Scripture: Mark 1:4-11
I debated some about what to call this sermon. I knew in broad terms what I wanted to talk about. I knew the sermon was going to be about how Jesus is revealed to us, this being epiphany season and all. How do we come to see Jesus, maybe whether we see Jesus, but also in what ways, with what kind of eyes we see Jesus, what informs, what shapes our picture of Jesus, meaning of course not just the physical picture, but how do we come to some sense of who this was and what he was like and who he is for us.
So I rolled different titles over in my mind: “Seeing Jesus”, “Picturing Jesus”, “Envisioning Jesus”, “Imagining Jesus”. At first I didn’t like that last one, “Imagining Jesus”, because I thought it would sound like I was suggesting that Jesus is not real, just someone we imagine, or dream up as it were. Then I realized that we do have these images of Jesus and we do dream them up, or we have them dreamt up for us and planted somehow inside us, and it is in fact the ways we imagine Jesus, for good and for ill, that’s on my mind this morning. So…”Imagining Jesus”
This is the season of Epiphany, which means revealing. We are supposed to be focusing on the revealing of Jesus in his true identity, how he came to be known as not just this guy from Nazareth, but how people came to see him as something else and something more—king, lord, savior, messiah—and how we are supposed to come to see him in those ways too. That’s generally what the season of Epiphany is supposed to be about. The trouble is, for me—and I don’t say this in a spirit of just wanting to be different or iconoclastic or heretical—the trouble is that for me, very often those ways of seeing Jesus with the terms and titles far from revealing Jesus often act more like masks that hide the human person of Jesus. In any case, it doesn’t help our own process of seeing Jesus to begin with these firmly established ideas of who we’re supposed to see when we look at Jesus. What we see is very often very largely determined by what we are expecting to see.
It’s been long recognized that people tend to create Jesus in their own image. Albert Schweitzer wrote a book, almost a hundred years ago now, called “The Quest for the Historical Jesus”. He was not the first to suggest it, but his book became well known for the idea that everyone who has thought that they could arrive at a “true” picture of Jesus, has ended up portraying a man who was very much like them, or as they would like him to be. I don’t know how many of you noticed, but during Advent when we were lifting up the various different parts of the world, in most instances we had on display a picture of Jesus as created by an artist from the part of the world we were focusing on, and of course the pictures those people created of Jesus had him looking like someone from their culture. A Japanese artist portrays Jesus as a Japanese person. A Swede portrays him as Swedish-looking. And so forth. Mostly I have to assume the artists know they are not painting or sculpting an historically accurate representation of Jesus. And I am never offended when a Swedish artist produces a figure of Jesus that is obviously meant to look Swedish, or when a Nigerian artist comes up with a Nigerian Jesus. I am more troubled when a European artist produces a work that looks as though the artist was trying to be historically authentic, but the Jesus that is produced ends up looking pretty European anyway. At that point the lack of self-awareness becomes troubling. But those who make no effort to disguise that Christ is one of them are expressing a different truth, which I’ll get back to.
The same kind of thing goes on when people try to present the character or message of Jesus. Just as a Swedish artist may tend to produce a Swedish Jesus, so a person with let’s say socialist sympathies may very well portray Jesus as a socialist at heart. And so over the years an enormous number of different Jesuses have been presented to us. Not surprisingly American culture has come up with some good ones. We have produced—I’m not making this up—a Jesus who was essentially an organizational genius, a master salesman, a model of success, a guru of self-esteem, and much more. What Schweitzer did was to point out in some detail that Biblical scholars and theologians were no more disinterested in their pictures of Jesus than the people who portrayed him in terms of popular culture. Scholars and theologians might surround their portrayals with lots of fancy language and footnotes, but in the end they couldn’t come to any real agreement either about who the real Jesus was, and each version of Jesus produced by scholars also depended on what that person’s agenda was and what assumptions they started with. Schweitzer’s conclusion was that it is not possible to discover the “real” or “true” Jesus by historical or objective investigation. The quest for the historical Jesus is doomed to failure. Even the gospels are not disinterested. They are different from each other because each one has some points it’s trying to make, an agenda if you will, different situations they’re addressing themselves to, arguments they’re involved in.
You may know that there is something in our day called the Jesus Seminar, which is a group of people, scholars and others, who hold conferences and communicate by e-mail for the purpose of arriving at some conclusions as to which parts of the gospels we should accept as authentic and accurate and which may be more like propaganda. They’ve attracted a lot of attention because of the assumption they begin with that not all of the gospel writings are quite reliable. I assume that many of the people in the Jesus seminar do this at least a little bit tongue in cheek because otherwise the notion that they could arrive at the true picture, through majority vote no less, where others have failed would be arrogant to say the least. What Schweitzer claimed, at least in the short reading we heard this morning, is that our discovery or epiphany only takes place for those who make a leap of faith and decide that they want to follow, to be a disciple, with all the uncertainty that involves, but that we only really come to a sense of who Jesus is for us that will be true for us as we set out on that journey of discipleship.
