Hilton Head Island, SC – December 20, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 2:1-11; II Corinthians 5:14-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – That is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the ministry of reconciliation. – II Cor. 5:19 (RSV)
PREACHING PROBINGS FOR A NON-ADVENT ADVENT
3. The Focus for Christmas: Jesus or God?
The liturgical season of Advent is always the four Sundays prior to Christmas. Because I was ordained as a minister fifty years ago on Friday, and because I have been concentrating for two Sundays on my thoughts regarding a half-century of preaching, I have not had truly Advent themes this Advent until today. But even now we shall not be looking at the birth of Jesus per se, but rather at his life and public ministry, and especially at his death and resurrection.
Let me begin by making what seems to me to be an undeniable historical observation. Jesus of Nazareth did not become an important historical figure until well beyond his crucifixion, which probably occurred sometime between 29 and 35 CE or so. During his lifetime, he did attract some followers, but there certainly were not thousands of them, and their allegiance to Jesus was likely not even noticed by the great majority of the Jews who were then living in the Roman province of Judea. Jesus had carefully selected twelve disciples, to represent the twelve sons of Jacob and the twelve tribes of Israel. He also had other disciples, among them a number of women, which was highly unusual for any religious leader at that time. But when Jesus came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and a crowd of people followed him into Jerusalem, there were probably at most a few hundred, and almost certainly not multiple thousands.
On VJ Day in 1945, millions of people marched down the main streets of cities and towns all over America and other Allied nations. There were perhaps a million on Fifth Avenue in New York alone. But once the parades were over, they were over. People went back to their normal lives, glad that the great trauma was behind them.
When Jesus died on Good Friday, the people who had joined the triumphal entry into the Holy City quickly disappeared . Even on Easter, there were only a few who truly believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead. Over the next few weeks, more of the original followers of Jesus also came to believe that he had been resurrected. But it took many decades before as many as a million Christians had emerged to be convinced that in Jesus of Nazareth, God had accomplished something utterly unique in the history of the world. Many of them believed Jesus was God’s Messiah, the Son of God, and, in some powerful but inexplicable manner, God Incarnate.
In liturgical terms, Christmas is technically the Feast of the Incarnation. When Jesus was born, Christians believe that God appeared in human flesh among humans. So the Christmas question always is this: Should the focus at Christmas be on Jesus or on God? Who is the central figure here?
If the Gospels are essentially correct in their brief descriptions of the ministry of Jesus, all of his disciples and the four Gospel writers themselves put their emphasis on Jesus, not God. It isn’t that they ignored God, but their focus was on the man they accompanied who spoke like no one they had ever heard, and healed the sick, and uttered marvelous parables.
It is not at all surprising that the original followers of Jesus put their life’s emphasis on him and on what he said and did. Jesus truly was unlike anyone who ever lived. He was the epitome of charismatic power, the essence of unconditional love incarnate, the proclaimer of a new understanding of God that no one had ever heard before.
Did Jesus actually do what the Gospels say he did, and did he actually say everything that they attribute to him? Many Christians believe so. Others cannot be so certain. Nevertheless, even the most tepid Christians are convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was one of the greatest people in history, if not the greatest.
It should not astonish us that some of Jesus’ contemporaries were astonished by him. After all, they were with him during the three-year public ministry. They saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears what he did and said. Had we been there, we too would have been astonished.
But the crucifixion changed all that in one immense, cataclysmic, catastrophic stroke. On Maundy Thursday Jesus was with the twelve disciples in the Upper Room for the Last Supper, and by three o’clock the next day he had died on a cross. All their hopes and dreams were shattered, along with those of all the other followers of Jesus. Whatever they believed or thought about Jesus was destroyed in a cruel instance of disastrously misplaced political and religious power gone completely amuck. Over three calendar days, and over the next forty hours or so, Jesus was in a tomb, a tomb belonging to his cryptic follower, Joseph of Arimathea, about whom a lovely legend in England eventually emerged connecting Joseph and Jesus.
And then … and then … Jesus was alive again! Jesus Christ is risen today; Alleluia! The day of resurrection, earth tell it out abroad! The strife is o’er, the battle done!
Easter is the historical origin of Christianity --- not the birth of Jesus, not the life of Jesus, not the death of Jesus, but Easter. If the original followers of Jesus did not believe without doubt that he was raised from the dead by God, there would be no Christianity.
But even that isn’t the whole story of Christianity’s origin. The interpretation by Saul of Tarsus of Jesus’ life and particularly his death also was an absolute necessity in the evolution of the Christian religion. To Paul, the crucifixion was The Greatest Pivotal Event in human history. It was not a tragedy, it was a triumph, God’s triumph for our salvation. What Paul declared about Jesus became the orthodox Christian position on Jesus from that time to this.
You will remember that Saul initially was a persecutor of Christians. He was an observant Jew who originally believed Jesus was both a fraud and a great threat to what Saul thought Judaism should be. But after his Damascus Road experience, Saul (later Paul) became the apostle of Jesus without whom there would be no Christianity. It was Paul who became the primary missionary to the Gentiles. By the time he died, nearly the only people becoming Christians were Gentiles. Virtually no Jews at all were being converted to believe the claims of Paul and the other apostles about Jesus.
So what, in essence, were those claims? Paul taught that the crucifixion of Jesus is the primary, and indeed the only factor, which brings salvation to the human race. Paul proclaimed that those who believe Jesus died as the necessary sacrifice to save us from our sins shall be saved into eternal life by God. There is far, far more to it than just that, but that is the essence of Paul’s theology, which is really far more Christology than theology.
