THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
WHO DO THEY SAY THAT I AM?
by Rev. Mike Young
Sermon Preached Easter Sunday, March 14, 1999
at the First Unitarian Church of HonoluluRobert W. Funk, Biblical scholar, is the founder of the "Jesus Seminar." He begins the introduction to Honest to Jesus with the assertion that, looking back on the first century, we presume that, of course, those folks were just terribly literalistic. We assume they were superstitious folk and had no appreciation for symbol, image, metaphor, or simile. We enlightened folk of the present day, modern as we are, are able to understand that these things were symbolic and metaphorical. Funk insists that, in fact, the evidence of the writings themselves suggest very loudly that those writers knew perfectly well that they were using metaphors. They were wrestling with very real human experiences and expressing them in the most powerful metaphors and images available to them.
Let me set the stage a little. The first part has to do with expectation. Even before Y2K there was Y0K. As you may or may not know, one of the things that was going on in the Middle East in the first centuries B. and C.E. was that the precession of the equinoxes had just moved the first day of Spring from the constellation of the Ram into the constellation of the Fish. Indeed, and for this reason, the earliest Christian symbol was not the cross, but the fish.
You've seen the fish on the back of people's cars. Sometimes you see "Darwin" written inside. My second favorite one has Darwin inside but the fish has got a wrench in its hand. I have to admit that my favorite is one from the opposition. It is a picture of the fish with "Darwin" inside and the regular fish is eating the Darwin fish. We have this wonderful guerilla theater theological debate going on on the backs of our automobiles.
But that expectation was very real in the minds of those who lived 2,000 years ago. There is an incredibly rich Jewish apocalyptic (concerning last things) literature. It's in prophetic poetry that describes the end of the present Age. Everything is going to change. The images and metaphors that are used for it are things like "the Messianic Age" will come. The expectation was of Gabriel blowing his horn and the angels of God coming down and defeating His enemies. The imagery is wild and imaginative and any citizen on the streets of Nazareth or Bethlehem or Jerusalem would have been intimately familiar with this. There were preachers and miracle workers and representatives of various versions and variations of this all over the place. You've heard of the Essenes. The Essenes were simply one of a dozen or more groups that were looking to precipitate the end. They were expecting a major transformation. Something was going to happen.
The last half of the 19th century, as scholars began to get both archeological and linguistic evidence for the material that's in our New Testament, there emerged a very popular historical Jesus movement. Albert Schweitzer virtually put it to death by a pair of books that he wrote, insisting rather dramatically and rather persuasively that the language and imagery of our New Testament is so steeped in that first century "end of the world" imagery that everything that happened then was interpreted through those eyes. That end of the world didn't happen was one of the early crises in the Christian church. In fact, the whole book of First Peter in the New Testament is an attempt to deal with the fact that it didn't happen. Schweitzer says that because of that pervasive overlay with the apocalyptic expectation there is almost nothing we can say about the historical Jesus.
With succeeding scholarship the Jesus Seminar is of the opinion they can pull some of that historical Jesus out of background noise. But even they recognize that apocalyptic expectation was the context in which all of this occurred.
So who did they think this guy was?
We recently had a house guest who was quite fascinated with and read several of the books that I have out of the Jesus Seminar tradition. She was interested in querying me at some length about the material. Afterwards she said, "This stuff is really quite interesting and I think I understand and get the message. I guess it's OK as long as you understand that Jesus was the son of God."
One of the things that has happened theologically to western Christian culture inundated folk--whether you happen to be Jewish or Buddhist or Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Evangelical and Reformed Expiationists or whatever--is that we have breathed that in with the atmosphere: "Jesus is the Son of God."
Here is the irony. Imagine I were to time-machine you back to first century Sapphora or Nazareth or Bethlehem or Jerusalem and you asked some of those ordinary local folk, "What would it mean to describe somebody as a "Son of God"? They would invariably have said to you, "Well, that's what our Jewish heritage called anyone who is doing the will of God whether he knows it or not." Indeed, Isaiah, the prophet, says Cyrus, the king of Persia, is a Son of God, a Messiah, because he's doing God's will. Certainly Cyrus had no idea he was doing that. "So," you would say then to this person you are talking to on the street, "what about 'Son of Man'?" They would laugh and they'd say, "Oh, well, that's a nice pun that we use around here." "Son of Man" in Aramaic is a way of referring to oneself without saying "I." This Son of Man might go to the market today; this Son of Man might go to the well instead. We use a similar circumlocution: "One might do this or one might do something else."
That's exactly the way in which "Son of Man" was used in ordinary parlance in Aramaic in Jesus' day. But one of the wild-eyed prophets, a man named ben Sirach, identified "the" figure who was going to come to inaugurate this huge transformation that was going to change everything as the "Son of Man." Everyman, everyone, anyone, someone. Can you see the image, the metaphor?
So, we begin arguing about whether Jesus was the Son of God, or the Son of Man; and what that might mean. Then we bump into St. Paul. An educated Jew and a Roman citizen. He knew the law. He was probably a high muckety-muck with the Sanhedrin, a temple lawyer. His job originally was to persecute these Christians who were threatening the cozy relationship with Rome. Then he got converted, and ended up being the Apostle who goes out to the Greek world to interpret this very Jewish experience to the Greco-Roman world. St. Paul knew perfectly well what "Son of God" and "Son of Man" meant in the Jewish context. He goes out and he says to Greeks: "Jesus was the Son of God according to his divinity, Son of Man according to his humanity." Metaphors that Greeks could understand that would have been wholly inconceivable to a first century Jew. He is playing with metaphors, trying to communicate a powerful transformative idea and experience into the minds and hearts of folk who weren't there when it happened. He knew these were metaphors. AND, the early church quite comfortably leaves the contradiction between Paul's usage and the Gospels usage laying there in plain sight, so THEY also knew they were metaphors,
That's what we use poetic language for, for evoking in others the poet's experience. That's what we use religious language for, for evoking in one another the shared experience of the community.
