Hilton Head Island, SC – August 16, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 16:13-23; John 14:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” – John 14:6 (RSV)
The Christs We Create
Last Sunday I preached a sermon called Did God Create Us, or Did We Create God? I intended to say that I firmly believe God did create us, but also that all of us, of necessity, create our own concepts of God. We cannot know God without a concept of God, and that, in effect, is who God is to us. It isn’t really that there are billions of Gods, but there are billions of concepts of God. God is One; He is not Many. Nevertheless, there are multiple millions of concepts of God, because there are 7+ billion people in the world, and most of them have a “God-concept.”
Today I want for us to think about the many concepts of Christ we also create, and for similar reasons. We cannot see God at all, but we’re sure that certain people in the 1st century of the Common Era did see Jesus, and most if not all of them formed their own concepts of who he was by having been eyewitnesses to his life. Today, twenty centuries after Jesus lived, we who are Christians also form our own concepts of him, but we do so from a very different perspective. Much of what we conclude about Jesus is determined by what we have heard or read from the four Gospels and from others who have given us their views of Jesus for twenty centuries.
For example, the well-known so-called “new atheists” Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris have a notion of who Jesus was (or is) that is very unlike the notion of Pope Francis or Billy Graham --- or the Ayatollah Khamenei or the Chief Rabbi of Israel or the Dalai Lama. There is a Jesus of history, who actually lived and preached and died, but there also are multitudes of concepts of Christ among all those who think about Jesus, either positively or negatively.
Last week I referred to a group of 19th century German Old Testament scholars who thought deeply about how the Hebrew Bible was put together. At the same time they were doing that, there was another group of European New Testament scholars who attempted to write what they believed were definitive and authoritative biographies of Jesus. Several of them called their books, in a common biographer’s nomenclature, A Life of Jesus. They honestly believed they were able to present factual accounts of the carpenter of Nazareth from their Gospel studies.
This process ended fairly abruptly because of a man named Albert Schweitzer. He was a famous organist, musician, physician, missionary doctor, theologian, and philosopher, one of the most widely talented men of the past two centuries. He wrote a book called The Quest for the Historical Jesus. In it he said that it was impossible to know enough about the Jesus of history to establish anything substantial by way of biographical certainties. Needless to say, that thesis did not meet with universal acclaim, especially among evangelical Christians. Nevertheless, Schweitzer’s ideas strongly influenced other New Testament scholars in the 20th century, some of whom claimed that almost everything in the Gospels is mythological, not historical. Despite what the words “mythology” or “mythological” might suggest to you, that does not mean Jesus did not exist in history, but rather that nearly everything claimed about him cannot be verified historically, because faith traditions of many kinds have insisted on various and often conflicting notions of Jesus as the Christ.
Do not imagine, however, that this is a recent phenomenon. There have always been conflicting ideas of who Jesus was. Many different concepts of Jesus emerged during his life and soon after. None of the four Gospels in the Bible presents exactly the same picture of Jesus as any other Gospel. Furthermore, there were at least a dozen to twenty other gospels that were deliberately excluded by the early Church from the New Testament. These other Gospels were written in the first through the third or fourth centuries CE. There were Gospels attributed to Thomas, Phillip, Peter, Mary Magdalene, and so on. Unfortunately, I cannot take time to explain this phenomenon. Suffice it to say that some of these other Gospels, many of which are called Gnostic Gospels, say nothing about the crucifixion or resurrection of Jesus. One, the Gospel of Thomas, says almost nothing about what Jesus did, but is solely a collection of things Jesus said. Some New Testament experts believe that the Gospel of Thomas was written just before or at the time the Synoptic Gospels were written.
Even within the four biblical Gospels, there are major differences over supposed “facts.” The most commonly accepted ending of the Gospel of Mark, for example, concludes by telling the readers that“ a young man …in a white robe” (an angel? It doesn’t say) told three women who came to Jesus’ tomb that Jesus had risen from the dead, and that that he was going to the Galilee. The women were instructed to tell the disciples what had happened and to go there to meet Jesus. But the very last sentence says, “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Later, maybe after decades or a century or two, someone other than the original writer of Mark thought that was too inconclusive an ending, so he added twelve more verses. This new ending stated that the resurrected Jesus appeared to the disciples (as he did in the other three biblical Gospels), although he did it in Jerusalem, and not in the Galilee, as the young man had told the women that was where Jesus would meet up with them.
Why am I telling you this? It is important for you to know that no two people today, just as no two contemporaries of Jesus, believe exactly the same things about Jesus. We all create a Christ to suit our own theological and Christological convictions. It cannot be otherwise. There is no One True Version Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, although countless Christians insist it must be so. Instead, there are countless versions which are acceptable to those who hold them, but they do not agree on every detail and nuance. It would be a mistake to try to enforce a single, universally accepted concept of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus, who, without doubt, did live in 1st-century Judea. Anyone who denies that Jesus ever lived is simply an anti-Jesus, anti-Christian zealot who has an anti-religious ax to grind. Every Christian of every type also has an ax to grind, but thank God it is not that ax.
The first things ever written about Jesus that made it into the Bible were the letters of the apostle Paul, not the four Gospels. Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, but he never heard Jesus or met him. In fact, to read the epistles of Paul, it seems that he knew very little of what Jesus preached. He knew that Jesus had been crucified, and that his disciples believed that God raised Jesus from the dead. Paul also believed that, because both the Book of Acts and Paul himself claimed the risen Jesus appeared to Paul in a vision on the road to Damascus. Our unison reading this morning is taken from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, Ch. 2, vs. 5-11. It is like a creed before the Church had authorized any creeds. The event upon which Paul focused in those verses was the crucifixion --- not the resurrection, but the crucifixion. In an upcoming sermon I shall address that issue, but we have more than enough to keep us busy for today with other matters.
Let me therefore ask a few potentially explosive questions. Was (or is) Jesus divine, or was he merely human? Was he God Incarnate, God-in-the-Flesh, or was he a human, the Messiah or a prophet or a spokesman of God? Did Jesus believe himself to be divine, or not? Does salvation come from God, or from Jesus --- or from both? And where was God when Jesus was alive?
In general, the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) did not make frequent or lofty claims that Jesus was divine. For the most part, they hardly addressed that issue at all. They did seem to hint, however, that Jesus was the promised Messiah of God, the one foretold in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament. Mark 6 (27-30) and Luke 9 (18-21) have brief descriptions of an episode that is much more familiar to us and considerably longer in Matthew 16, which was our first scripture reading today. In it Jesus asked what the disciples had heard about Jesus from others, and they gave various answers. When the disciples were asked by Jesus who they thought he was, Peter, the most impetuous of the twelve, blurted out that Jesus was the Messiah. Strangely, and in all three versions of the story, Jesus insisted they must tell no one that he was the Christ. You may wonder why he did that, but we shall not take time to attempt an answer.
The Fourth Gospel, John, on the other hand, declares in many different passages that Jesus was not only the Messiah, but God Incarnate, and indeed, God Himself. In words especially intended to inflame Jesus’ theological enemies among the Jews, John says Jesus made the cryptic but incendiary statement, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:48 ff). This harks back to last Sunday’s sermon where I noted that God’s actual name in Hebrew is Yahweh, which literally means I Am or I Am Who I Am. Thus Jesus was using a linguistic play on words to imply that he, Jesus, was and is actually God, Yahweh, I AM: “Before Abraham was, I AM.”
Our second scripture reading will be familiar to most of you, because it is frequently read at funerals and memorial services. At the Last Supper, according to John, Jesus told the disciples that he was going to heaven to prepare a place for them in what he called “my Father’s house,” further telling them that they knew the way where he was going. Thomas, ever the skeptic among them, said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” John tells us that Jesus answered, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).
Allow me to observe that Christians generally tend either to be “Synoptic Christians” or “John Christians.” It is very difficult, in my admittedly subjective opinion, to try to meld the two traditions into one. Another way to state my bias is to say that I wish the early Church had rejected John as a not-valid “hyper-Christological” Gospel, just as it rejected the Gnostic Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas for other reasons. I do not believe Jesus ever claimed to be the incarnation of God or that he himself was God. Instead he saw himself as an ordinary human being with an extraordinary message about God.
Most Mainline Protestants are Synoptic Christians, and most Evangelicals are Johannine Christians, although neither side may be aware of that. Nor can many of them articulate clearly why they are what they are.
Why would the Council of Nicea in 325 CE and other later councils agree to include three Gospels which essentially tell the same story about Jesus and another Gospel which tells a very different story with a much higher Christology? It was, I suspect, a purely political decision, not in the sense of partisan secular politics but in the sense of internal ecclesiastical politics. They were trying to satisfy or placate both types of Christians, the Synopticists and the Johannines. By the early fourth century, many Christians believed Jesus was the human Messiah, whereas many others believed he was the divine incarnation of God Himself. The net effect of the decision of which Gospels made “the cut” to get into the Bible was that almost all individual Christians could legitimately place themselves within “the big tent” of Christian orthodoxy.
Perhaps now you can better understand how and why the fourth century Christians made the decision they did make. They wanted to retain everyone within the Church they thought belonged there, so they said both Synoptic Christians and Johannine Christians were acceptable. To use an analogy, how would the current Republican Party decide today what is orthodox Republicanism and what is heretical? Are all seventeen candidates for President within the big tent? Does that include or exclude Donald Trump? How about Rand Paul or others of whom you or the Republican National Committee may not approve? Can you now better perceive the problem the early Church had, and why they included three similar Gospels and one very dissimilar one, but they also excluded a dozen or more other possible Gospels?
Thirty years ago an American New Testament scholar named Robert Funk brought together a group of other Jesus scholars to talk about what they perceived to be the historicity of everything reported in the four Gospels. They came to be known as The Jesus Seminar. Eventually they came up with a system for privately voting on the supposed historicity of every single verse in all four Gospels. Was each verse definitely historical, maybe historical, probably not historical, or definitely not historical? Most of the Gospel of John was rejected as being un-historical by most of the scholars, but also fairly sizable portions of the Synoptic Gospels were blackballed.
Those who basically agree with either Albert Schweitzer or the Jesus Seminar folks are likely to conclude that it is nearly impossible to know very much about the historical Jesus. Therefore they are left with what scholars call “the Christ of faith,” the person we believe lived in history who was sent by God into the world and who preached the Good News of the kingdom of God, but about whose historicity we can know very little. Nearly everyone asserts that the historical Jesus was crucified by the Romans. The Romans feared Jesus might lead an insurrection against them, and they ruthlessly stamped out all such subversion.
Let me now make a statement with which you may or may not agree, but it highlights the essence of this sermon. In the main, the Church of Jesus Christ historically has put its emphasis on the messenger, Jesus, rather than on his message. In other words, the center of Christianity turned out to be Jesus Christ rather than the God whom the historical Jesus likely proclaimed.
In one of my hymnals, I counted the number of hymns in the section on “God” and those in the section on “Christ.” There are 48 hymns about God and 116 hymns about Jesus. Would the historical Jesus approve of that? I personally believe he would not, but you may differ with me, and that is certainly acceptable. We all create a Christ for ourselves who is valid for us.
Has this sermon inserted ideas into your mind you have never thought about before, ideas which may, for the moment, disconcert or frighten or muddle you? I very sincerely hope so. Unless and until you create a coherent Christ for yourself, you will be like children, as the apostle Paul said, tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine (Eph. 4:14), including, I might say, the doctrines of the apostle Paul. Who is your Jesus of history, and who is your Christ of faith?
A Galilean peasant preacher and prophet stood at the headwaters of the Jordan River, at today’s border of Israel and Syria. He asked twelve very ordinary extraordinary men a straightforward question: “Who do you say I am?” And so I ask you, “Who do you say he is?”