Will the real Jesus please stand up?

The following is an address prepared for a service at Chester recently which ended up being a discussion instead so was never delivered.
 

I remember a comedy car sticker from the eighties that was supposed to be funny but always worried me. It read, 'Jesus is coming back: Look busy.' We probably all know what this meant. It was a reference to this idea of an end of history, a judgment day, when according to some, Jesus was going to come back as a kind of warrior king, rewarding those who followed him and condemning the rest. It was an idea that I found, and still find, pretty unsavoury, and it seemed a long way removed from the Jesus of my earlier childhood, the man from Nazareth who talked about forgiveness and equality, the man so often referred to as the 'Prince of Peace.'

 

I decided to talk about Jesus today because I consider myself a Unitarian Christian. My spiritual journey has evolved over time but instinctively I have kept Jesus at the centre and I think I always will. In talking about Jesus I am, of course, getting to the heart of what Christianity is all about. It is interesting to note that in Judaism the decisive revelation of God is considered to be found in a book, the Torah and similarly Muslims consider the Qur'an to be the decisive revelation with Muhammed being the revealer but not the revelation itself. In Christianity, however, the decisive revelation of God's character is not the written word but a person – Jesus. That, I think, can be both liberating and constricting. It's liberating because it suggests that what matters is a relationship rather than obedience to a prescribed set of rules. Any kind of healthy relationship allows a person to be, to a large extent, themselves and that is how it is with Jesus. Read the gospels and you see a pattern of Jesus meeting people where they are, whether they are important interpreters of religious law, tax collectors, fishermen, prostitutes or whoever else. In the world view of Jesus, everyone is a person of worth, everyone matters, everyone can be themselves and Jesus won't behave as if they are beneath him.  On the other hand the idea of Jesus as the decisive revelation of God's character is tricky because many Christians feel unable to be properly critical of some of the claims made for Jesus.  This is the Christian holy-of-holies and messing with it seems profoundly dodgy.

 

Here's my problem, and bear in mind I am speaking only from my own experience and no one has to agree. One of the barriers in my own faith journey has been that ever since my adolescence, I have been aware of at least 3 different versions of Jesus in the bible and my view has been further fogged over the years by the different claims made for him by people coming from different theological and political positions. I am indebted to Dr Andrew White, who I heard recently speaking on a Unitarian podcast recorded in Quincy, Illinois who explored the very issue that I am talking about today. He teaches New Testament at an American college and he was referring to the fact that many of his students attend his courses with very little knowledge of the gospels but very fixed ideas of who Jesus was, based less on the bible than the cultural values they have grown up with. He says that when he asks students who they think Jesus was they tell him that he was white, he talked a lot about ethics, particularly those revolving around sexual purity, he opposed abortion and gay rights and his main message was believe in me or go to hell. Doesn't that sound terrible? And doesn't something within you say that can't be right and recognise it as a contemporary cultural obsession rather than any kind of eternal truth? It's an uninformed mindset that scholars readily dismiss but it illustrates the extent to which the real Jesus, insofar as it is possible to get to him, has been lost amidst centuries of cultural baggage with which we have weighed him down. As I said I grew up with 3 Jesuses – the first was a human being who spoke about social justice and cared for people – the pre-Easter Jesus if you like. The second was post-Easter, a Jesus who had risen from the dead, who was recognizable but not recognizable, human but able to walk through walls, a Jesus I could only really make sense of symbolically. The third Jesus was very different – he was a warrior king, the one from the car bumper sticker I mentioned earlier, the one who would judge people and who was used by people I met to judge others. Andrew White referred to this version of Jesus as faith reduced to fire insurance against hell with Jesus being the policy product.

 

White also referred to six main literary sources that contributed to the portrayals of Jesus we get in the bible, from Q, which does not survive but is a clear influence on the early gospels and emphasizes the more human aspects of Jesus right through to the warrior king language of texts like Revelation. It seems to me that the process of telling stories and making claims about Jesus over time has been like a game of Chinese whispers. I’m sure everyone has played Chinese whispers. One person whispers something in someone else’s ear, and they whisper to the next person and so on and so on. Thus you start out with ‘Jim is wearing blue trousers today’ and you end up with ‘Tim is swearing very loudly okay.’ In the process of remembering Jesus, I feel this kind of process may have happened. In early texts, we see a very human Jesus, with no claim of a virgin birth or being raised from the dead, a Jesus with a lot to say about social justice, right relationships, and fairness. In subsequent texts Jesus appears more divine and less human. By John, divinity looms larger than humanity, with Jesus making 46 ‘I am’ statements, each referring to his divine status in some way.

