Telling the Story of Jesus: The Shaping of Jesus
Rev. Lee Ann Bryce
Community Christian Church
March 27, 2011
Today we continue with our Lenten sermon series, “Telling the Story of Jesus.” The first Sunday of Lent, we began with considering the primary ways that Jesus is viewed in our culture. Then last week we explored the value of seeing the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John through a historical-metaphorical lens. If we understand the gospels not as the divine, infallible Word of God, but rather as memory and testimony of Jesus’ followers in the decades after his life then it impacts how we understand and tell Jesus’ story. We begin to recognize the difference between a pre-Easter Jesus and a post-Easter Jesus. By pre-Easter Jesus, I mean Jesus before his death; by post-Easter Jesus, what Jesus became after his death.
Think about it like this: Jesus’ followers, his closest friends, knew him in a different way after his death than they did before his death. Before his death, they knew him as a finite, mortal, flesh and blood human being. Specifically, he was a Galilean Jew. If his body was typical for that time he might have stood just over five feet tall and weighed 110 pounds. (This would be small by today’s standards, but is considered to be representative of a first century male.) Jesus, 110 pounds soaking wet, had to eat and sleep like any other human being. He was born and he died.
This flesh-and-blood Jesus is no longer living. He is a figure of the past, dead and gone, nowhere to be found. (Don’t worry. I’m not denying Easter, but simply recognizing that Easter does not mean that the flesh-and-blood Jesus who weighed 110 pounds is walking around somewhere.)
After his death, his followers came to know Jesus in a different way. Paul experienced him on the road to Damascus as a brilliant light and a voice. In 2 Cor. Paul says, “Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now” (2 Cor. 5:16). In the gospel stories of Easter, it is clear that Jesus after Easter is different from what he was like before his death. He passes through walls and mysteriously enters locked rooms (John 20). He is mistaken for a gardener near the tomb. Two of his followers walk with him for some time and have an in-depth conversation without recognizing him (Luke 24). He appears and then vanishes. Though we’re not quite sure what this post-Easter Jesus is, the gospel accounts indicate that he was significantly different after his death than the flesh-and-blood person they had come to know before his death.
And so this distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus is nothing new. In Matthew 26:11, Jesus before his death says to his followers, “You will not always have me with you.” Two chapters later, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, after the resurrection, Jesus turns around and says exactly the opposite. Instead of “I will not always be with you,” he says “I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth (28:20). For Matthew, both statements are true. Jesus in the form they had known him before Easter was no longer with them, but Jesus after Easter was with them in a new way, a way that is more lasting, more significant, more-than-literal; the way in which Jesus is with us. The pre-Easter Jesus was finite and mortal. The post-Easter Jesus is a divine reality.
In my opinion, consistent with the views of many scholars and theologians, the pre-Easter Jesus, the finite, mortal Jesus, likely did not consider himself as the Messiah, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Divine Savior of the World. Jesus didn’t talk about himself in this way. He likely did not think that a primary purpose of his life was to die on the cross for the sins of humanity. Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion, Christianity. Jesus was a Jew, whose teaching might well have simply led to a reformation within Judaism. In other words, I’m asking you to consider the possibility that Jesus, in a manner of speaking, is not responsible for Christianity. It was all those who came after Jesus, those who knew him quite well or those who had merely encountered him but whose lives were forever changed by him who are the impetus for the development of what we know as Christianity. Most significantly, it was the apostle Paul, who almost certainly did not meet Jesus, outside of Paul’s dramatic, mystical conversion experience on the road to Damascus.
The Jesus we meet on the surface level of the gospels and the New Testament as a whole, however, is the post-Easter Jesus of the developing tradition. In other words, the gospels reflect a later understanding of Jesus and so the stories are told with this emphasis. Jesus didn’t think of himself as the Messiah, but his story is told in the decades after his death, through the lens of those who had come to consider Jesus the Messiah.
For some, it is actually a more powerful claim that this recognition of Jesus as Messiah came as a testimony of all those who knew him rather than his own self-proclamation. Anyone can come along and say, “I am the king of kings!” Indeed many have. What makes Jesus different is the enduring witness of those who knew him. In the gospels we have a record based on the memories of those who knew him and who said, “We have found in this person, Jesus, spiritual food that feeds our hunger, light that banishes our darkness, hope that overcomes our despair, water that quenches our thirst.”
This gets a little confusing. If we can’t count on the gospels to give us an accurate picture of how Jesus understood himself when he walked the earth; if we must rely on gospel accounts that project later understandings on the stories about Jesus they remember, what can we possibly really know about Jesus? If all we have are post-Easter understandings, how can we know what the pre-Easter Jesus was like?
There are some concrete ways to describe Jesus and his message that can be drawn from the gospels with integrity. We can talk about various factors that shaped who he was starting with world in which he lived. I’ll conclude today’s sermon by briefly considering the culture into which Jesus was born and lived. Then next week we’ll continue with some defining characteristics of Jesus that significantly shaped his message. First, let’s talk about Jesus’ context, his culture.
When we consider a person’s culture, we’re talking about things like political and economic systems, codes of behavior and convention, understandings of how to live, religious traditions and practices, language, technology and more. Culture is what makes a time and place that time and that place. It is what distinguishes life in Rochester from life in Istanbul, life in Zimbabwe from life in the United States and so forth. It is impossible to understand an individual without first understanding his or her context, culture.
Jesus grew up in a Jewish peasant village in the Roman Empire. It was politically oppressive which meant it was ruled by a few. The ruling elites were perhaps 1-2% of the population. The ruling elites all lived in the cities, commonly called the urban elites. There was no middle class. Of the remaining 98% of the population, the ordinary people, were peasants. Some of them lived in the cities, but mostly they lived in rural areas, in the country. What’s more, they had absolutely no voice in the shaping of the society.
Not only did ordinary people have no voice, they were economically exploited by the ruling elite to a shocking degree. The wealthy and powerful few acquired a high percentage of the society’s annual production of wealth. So typically from half to two-thirds of an entire society’s production was held by 1% of the ruling elite. And this tremendous imbalance was defended as being the way God wanted it. The social order was thought to reflect the will of God. “We didn’t set things up like this, God did.” (Are you beginning to get an idea of why Jesus’ parables and teachings that spoke of radical equality
were so challenging to the powerful few? And so empowering to the peasant majority? The idea that God was on the side of the poor and humble was not well-received by the ruling elite. It was a challenge to their power.)
Lastly, Roman societies were marked by intense armed conflict, by organized violence. The ruling elite could increase their wealth and power in a couple of ways. They could increase the agricultural production of all the people under them, all of those peasant farmers, or they could take over land and agricultural production from a neighboring society. And so armies became necessary, whether to increase their own holdings or to defend their holdings against others. It was an extremely violent society. Wars were common. They were not fought for nationalistic purposes, as sometimes happens in the modern world. In Jesus’ day, wars were ruthless battles, where ordinary people were completely expendable; initiated by the ruling elite for the sake of gaining more wealth.
This is the world that Jesus was born into. This is the world that shaped Jesus. It was to the poor people of this world, the peasants, like himself, to whom he told parables like the laborers in the vineyard and the rich master who went on a journey and entrusted his money to his slaves.
In the coming weeks we’ll dig deeper into the man, Jesus, who emerged from a small Galilean village in the Roman Empire and further examine other conditions that shaped 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment