Hilton Head Island, SC – December 17, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 2:1-12; Mark 10:17-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” – Mark 10:18 (RSV)
JESUS AND THE EXTRAORDINARY
Jesus didn’t think about anything the way any of the rest of us thinks about anything. Jesus had a unique perspective on every subject we might put before him.
During Advent we have looked at how Jesus perceived the individual self, and how he understood the world. Today we shall consider a couple of episodes in the Gospels of how he conceptualized himself. Next week, on Christmas Eve day, we will look at some of the statements through which Jesus explained his concept of God. All of these subjects are extraordinary in themselves, and Jesus’ ideas about them were also extraordinary.
However, there is an inherent problem in referring to anything Jesus said about anything. It is impossible to know beyond any doubt that Jesus actually said everything that the Gospel writers said he said. None of the Gospels is a written eyewitness account of the activities and statements of Jesus at the time he did or said them. The earliest Gospel was likely written at least thirty years after Jesus was crucified, and the latest one was written at least sixty years after Jesus died. Thus we cannot know what Jesus actually and factually said. We can know only what the four Gospel writers claim he said. Furthermore, there are several other gospels, called apocryphal gospels, which were written many decades after that. The early Church rejected them as valid summaries of the words and actions of Jesus, concluding that they were incorrect or incomplete.
Nonetheless, the four Gospels in the Bible are the best record we have of Jesus’ life and teachings. In any event, they are the only records approved by the early Church; all other gospels were either destroyed or suppressed. Therefore, if we are to grasp how Jesus understood himself, we have no other choice than to study what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John said Jesus said.
When I was in seminary over half a century ago, one of the primary issues which concerned New Testament scholars at that time was what they called “the messianic self-awareness of Jesus.” Did Jesus know from his earliest youth that he was God’s Messiah? Did that awareness come to him as a late teenager, or in early adulthood, or before he began his public ministry, or after he had been preaching and teaching for a while? Did Jesus ever perceive himself as God’s Anointed One? Have you ever thought about that?
When you read the Gospel of John, you are told that Jesus knew he was not only the Messiah, but the Incarnation of God, God in the flesh. What do you think of that? In the three Synoptic Gospels, however, that matter is not at all clear. In fact, it is difficult from the Synoptics decisively to claim that Jesus understood himself to be divine any more than any of us is divine. There are verses that hint at that, but no single verse says that beyond dispute.
On the contrary, one of the most authenticate factors about the Gospels is that they display honest ambivalence in Jesus when pondering himself. Introspective people are those who look within themselves to try to discover who they are and what God wants for them to do. Jesus was highly introspective. Therefore he frequently wondered about who he was and what God might have called him to do. If any of us has never asked such questions about ourselves, we have failed both God and ourselves. To live authentically is to wonder whether we are living authentically. That is what Jesus was constantly doing, and that is what the Gospels tell us about him in ways that are, all the same time, beautiful, beguiling, and bewildering.
I chose two readings for today from the Gospel of Mark. Most scholars agree that Mark was written by the man identified in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles as Mark or “John Mark.” He accompanied the apostle Peter on some of Peter’s missionary journeys. Mark never saw or heard Jesus, but Peter did, and many experts say the Gospel of Mark is probably the closest thing we have to an eyewitness account of Jesus’ life, because Peter, who was an eyewitness, told Mark what he saw and heard. Then Mark wrote it all down.
Mark 2:1-10 explains in detail one of Jesus’ earliest miracles. It took place in the village of Capernaum on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. You heard the details, so I won’t repeat them. Amazingly, before he did anything else, Jesus told the paralyzed man who was brought to him, “Your sins are forgiven.” The scribes were men whose vocation it was to write commentaries on biblical passages or to copy books of the Bible. Those who were there were incensed Jesus said that. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” they demanded to know. In response Jesus said to them, “Which is easier, to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up, take the stretcher on which you were brought, and go home’?”
Then Jesus did something no one who was there would ever forget. It went to the very heart of his self-understanding and about his ability to forgive sins and to perform miracles. “So that you may know that the Son of man has authority to forgive sins,” Jesus said with astonishing inner authority, as he looked at the man lying on his stretcher, “Stand up, walk, and go home.” And the man did it! Everyone who saw it remembered it forever, including Peter, who was there and saw it. Years later he told it Mark, who carefully and reverently wrote it down.
In that incident it is evident that Jesus perceived himself to be capable both of performing miracles and of forgiving sins. Therefore in some undefined measure he thought himself to have been commissioned by God to take on a unique role that no one else had ever had before. He was to provide God’s own touch to people in need when God Himself was unable directly to provide that touch. He was to do things for God that even God Himself could not do, because God was not and could not be physically present in the world. In that moment in that house in Capernaum on the shores of the Lake of the Galilee, Jesus saw himself doing exactly that. He was fulfilling what he believed God had desired from him, namely, to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to those who need to hear that good news. After all, that is what the word “Gospel” means: Good News!
But it wasn’t always so clear to Jesus who he was and what God wanted him to do. When he was tired, or under stress, or when his theological enemies were attacking him too fiercely, he just wanted to get away from it all. That is what, according to the Gospels, he did on many occasions. Jesus went off by himself to ponder what his life was all about.
Perhaps a couple of years later, when Jesus had decided to go to Jerusalem for that final fateful, fatal Passover, he was stopped along the way by an eager young man who had a question to ask Jesus. This episode was so memorable that it was included in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. “Good Teacher,” the man said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17)
Maybe Jesus was tired. Maybe he was feeling the stress of what he feared awaited him in Jerusalem. Maybe one or more of the disciples had made one too many ridiculous statements or asked five too many ridiculous questions. Whatever were the circumstances, Jesus snapped back at the poor chap, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18).
That man, whom tradition calls “the rich young ruler,” asked the right question of the right man at the wrong time. Jesus was peeved that he called him “good,” and showed his displeasure by saying that only God is truly good. And that is correct. What is further correct, or so it seems from the story, is that Jesus did not see himself in that moment as being God, if he ever saw himself in that capacity. The early Christians did, in particular one of the Gospels writers did, three of the Gospel writers may have, but Jesus didn’t. Not in that particular instance, and maybe not ever. Jesus knew the young man was buttering him up, and he was miffed by it.
Jesus Christ was one of the most introspective people who ever lived, possibly even the most. Introspective people are always going back and forth in their own minds about themselves. More than most other people, they constantly wonder about themselves and what they think they are truly doing or what they are really about.
I would think anybody who believed he was God’s Messiah would often wonder whether that is who he really was. Sometimes he would be confident of it, sometimes he would question it, and sometimes he would say, “No one is good but God alone, and I know I’m not unfailingly good, and therefore I know I’m not God.” It would be hard to be Jesus; it would be exceedingly difficult. Have you ever thought about that?
People wanted to know things from Jesus he knew he was incapable of telling them. On Wednesday of Holy Week, the day before the Last Supper and Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane, the disciples James and John asked Jesus if they could sit at the right and left sides of his throne when Jesus would usher in his kingdom, whatever that might mean. He told them that would be solely up to God, not him. The twelve wanted to know when the world would end, and he said he didn’t have a clue; only God could know that. He could answer many of the questions people had, but not all of them, and he got tired of saying he couldn’t give them answers. When that happened, he may have gotten down on himself. Such things happen to all of us sometimes.
Who was Jesus? Surely he was an extraordinary person, but in what specific ways? Are the Gospels correct in what they say about him? Since no two of them say precisely the same things, is any of them historically correct? And does it matter if they got it right biographically? They were writing Christologically, theologically, weren’t they? And if they were, who is to decide what is right? The Church? You? Me? Us? Jesus? Who?
Obviously I can’t be positively certain about this, but I choose to believe those were the kinds of questions Jesus asked himself about himself throughout his short, highly influential, God-haunted life. From early on he sensed he was somehow extraordinary, but he wondered in what precise ways that might be true. Thus at one time he seemed to indicate one thing, and at other times very different, even conflicting, things.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German Lutheran pastor and theologian in the 1930s. He came to America, studying theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Many of his colleagues there urged him to stay in the U.S., because they feared for his life should he return to Nazi Germany. But he went back to his homeland anyway, and tried to establish a life there for himself, even though he detested the Nazi regime. During the war he became tangentially involved in a plot to overthrow Hitler. He was arrested and imprisoned. Just a few days before the Nazi government surrendered to the Allies, Bonhoeffer was hanged in the Flossenburg Prison.
Afterward a relative of his collected the things he had written there, and they were published posthumously as a small book, Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the things in the book was a fairly brief, highly introspective, marvelously-written poem. It was called Who am I?
Who am I?/ They often tell me/ I stepped from my cell’s confinement/ Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,/ Like a Squire from his country house…. Who am I? This, or the Other?/ Am I one person today and tomorrow another?/ Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,/ And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?/ Or is something within me still like a beaten army/ Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? they mock me, these lonely questions of mine./ Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!
Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew he wasn’t an ordinary garden-variety German pastor. But once he was thrust behind bars in a place from which he knew he would never escape, he began to question exactly who, and what, he was. What he was was extraordinary, magnificent, and supremely human.
There have been literally hundreds of thousands of books written about Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus himself wrote none of them. None of his twelve disciples, none of his other contemporary followers wrote biographies of him, or inscribed bits and pieces of what he said and did while he was alive. We have four Gospels which the early Church, by the fourth century or so, sanctioned as being canonical, plus the many other apocryphal gospels which were officially rejected.
It is extraordinary that a man who lived in a far-off place which was distant from every important place in his own time has elicited so much interest by so many people for so long.
In the nineteenth century, theologians on both sides of the Atlantic, but mainly in Europe, tried to flesh out biographies of what they assumed was the historical Jesus. These efforts were duplicated in the twentieth century by a group of mainly American scholars who called themselves The Jesus Seminar. All these learned people, plus all other Christians through all time, have tried in their own ways to pinpoint exactly what it was that made Jesus so special. All of us have our own thoughts about Jesus, as Jesus himself had his own thoughts about himself.
Albert Schweitzer was one of the most brilliant minds of the early twentieth century. He was an exceptionally gifted musician, organist, physician, theologian, philosopher, linguist, and medical missionary. Had he chosen to do so, he could have been world-renowned in any of those fields. Ultimately he chose to go to a place called Lambarene in central Africa, where he established a missionary hospital. He stayed there for the rest of his life, caring for people who had nothing, many of them suffering from lethal tropical diseases.
Fairly early in his life, during his philosopher-theologian days, Schweitzer wrote a book called The Quest for the Historical Jesus. He suggested it was impossible to re-construct an accurate biography of Jesus. The only way to know who Jesus was, Schweitzer said, was to become his disciple. Here is the final paragraph in his outstanding, thought-provoking, theologically pivotal book: “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside. He comes to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is.”