because the spirit of God by having breathed the first humans to life in the creation myth is active in every birth - what is true for Jesus... .
If it were an asexual miracle Jesus could not be a true human. Theoretically he may have acquired the physical features of a human through Mary's genes, but he essentially would have been a divine being, more so than the demigods of ancient Greece. This divine Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel of John as taking on our physical nature without really being one of us. That Jesus is nothing like the rest of us humans. On the other hand, Jesus as portrayed in the Synoptic Gospels (SG) of Matthew, Mark and Luke is someone who is human and easier to relate to, if one ignores the editorial commentary regarding his divine parentage.
As I have noted in a previous post, the editorial comments in Matthew and Luke miss the point of Jesus being a direct descendant of King David. Jesus could not have been considered an heir of David if Joseph, his "so-called father" in Luke 3:23, was not his biological father or if, according to Matthew 1:25, Joseph refrained from any sexual encounters with Mary until after she had given birth to Jesus. Such editorial comments were inserted to promote the idea that Jesus was the biological Son of God, an utterly nonsensical notion that detracts the value of Jesus' teachings, which are the essential Gospel message.
This is largely the result of the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of John where there is no mention of Jesus being baptized or being led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted. Rather, Jesus is depicted as omniscient; as knowing what is about to happen before it happens. Even the crucifixion is depicted as knowing act, stripped of it human horror by Jesus' super-human willingness to accomplish his purpose, in John, of atoning for the sins we were and are supposedly incapable of doing. In John, Jesus crucifixion amounts to a disrobing Jesus of his human flesh and taking on a divine physicality that retains the imprints of human wounds - the trophies of his divine love for his creation.
The 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, wrote a treatise on why "God became a human" which solidified the teaching that Jesus was the only truly begotten offspring of God, contrary to everything else scripture says about the rest of us humans and Jesus' own teaching in the SG. At best the Gospel of John is speculative theology about Jesus aimed at comforting Jewish Christians who were being thrown out of the synagogues after the Fall of Jerusalem because they were preaching about Jesus. At worst, it is a fictional fantasy meant to accomplish the same purpose.
So much of Christianity is shaped by the Gospel of John that we can't read the other Gospels without seeing them through its lens as the last word about Jesus in the canonical New Testament. Christians love the Gospel of John because it is written for them and about them without giving much thought to its darker side, the immediate condemnation of those who don't believe Jesus as the only-begotten Son of God. The idea that Jesus is the eternally creative Word of God that brought all things into being, in essence, makes Jesus God, which is precisely the point of the Gospel of John is making at the expense of other possibilities.
The creeds do nothing to change that analysis, no matter how many times they insist that Jesus is true God and true man. That mankind is created in the image of God does not mean that humans are God, even though some, throughout history, have believed themselves to be, and at times have acted as if they were God. The belief that Jesus is God is increasingly becoming a problematic issue for mainline Christian churches that continue to insist that Jesus was sent to earth to become a sacrifice to atone for the sins of humankind. More and more Christians are finding the idea of God sacrificing his own son a barbaric notion; that a loving God and father would never do such a thing. Certainly this is not how Jesus understood God, in spite of the New Testament writers' attempts at suggesting that Jesus was sent to be a sacrifice.
The idea or fact that Jesus was no more and no less, like the rest of us, purely human has long been treated and suppressed as a heresy by mainline Christian churches for close to eighteen hundred years. Personally, I suspect that this is being re-evaluated by theologians and biblical scholars in mainline churches. The problem they face is how to present this without causing a major walkout of those who have been indoctrinated from the moment of their baptisms to believe that Jesus is God, a belief that has defined Christianity for two thousand years.
Being an Episcopalian, where the creeds are said almost every service, I haven't been saying them for some time. During this past Lenten season, I've noticed that the Gospel of John, although read, was not being used as text for sermons in major cathedrals here in the US or in the UK. Rather it was the prophets the clergy opted to preach on. I sense there is a general discomfort with the Gospel of John and as there is with the creeds. Our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry commented on the Nicene Creed during a sermon at Trinity Wall Street on September 12, 202, "I love the Nicene creed. I don't understand everything, but I love it."
What our beloved Presiding Bishop underscored in his comment is the problem mainline denominations have; an attraction to tradition over reason in the face of a looming theological crisis. He also stressed in his comments a fear that he and other clergy have in moving too fast in the direction of challenging long held beliefs that are entrenched in the beliefs of most people sitting in the pews of their churches. The Nicene Creed is an eighteen hundred year old document written to define the Christian God in order to bring universal order amongst Christians in Constantine's empire who were quickly becoming the dominant religious group within Roman empire.
As a whole, the Christian Creeds are rather vacuous in both meaning and application and yet they remain the central pillar around which the oldest mainline denominations conduct their worship services and guide their theological discourse. Christianity, more than ever, is faced with a renewed challenge regarding the essential question Jesus posed to his disciples about himself that was never fully answered, apart from the editorialized account in Matthew where Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God. Despite being praised by Jesus for being inspired to make such a statement (although not highly praised in Luke and Mark), who is Jesus has re-emerged as the essential theological question for Christians in the 21st century.