It is interesting, however, that in his Letter to the Phillipians where St. Paul talks about Jesus, the language that he uses is that Jesus "emptied himself" to become that elect special one of God. "He emptied himself." Wrestle with that image. For those of us with Buddhist experience it rings with a familiar tone.
The gospel of Mark has Jesus become the elect one at the time of his baptism. Luke and Matthew have miraculously-born versions but not the same version. The gospel of John has Jesus identified with "the Word." The gospel of John begins "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God." And here, again, wrenched out of its first century context, trying to read it as if it were the Tao-te-ching, or a piece of magical literature, we miss a nuance that is powerfully and maybe even beautifully there. The logos (the Word) was the image of creativity in one of the major Greek-Jewish philosophies. The logos was that rational creative urge or force, that aspect of the universe constantly creating the new, the unprecedented, out of the old. The logos: the meaning creating feature of the universe.
Today, if I tell you that Jesus, by whatever historical, biological, theological, or miraculous process became Son of God, One with God; you would look at me and say, "Well, all right, if you say so, but, please, do that with your tongue in your cheek." And yet, if I were to say to you, "Here was a man who the people who knew him said had brought his life into such sync with the tao that it might almost be true to say he was one with the tao," you would say, "Oh, well, that may be stretching the metaphor some but, yes, I understand what you mean." And yet, the Chinese concept of tao and the Jewish concept of logos are so close that they almost mesh and match.
It is not the case that there are two versions of Christianity extant today: one, ancient, literal, and anti-logical chocked with you-have-to-take-it-on-faith doctrine that you are required to believe to be a nice person; the other, recent, metaphorical and watered down just to keep the institution alive. Liberal Christianity has been there all along. Labeled "heresy," yes. A minority report, it's true. But the literalistic version is, in fact, the deviation, dating only from the eruption of open warfare between religion and science.
What we have still alive in our midst is a memory that has persisted and has from time to time, eon to eon, reanimated communities that have called themselves Christian. Something happened and continues to happen.
The first two centuries of the Christian heritage produced a mass of material. The Jesus Seminar tries to pull out of all of that mass of teaching some of the pieces that look like they may very well be the kind of thing that was in the mouth of Jeshua bar Joseph, that first century rabbi. Interestingly enough, it is the most uncompromising pieces, the hard teachings, that look like they have the best claim on authenticity. He was hard on everybody. His teaching was demanding; demanding of a different quality of relationship between people and a different quality of straightforward honestness with oneself.
One of the things we westerners have done is to have turned the message into the man instead of keeping the message the message. One of the ways we have ducked and dodged the message is by turning the man into God, to elevate the man to escape the teaching. "Sure, HE did it. After all, he was just God down here walking around pretending." I'm quite serious in suggesting that, theologically, this is what we have had a tendency to do. Those who have insisted, "No, no. This thing has to do with the ways in which issues emerge out of my life and make sense to me and touch and transform me, that's what makes a difference" have been right.
Still, the easiest answer is to dismiss it as conjured up by Paul, as made up out of whole cloth by somebody, Josephus, perhaps, or perhaps he was a fraud that, despite himself, got taken seriously. Or finally, to take Schweitzer's insistence seriously, he is simply lost to the mists of mythic history.
It remains the case that the hardest part of all of that to explain is not the empty hole. It is not who it is they did or didn't say he was. The hardest part of the whole wonderful, fascinating story to explain is what happened to the people. The one historical fact that we know for certain is that whatever it is that happened back then, fraud, miracle, very human transformation out of abject despair; whatever it was that happened took a small community and turned them into one of the most dynamic communities that the world has ever seen. They went out into the parts of the world that no one identified with, out to the slaves -- and bear in mind, a good third of the population in those days were slaves or serfs or under somebody's heel -- sent them out into the rejects of history of their time and turned those rejects into a vital community. 300 years later, when the megalomaniac Constantine looks around for the best instrument for consolidating his empire, the instrument that he sees is Christianity. They had, in 300 years, turned that batch of dejected, despairing folk into a dynamic community with guts, with profound things happening within it. And every time small communities of people have committed themselves to trying to keep that kind of open richness, caring about one another in the common, ordinary pieces of our every day; every time, that dynamic has been still available, quite irrespective of the vocabulary, or the theology.
Those who are a part of the Kingdom of God, who understand what this world could be if we spread that sense of community from where it is now to beyond ourselves; those who are a part of the Sangha, the Buddhist community, who begin to understand what it means to have Buddha nature in common with everyone, trying to bring the Buddha nature to realization in all of our communities; those within Islam, who understand that surrender to Allah does not mean driving Jews out into the ocean, but means creating a different kind of community here amongst each other, with all of the people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike; those who understand themselves as being one with the tao; those who understand themselves as being one with Brahma: all of the religious images of the many heritages of the human spirit. These are not alternate realities, but alternate versions of a consistent insight of the human spirit. To live as if what was unfolding, was fully unfolded, and by living as if that unfolding reality were, indeed, real to make it unfold a little bit more.
Faith, trust, taking a chance, yes. And every time the human spirit has taken that chance it pays off a little bit.
It seems a chance worth taking.