 

What I don't want to suggest is that all of these later ideas about Jesus have no value. I must confess to being completely put off by the warrior king of Revelation, not least because that Jesus seems so very far removed from the Jesus of earlier texts. Perhaps this Jesus is more a fantasy scenario for early followers of Jesus than a prophecy of things to come. The Post-Easter Jesus texts make more sense to me in a symbolic way. Indeed, I think there is something profound about this idea of Jesus as simultaneously human and somehow divine that attracts me to this day but it works for me in large part because I don't take it literally.  So, for example, I don't want to stop celebrating Easter because I've moved to the Unitarians. I might not believe in a literal resurrection but I see tremendous value in this story of life overcoming death, hope triumphing over despair, and love overpowering hate. It has inspired Christians for 2000 years and continues to inspire me. That Easter story is echoed in the natural world in the coming of spring, when through an annual miracle of nature, life springs in places where there did not appear to be any sign of life just a few weeks before – hope in a hopeless situation.

 

I love the Easter story as a story but for the most part I draw my inspiration from the pre-Easter Jesus. The issue of divinity I would explain in this way – Jesus was a human being, sharing all the frailty of the human condition. He lived and died as all people do but human though he was, Jesus is, for me, the ultimate example of what the God-filled, spirit-filled, or love-filled life looks like. I think we see this most clearly in the early accounts of Jesus. I think of the Jesus of Mark's gospel, a reluctant messiah in many ways, a human being crying out to God from the cross. I think also of aspects of the Jesus story we find in Luke's gospel, a Jesus of social justice who advocated an upside down kind of kingdom in which the last would be first and the first last. This is a radical Jesus, challenging us to think about our own role in making our communities and our world better and fairer. It is a vision of Jesus that is at the heart of liberation theology, a way of thinking that invites us, to coin a phrase, to recognise the face of Christ in the poor and oppressed.

 

This Jesus, this radical, loving human being whose life experiences included times of sorrow and times of despair is a person I suspect we can all respond to with warmth. More importantly this Jesus challenges us to lives of radical love in action. But so much of the time, that Jesus is lost in the fog of many of the claims that people have made about him so that the dominant issues in much of the discourse about Jesus is on themes such as the virgin birth, the existence of evil spirits or the idea of the warrior hero who may return at any moment to judge us all.

 

In his talk on Jesus, Andrew White made the very good point that as far as possible we should try to reclaim the teachings of Jesus and distinguish these from other people's teachings about Jesus. I remember years ago someone telling me that it was wrong to pick and choose what to believe when it came to Jesus. It was either all right or none of it was but that seems a smokescreen to me. It seems to me that the Jesus who lived and breathed on planet earth would probably be baffled by virgin birth stories circulating about him. As a human being, he may have felt very closely connected to God but would he have thought of himself as God or were those words put into his mouth by a later author aiming at a different kind of truth? And would Jesus really have recognised himself as a person obsessed with sexual ethics? I suspect not but I recognise that even raising these questions in some churches would get me in trouble. Andrew White has faced the same problem teaching New Testament and offers students the following story:

 

Two men are talking about how much they love their wives. The first says, 'When she was younger, my wife won Miss World, she went on to be a film star, and she made some really shrewd business decisions and now she has millions. She's loaded and that's why I love her.' The second man says, 'My wife and I don't always get along. Sometimes we argue a little bit and we need to get away from each other. Still, I don't know how she does it but she always seems to know when I need time to be alone, when I need to talk and when I need a hug and I try to do the same for her. She's my companion on the road of life and that's why I love her.'

 

The obvious question is which man loves his wife the most?  The one who was all about what people see, the superficial details, the appearance of wealth or the one who recognized that his relationship with his wife was not perfect but who appreciated the way in which his life was fulfilled by those moments he shared with her that did make sense.

 

An evangelical preacher might ask how your relationship with Jesus is and in a different way I pose the same question today. Are we put off engaging with the Jesus story by all the baggage that has crowded around it? How well do we really know Jesus?

 

Perhaps it's time to try to get back to the teachings of Jesus rather than the many conflicting stories and doctrines about Jesus. Less of Jesus the judge, the post apocalyptic character to be feared, and more of that remarkable, loving man of 2000 years ago, who met people where they were and whose story still meets people where they are, whose life and ministry continues to change the lives of millions, who earned the title 'Prince of Peace.'

 

A Reading: Nick Cave on Mark:

The Christ that the Church offers us, the bloodless, placid 'Saviour' – the man smiling benignly at a group of children, or calmly, serenely hanging from the cross – denies Christ His humanity, offering us a figure that we can perhaps 'praise' but never relate to. The essential humanness of Mark's Christ provides us with a blueprint for out own lives, so that we have something that we can aspire to, rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences, rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy. Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness, keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity – our ordinariness, our mediocrity – and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and to fly. In short, to be Christ-like.

From Revelations: Personal responses to the Books of the Bible (2005).