As such, one can appreciate and understand people two thousand years ago thinking of Jesus as being a god-like spotless sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity, who was born of godly human woman, Mary and thus the divine Son of God. Being a mere mortal was not going to make a dent in the mindset of the cosmopolitan world of the Roman Empire where the meaning of Jesus was up against and endless array of mono and polytheistic religions deeply rooted in the the idea of the divine. To get any part of Jesus' message across he simply couldn't remain a man from Nazareth in Galilee, he had to be more; a Messiah. Eventually he had to be more than that. He had to be God and so his followers declared him to be that and it would take and Roman emperor, Constantine, to set that belief in stone through his calling the first ecumenical council in 325 at Nicea.
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To say that Jesus is purely human may sound like simple solution to who Jesus is, but it is not as simple as it sounds because we are not simple as that sounds. Being human is anything but simple. We are complex creatures who, for the most part, have little appreciation for the gray areas of life. We want to know. Not only do we want to know, but we also want to be certain about what we know. For the most part we humans have little tolerance for paradox. We tend towards discrimination and differentiation as a way to navigate through the paradoxical conundrums we create and find ourselves in.
Jesus was a unique human being as portrayed in the SG; selfless to a fault, patient, loving, inspirational and intuitive with an uncanny compassion for those living on the fringe of society. He was loved deeply and was deeply loved by those who knew and followed him; so much so, that Flavius Josephus, in his account of the Fall of Jerusalem noted that the followers of Jesus living in Jerusalem at the time loved him.
What was so unique about Jesus is that he showed us what is so unique about us. That each of us is a child of God, capable of loving everyone we meet, forgiving the wrongs done to us, and to be a healing presence to those who are suffering. Jesus felt God in his very being, but that doesn't mean he claimed to be God.
We too carry the image and being-ness of God in our being. The intimacy Jesus felt with God is not beyond any of us feeling such intimacy. The point of Jesus being called God's beloved son in whom God was well pleased was not to keep such good news to himself but to be awakened to the truth that every person Jesus would meet was a child of God just like him. This is embodied in his proclamation of the Kingdom of God being at hand, to awaken to a reality of God that encompassed and subsummed the reality of our making.
According to the SG, Jesus intended to redeem this sense of being children of God in his fellow Jews and to proclaim that the Kingdom of God was not something to wait for, but rather that they were, in the midst of God's Kingdom, even though Judah was being occupied by the imperial army of Rome. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was something that has existed since the dawn of time. "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof" was an undoubtedly familiar Psalm (42: 1-2) to Jesus. When Jesus talked of repentance because the Kingdom of God was at hand, he was asking people to wake up to what is present already and to reach out and grab it. The reality of the transient world of our making is only a small shadow compared to the cosmos of God's creating.
In the world of our making, things rarely are what they seem to be. Jesus attempted to alleviate the sense of panic we often feel when it comes to the problems we face. He did this by setting an example for us to emulate in our lives. He advanced the Golden Rule to its highest level - the love of one's enemies. Goodness and mercy outweighed bitterness and vengeance. While Jesus did not answer all the question or solve all our problems, he provided us with an ethical template to address them, which has yet to be fully implemented.
The closest humans, after Jesus' time, ever came to collectively implementing the teachings of Jesus was in the peaceful protests started by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and the Peace and Reconciliation Movement headed by Desmond Tutu in the Union South Africa. It took two thousand years for Jesus' teachings to bear some evidence of it truthfulness. What didn't free India, promoted the civil rights of Black in the United States, or healed the racial wounds in South Africa was telling people that Jesus died for their sins. Rather it was taking to heart Jesus' teachings about the Kingdom of God; whose only directive is to love God by loving that which God loves. and the the path to realize this love is to enact justice through peaceful means and patient persistence, seeking opportunities to forgive, practice humility, and show mercy.
Jesus lives through his teachings. If the resurrection story means anything beyond the possibility, if not the probability, that there is more to life than this life, it is that it demonstrates that importance of Jesus' life-giving teaching in this life.
Our understanding of what theistic religion refers to as God is always evolving as we learn more of the macrocosm and the microcosm of the cosmos we are part of. While the tribalism of nationalism continues to threaten our existence as a species, Jesus' teachings and ethical approach to life serves as a guide to seeing beyond the mere moral values and barriers we create in God's name, in order to allow us to embrace the one and only judgment God has made regarding what God from the very beginning created, that it was very good. That we are "very good" and "well-pleasing" in God's sight is something difficult to grasp when much of the evidence in our daily lives argues against that judgment, but that eternal judgment, made at the Alpha of time resonates through time to the Omega of time.
Jesus, as depicted in the Synoptic Gospels, understood that. It was what allowed him to approach lepers, the foreigner, and the social outcasts of his day. It is what exposed the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his day and our day. Reclaiming Jesus' humanity is vital to understanding the Gospel message, the Good News that God sees our goodness even when we don't; that we can live into being the children of God called us to be just as Jesus lived into being the son God called him to be.
In future posts, we will examine the importance of this totally human Jesus which is a gleaned from the Gospels.
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Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