Although the primary focus of Judaism has always been on God and God alone, and although Paul always considered himself a Jew, the focus of Paul’s preaching and teaching was mainly about Jesus, not God. We need to understand this is in marked contrast to the preaching and teaching of Jesus. In the Gospels, with the exception of the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, Jesus’ own focus was always on God, and not on himself. Except for the Fourth Gospel, Jesus made very few claims about himself or about his part in the divine plan for the world. Instead, Jesus talked primarily about God and about how he, Jesus, was called to proclaim what he frequently referred to as “the kingdom of God.” God was doing a new thing, said Jesus, and Jesus invited and encouraged people to join together in the advancement of God’s kingdom.
What I am attempting to establish here is that between the execution of Jesus and the completion of what Christians call the New Testament, there was a major shift among post-Jesus Christians in their understanding of who Jesus was and what he said and did compared to the Christians who actually knew and lived with Jesus during his brief ministry in the Galilee. To Peter and the other early followers, Jesus eventually was perceived as the Messiah, but not as the Son of God in a theological sense and certainly not as the Second Person of the Trinity. In fact the concept of the Trinity did not start to coalesce until the early 4th century.
Thus Jesus became elevated in the “later” Early Church (so to speak) from the way he was perceived in the earliest Early Church. By the 21st century of the Christian Era, probably a majority of Christians put their own personal theological emphasis on Jesus rather than on God. It is very understandable why that should have happened. Every reasonable person realizes that Jesus of Nazareth was an historical personage, someone who actually lived in the 1st century of the Common Era. It is much easier to conceptualize Jesus than God. God is exclusively spiritual, said Jesus and the other writers of both the Old and New Testaments, and “spirit” or “spiritual beings” are ideas that are far more difficult for us to grasp than physical beings. In this world no one has ever seen God, because He is not visible. But a certain number of people in the 1st century actually saw Jesus, because Jesus was a physical person, and therefore they and others in later centuries could visualize Jesus much more easily than they could visualize God. Intellectually we tend to be most comfortable with what we know intimately, and we know physical beings far better than we know spiritual beings. In truth, we may feel we do not know spiritual beings at all.
And so the focus of Christianity came to be centered on Christ rather than on God. It was as inevitable as it was inadvisable, at least according to Jesus and the earliest Christians.
In terms of a Trinitarian understanding of God, there are three distinct kinds of Christians: God-Christians, Jesus-Christians, and Holy Spirit-Christians. To put it in slightly different words, there are Father-Christians, Son-Christians, and Holy Spirit-Christians. Son-Christians are mainly Evangelicals, Holy Spirit-Christians are mainly Pentecostals, and Father- or God-Christians are found among many Mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or other odd ducks such as yours truly.
I readily admit that for the past forty years or so, I have put my emphasis on God the Father much more than on God the Son or God the Holy Spirit. If the truth is told, I make no distinction at all between God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. To me, “the Father” and “the Holy Spirit” are one and the same. However, also to me, although probably not to the great majority of Christians, Jesus and God are not the same. Jesus never claimed he and God were the same, I believe, despite Paul and many others subsequently claiming it to one degree or another.
Heaven knows I have ridden this theological hobby horse several times in your hearing, and several times in the hearing of other congregations who were subjected to my theological peculiarities and eccentricities. This may be the last time I ride this horse - - - maybe. However, I being I, I don’t promise it.
But why on earth would I do this on the Sunday before Christmas, of all times? Why not just drink in the wonder of the newborn baby and Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and wise men and Bethlehem and the “whole nine Christmas yards”? Why not let it go at that?
The answer, I suppose, is that I am too convinced of what I am convinced of to leap happily into the manger and revel in the little baby. The little baby has nothing intrinsically to do with the divine plan of God. The young boy, the teenager, the young adult are not part of the plan either. Only when the 30-year-old Jesus (or thereabouts) was baptized by John in the Jordan River and he began going about the Galilee preaching the kingdom of God did God’s plan for the salvation of the entire world start to take place.
Do you want proof of that? In the Bible there is no real proof for anything, but there is support for various positions, and to support my God-Christian position, I cite none other than the apostle Paul himself. In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul began by summarizing what he believed was the essence of the Christian Gospel, and how he was involved in it as a missionary to Gentile Christians around the Mediterranean Basin. In Jesus something entirely new had happened, Paul insisted. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (II Cor. 5:17-18).
Then, to make his point even more explicit, Paul said, “That is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (5:19). Did you hear it? God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself! In Christ, through Christ, by means of Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not to Jesus, but to God!
Jesus is the agent of reconciliation; he is not the Reconciler! Jesus is the agent of redemption; he is not the Redeemer! God is the Reconciler and Redeemer! That is what Jesus came to proclaim. He didn’t come to proclaim himself, but rather to proclaim what God was doing by means of His kingdom on earth, of which Jesus was the major spokesman.
This is important stuff, Christian people. This Christmas stuff is important stuff. Unless we get it right, or so I am led to believe, we misappropriate Christmas and what it truly means. Christmas is about God and what He was eventually to do through the baby born in Bethlehem, and what He did through Jesus, and what He is still doing through Jesus. But it is ultimately God who does it, not Jesus, or at least not essentially Jesus.
God never lets up on us, because Jesus never lets up on us. God wants us to get it right. Yet even if we don’t get it right, God will reconcile us and redeem us anyway, because He is God, and we are His children, and He never ever gives up on anyone. God always wins out in the end, with everybody. Hallelu-Jah; praise God! It’s Christmas! God be praised! And Jesus too!