Telling the Story of Jesus
Rev. Lee Ann Bryce
Community Christian Church
March 13, 2011
Join me if you know this:
I love to tell the story of unseen things above;
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love;….
(“I Love to Tell the Story,” text by Katherine Hankey)
Tell me the stories of Jesus, I love to hear,
Things I would ask him to tell me if he were here;
Scenes by the wayside, tales of the sea,
Stories of Jesus, tell them to me.
(“Tell Me the Stories of Jesus,” text by William H. Parker)
I have always loved singing these hymns and the many like them that spoke of Jesus. And I was raised on hymns like this and have sung them my whole life. In fact, if you come to our home while I am doing laundry, you are likely to hear me singing them still! Singing hymns about Jesus as a child, I developed a picture of Jesus that continues to inform me today. (Sometimes this is a good thing and sometimes not!) Like most people, what I sang over and over again is what I came to believe.
As I’ve grown older and studied Bible, served as a minister, devoted myself to theological matters, and had countless conversations with people hearing their stories of Jesus, something has become increasingly apparent to me: how we tell the story of Jesus matters. There are many ways of telling the story of Jesus, and how we tell it makes a crucial difference. The way we tell the story can make Jesus either persuasive and compelling or difficult to believe; inspiring and comforting or chock full of fear and shame.
This is of course because of the central role that Jesus plays in Christianity. Maybe it goes without saying, but let’s say it anyway: for Christians, Jesus is the decisive revelation of God. (By the way, claiming Christ as the decisive revelation of God does not preclude affirming other faith traditions and the decisive revelations of God they claim. Indeed progressive Christians honor, respect, and affirm other faith traditions. But for Christians, Jesus is the central figure.
There are many, many ways of telling Jesus’ story within that umbrella definition. There are as many Jesus-es as there are disciples of this remarkable first-century figure. No two people understand or relate to Jesus in exactly the same way. Was Jesus a mystical faith healer? An apocalyptic prophet? A profound teacher? A political insurrectionist?
Walk into the narthex of any number of Protestant churches and you’re likely to find the sentimental blue-eyed, pink-skinned Jesus of artist Warner Sallman gazing beatifically upon your comings and goings. (This is the image that was the object of our reflection during Visio Divina today.) Or, enter the neighboring Catholic church and you’re likely to find an image of a beaten, bleeding, emaciated man suffering on a cross. Different ways of telling the story.
From the Gospels to illustrated Bible storybooks to portrayals in film, to non-fictio and fiction books alike, Jesus has been the subject of considerable spin over the ages. Each tradition and each individual puts their own emphasis on his memory. For many middle-class Americans, the ideal Jesus is the gentle, upstanding, right-thinking suburbanite that you’d love your daughter to date. The notion that Jesus was probably short, dark, a Middle-Eastern peasant rabble-rouser is so far from many people’s capacity to comprehend, that all reason is rejected in favor of our blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, meek and mild.
Today begins a Lenten sermon series about how contemporary Christians understand and tell the story fo Jesus. Let me summarize the primary ways that the story of Jesus has been told, at least in our culture:
I. Jesus as the dying savior, a substitutionary sacrifice for sin. In this view, Jesus paid for our sins by dying in our place. This is the Jesus that many of us grew up with and that we still hear a lot about. Since most of us are familiar with this view, I’ll not spend a lot of time right now developing it. In short, this is Mel Gibson’s Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.
II. Jesus as judge at the 2nd coming. This is the contemporary manifestation of the Left Behind novels. I’ll read an excerpt from the series to better illustrate telling the story of Jesus as judge. This scene is excerpted from the final novel of the series and takes place at the final judgment.
Men and women, soldiers and horses, seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin…Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.
(Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Glorious Appearing, Wheaton, p 225-6)
I included this excerpt because if you haven’t read the Left Behind novels, you might not realize how the image of Jesus as divine judge plays out. It is a definite way that the story of Jesus is being told in our culture. And judging from the books sales of the Left Behind series, many are hearing it.
III. Jesus as divine-human and thus super-human. This is another popular understanding of Jesus and there’s a lot of overlap in these categories. This view emphasizes that Jesus was divine, unlike the rest of us and that even during his earthly life he had divine power and divine knowledge. Though he looked like us and seemed to be one of us, he was really God in human form (and thus not really one of us.)
In the early church, this view was considered to be one of the earliest Christian heresies. It was known as Docetism, from the Greek word meaning “to seem” or “to appear.” Jesus appeared to be human but he really wasn’t, he was really God. We don’t realize that this was once considered heresy, because many of us assume Jesus had divine knowledge in a way that we do not. He could speak for God. He seemed to know the future. He appeared to have divine power (he walked on water, healed the sick, changed water into wine, raised the dead, etc.) (Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, the Teachings, and Relevence of a Religions Revolutionary, 2006).
Robert Capon, a contemporary Christian writer begins his description of this Jesus by quoting the well-known words that opened each episode of the Superman:
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.
In his book, Hunting the Divine Fox, Robert Capon continues:
If that isn’t popular Christology, I’ll eat my hat. Jesus-gentle, meek and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than-human insides – lives for 33 years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Kross, but at the last minute struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven. It’s got it all – including, just so you shouldn’t miss the lesson, Kiddies: He never once touches Lois Lane.
Of course, this view (presented tongue-in-cheek) presents a problem. If Jesus had superhuman power and knowledge, then he cannot truly be a model for human behavior. Yet the New Testament often speaks of Jesus as such. The gospels speak of following Jesus. Paul speaks of imitating Christ. If Jesus had powers that we do not or cannot have, then it’s not a level playing field.
IV. A fourth way of telling the story of Jesus is to focus on his teaching role. All Christians agree that Jesus was a great teacher. Often this view is held by people who don’t quite know what to do with some theological claims about Jesus. Was he really the divinely begotten and only Son of God? Is he the only way of salvation? Are the miracles attributed to him really possible? Skeptics of these claims sometimes lean toward affirming the importance of Jesus in his moral teaching. I don’t know what to think about all that other stuff, but he was a great teacher!
Then usually what happens is that Jesus’ teaching is summarized by some sentimental, general moral precepts that you might want to embroidered on a pillow or something. Things like, love one another. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbor as yourself.
These statements are all good advice, of course, but telling the story of Jesus as a great teacher is inadequate. If this is all Jesus was about, he wouldn’t have been killed. Jesus’ teaching was edgier than this. He upset people with the things he said. The worst thing that happens to teachers is that they don’t get tenure. They’re not executed by the state. Jesus was. The problem with Jesus as teacher is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s shallow.
These are a few of the ways people today tell the story of Jesus. This is not a comprehensive list, of course, and these categories are not mutually exclusive. In the coming weeks we’ll continue telling the story of Jesus and consider the factors that inform us as we 21st century Christians seek to understand and follow him.
I am indebted to Marcus Borg for his lectures at the Canandaigua UCC church I attended last September, as well as Borg’s book, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) as a resource for this Lenten sermon series, Telling the Story of Jesus.
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