JESUS OF NAZARETH AND THE LIBERAL CHURCH

Who Do You Say That I Am?

December 16, 2001

the Rev. James Gertmenian

Text: Mark 8:27-38

To speak of Jesus, known as the Christ, and to ask who he really was, is to take the first step down a well-trod and very long path, knowing fully that those who have gone before have included many of towering intellect, breathtaking spiritual depth, and even nerve-numbing courage. To speak thus publicly, then, demands a heaping dose of humility and a sure trust in the grace of one's audience. I have never lacked the latter so long as I have been at Plymouth, and the former has been pressed on me more and more over these past weeks as I have studied, prayed, and struggled to say what I think and what I have experienced in the one who has been called Messiah, Lord, Son of Man, and Son of God, to name but a few of the thousands of images used through Christian history to describe Jesus.

Today, in the fourth and last sermon in this present series, I want to ask about the notion of Jesus' "divinity," which asking leads, I think, to a larger, more personal question that I'll speak of later. In the meantime, though, let me say that I have no need or desire to be iconoclastic here. Theological liberals such as I - and such as many of you - have no right to dismiss tradition with a condescending nod or to answer those of more orthodox bent with glib rejoinders. To do so is the height of arrogance. If there have been mean rigidities and evangelizing excesses, may God forgive those. But, even if the ancients and others of our forbears held to doctrines which seem less meaningful to us today, we are still bound to bow before those ardent believers as our elders in the faith and to approach with awe and respect the ones who gave the world the strength of their convictions and the witness of their lives. Yet it is also true that we do them - and God - no honor by receiving what they taught and, mistaking timidity for respect, fail to do our own work of re-forging and recasting the language and reality of faith. As I have said, though, our re-working must be done with respect for what has gone before. I may not be able to accept the Nicene Creed, for instance, as my own statement of faith, but I can say it as an homage to those who, encountering Jesus, did their best to put their experience into words. I may not need, in my own belief system, to hold to the virginity of Mary, but I should not cast the idea off as though it were some useless relic, but rather I must lay it down gently, reverently, in a place made honorable by the devotion of so many. And, of course, it's important to remember that if yesterday's language of faith gives way to today's, surely today's will, in some time not so distant, need to be laid aside as well. Will you pray with me?

Gracious God, love us as with stumbling steps and inadequate words we dare to approach your glorious presence and tell of your shining face. Amen.

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In the earliest years of the last millennium, a man whose name was Jesus (or Joshua) lived in Palestine, a territory under the rule of the Roman Emperor. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, though the popular image of him as a country peasant may be vastly overdrawn. Recent excavations have revealed that the city of Sepphoris, a short walk from Nazareth, was a significant, cosmopolitan center, and we have every reason to believe that Jesus fed on the intellectual and economic and religious ferment of that place as much as he did on the simpler fare in his native town. He was a devout Jew. Sometime in his late twenties or early thirties, after a ritual baptism, he became a teacher of wisdom, a prophet calling for radical justice, and an urgent proclaimer of God's coming realm. By many accounts he was able to heal people of their infirmities, both spiritual and physical. He gathered about him a group of devoted followers, some of whom traveled with him from place to place. After three years, when he became troublesome to the ruling religious and civil authorities, they tried him and executed him on a hill outside of Jerusalem.

Days later, Jesus' tomb was discovered empty, and in the ensuing weeks, many of his followers experienced his presence in a way that broke through their old ideas about the divisions between life and death, body and spirit. By their accounts, he spoke with them, ate with them, even touched them and allowed them to touch him. During this period, he gave them a mission, charging them individually and as a group to continue his proclamation of God's realm and to call other men and women to follow in the way of justice, love, and spirit.

During Jesus' lifetime it only began to dawn on his followers that there was something unique about him, but in the time after his death, this dawning thundered over them like a new sun, and they realized that in some way, Jesus had broken history open; that is, he had lived in a way that was so radically new that everything that came after him was colored by his life. His had been no common charisma, no traditional teaching, no ordinary presence.

They found the evidence for this in their own lives. Emboldened by his unaccountable presence to them and later by the indwelling of his spirit in them, they found themselves infused with power, re-born with new purpose, and imbued with a joy that surpassed anything they had known before. The evidence of that seismic event - his life - and its effects on the first followers surround us still today. These very walls are nothing less than an indelible jagged line on the instrument of history, a line that says to anyone who looks here: once, in Jesus of Nazareth, the earth moved, and since that time, people's lives have never been the same.

In those early years after Jesus' death, his followers, transformed by their experience with him, cast about for ways to describe what had happened to them, for ways to talk about Jesus that would convey the impact he had. They borrowed images and words from their own Jewish tradition as well as from Greco-Roman thought. They called him Son of Man, an ambiguous term which at various times had connoted anything from an ordinary human being to an apocalyptic figure who ushers in a new age. They called him Son of God, a term which, as I said last week, was also commonly applied to Caesar among others. They called him Christ, which is the same as Messiah, which translates "anointed one," another phrase which described all of the Kings of Israel as well as other figures of power and authority. They called him Lord (the Greek is kyrios) which at times simply meant "sir," and at other times meant "rabbi," "teacher," or "master." Later on they called him "The Word" (in Greek, logos) which referred to the divine reason that existed before creation. In none of these instances did the believers mean exactly what the words had meant before, and they were well aware that they were speaking in metaphor in any case, but just as a small child lacks vocabulary and must depend on a few general words to describe the whole world, so even the most eloquent, the most learned among Jesus' followers lacked vocabulary, except in the grossest sense to say what had happened to them in Jesus, or to describe who he really was.

Over the next three centuries, the early church tried to build and hone its vocabulary so as to speak more accurately about the person of Jesus and the experience of the first followers. From the first and simplest declaration, "Jesus is Lord," they built and argued and thought and experimented and voted and prayed and edited so that they might say it just right. At one point, everything hung on the difference between the word homoousious and the word homoiousious in trying to describe whether Jesus was of the same substance as God or of similar substance as God. True, even at the time, there were those who thought the arguments meaningless, and one such who attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 said to the debaters that Christ did not "teach us dialectics, art, or vain subtleties, but simple-mindedness which is preserved by faith and good works."1 Yes, but articulation of our faith is a noble task and one which, even in simple-mindedness, demands our time and our effort. I spoke of the Nicene Creed earlier - the one that came out of the Council in 325 - and I wonder if, as an act of respect if not also of assent, you would read it with me. You will find it on page 512 of your hymnal, selection number 52.

I believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets. And I believe one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

It is, to my mind, a magnificently beautiful statement intended to convey the power and meaning of Jesus' life. It does so by claiming divinity for him - "God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God." It describes him as coming "down from Heaven" and asserts that he has now gone back there. Now, I do not doubt for one minute the reality that stands behind those declarations - that something unique happened in Jesus, that his love and wisdom transcended anything anyone had known before, that he represents not only the best in us but also a revelation of that which we cannot see otherwise - but the declarations themselves, the word and the concept of divinity, to say nothing of the images of a spatial heaven, for me at least - for many of us, I imagine - can no longer bear the weight that they are being asked to bear. They don't tell the truth that they were meant to tell but, rather, have become a buffer between us and the original and profound experience that the early followers had of Jesus - namely, that he opened God to them in a way that was, ultimately, inexpressible. To call Jesus "divine" no longer connotes power, nor does it encourage us to follow him. In fact, it does the opposite; it marginalizes him and puts him at such a remove that it becomes impossible even to see him, let alone follow him. When Jesus is called divine, the God that he pointed to gets lost rather than revealed in Jesus' shadow; the proclaimer becomes the proclaimed, the worshipper becomes the worshipped one, results which he surely did not intend.

But what is left then? Is Jesus relegated to being one in a list of good teachers, one in a long line of social reformers, one in a large company of spiritual seers? Thus are we let off the hook, put back in control of the world, no longer encumbered by a sense that the universe is charged with uncontrollable mystery. Thus Jesus is no longer a threat to our complacencies, theological or otherwise, for then we can pick him up and lay him down as easily as we can a volume by any guru. The church becomes just another meeting place, no different from a board room, or a union hall, or a football stadium where the latest purveyor of wisdom holds forth. The ground drops out from under any consistently ethical behavior, leaving behind only well-intentioned acts of enlightened self-interest or of sentimentalized love. This is not what I intend when I suggest that we lay aside ideas of Jesus' divinity.

I mean, instead, that when we lay down some of the old language, the old ideas, we are standing where Peter stood, and where the disciples stood, when Jesus put to them the question, "Who do you say that I am?" The earlier question, "Who do others say that I am?" is the easy part. "Others have said that you are divine, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God. Others have said that you are 'The Anointed One,' the 'Son of God,' the 'Logos.'" That's not hard at all. But who do you say that I am? The question will simply not let us look left or right, neither up nor down, but only straight into the face of it. "Who do you say that I am?" And now he stands among us, no longer disguised by the language of another time, no longer hidden behind titles that we accepted without question until they became meaningless. Now the demand for relationship with Jesus is on us, the need for articulation of our faith our own. Now Christmas is no longer an act of sentimental repetition, but something altogether new in which he comes among us, his deeds fresh, his teachings new, with the life in him undeniable. The crowning words at the end of Albert Schweitzer's historic book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, say it best:

The names in which men expressed their recognition of Him as such, Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, have become for us historical parables. We can find no designation which expresses what He is for us.

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His Fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.2

So, finally, the truth about Jesus is not to be found in sermons, or treatises, or creeds, but in the act of following him. Having questioned all of what we thought we knew, and having gently put aside the titles and notions with which the church has described and contained him, we are meant to see him face to face, and to go with him where he bids us go. There, in the daily struggle for justice, in ordinary works of love, in acts of healing and in moments of God-centered quiet, He reveals Himself. He tells us who He is. A new name shimmers on our tongue, a name the world has never before heard. For now the earth has shaken again. Now we are the ones who are changed. Now, standing on tradition we may yet reach beyond it and so testify to the world the living power of God's unending love.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

1Latourette, Kenneth Scott, A History of Christianity, New York: Harper & Row, 1953, pg. 154. 2Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest Of the Historical Jesus, New York, The

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