So where does that leave us, we who gather here under the Christian banner. I put it that way because although we do claim the name of Christian and let it claim us, although we are a Christian community and those of us who are officially members bear the mark of our Christian baptism, still in spite of this there are some here who are not too comfortable with the name Christian, and there are some here who are not so sure what they believe, or about what image they really do have of Jesus, and there are some here for whom Jesus simply does not play a dominant role in their own spiritual lives. We gather here under the Christian banner, but Christ does not mean the same thing to all of us.
And that’s o.k. It’s o.k. if not everyone here is very clear about who Jesus is, what they think about Jesus, or even if they think very much about Jesus. If Jesus doesn’t have a firm, settled, unchanging place in our spiritual lives, that’s not only o.k., it’s as it should be. That’s as it should be in a community where we commit ourselves to respect the various ways each of us relates to Jesus. There is not going to be agreement about that. There shouldn’t be agreement about that. It’s a good thing there is not agreement about that among us. It should keep us on our toes. It should keep us from taking Jesus for granted. And it’s also as it should be for each of us individually. Jesus will not have well-defined, firmly established place in the life of the community because we are committed to allowing and encouraging many different pictures of Jesus and many different approaches to Jesus among us. And even for each person individually it’s good for Jesus to not occupy too fixed a place in our spiritual lives, as though any one of us could think that we have him figured out, and that we have exactly the right words and titles for him, no need to think any more, no need for any further revelations or epiphanies.
I like the story of Jesus’ baptism because it challenges, in my mind, all our easy notions about who Jesus was. I’m aware that there are some people who will hear this story as being about how Jesus was revealed as the Son of God, and I’m aware that there is that part of the story. John recognizes Jesus as the messiah or the promised one. And there is even a voice from heaven proclaiming that Jesus is God’s chosen or beloved. For some this is a story that shows who Jesus really is, though I have to point out that the language used does not answer every question about who Jesus might be. But nevertheless the church has often wrapped the story in its theology about Jesus. It’s possible to do that.
But the story touches me in quite a different way. To me this story is not about Jesus as someone set apart from everyone else, perhaps even about his divine nature. It is, quite the contrary, a story about his humanity. What I understand Jesus to be doing at his baptism is setting the tone for the rest of his ministry. It will be the essence of what Jesus will be about, the essence of who he is will be to refuse to recognize any absolute distinctions between people—between believers and non-believers, between the ritually clean and the unclean, the righteous and the sinners, the good guys and the bad guys.
There were all sorts of people who gathered around John the Baptist, I’m sure. Some, no doubt, stayed on the shore because they were above it all, didn’t need what John was offering, were already counting themselves among the pure, the blessed, the orthodox, the righteous, the religious, the role models, the redeemed. The rest, those who waded down into the water to be baptized, were those whose self-esteem was not in such good shape. Jesus washed in the water with them, just as he was later to break bread with tax collectors and sinners. Already, without a single word, Jesus was beginning to build a new kind of community, based not on the things that divide us from others, but on the threads of our common humanity.
That’s what to me this story is about: the threads of our common humanity, including the threads of Christ’s common humanity with us. One whole large strand of Christian theology would read this story in line with the conviction that Jesus’s humanity is really not very important. It is his divine nature that we need to make sure everyone “gets”. Jesus is God. Say it loud and clear and often. And the importance of this is, to oversimplify but I think it is still fair to say, the important of this is that if Jesus is divine and we unite ourselves to him, then we will somehow either now or at the end of our days or at the end of the world or all of the above, we will be lifted beyond our sinful mortal condition. The goal of faith in Jesus, in other words, according to this way of looking at things, and again to admittedly oversimplify, is heaven. And the goal is to gain that privilege for some of us, those who believe in Jesus.
It would be nice of me to say that those who hold such beliefs are welcome to them, but I need also to be honest and say that such beliefs are in my view harmful to the life of the world. And even to Christianity.
Far better for our Christian souls, far better for the soul of Christianity, if we give up any claim to predominance or pre-eminence or superiority, as Jesus did at his baptism. Far better to put aside any claims to specialness or superiority and lay claim to the threads of our common humanity, which seem so threatened right now, and which we have such a need of recovering and strengthening. It does not make faith impossible that we never can arrive at the absolutely, objectively true historical Jesus. There is a part of all of us, after all, that is undiscoverable.
But it is important to keep before us that image of the human Jesus, so that we can avoid the pridefulness of clothing him in all the superhuman titles we have for him and so that we can affirm the Jesus who affirmed us, but calmly entering the waters of the Jordan to be baptized in order to “avoid the sin of standing apart from us.” He was to give his life for the life of the world, not to earn us a ticket to heaven.
Faith is an act of the imagination, guided by many things, but still essentially an act of the imagination. In imagining a being, Jesus, who comes to us directly from the heart of God, we begin to imagine ourselves that way, as beloved daughters and sons, and such a picture almost necessarily lures us to do our best to become that image. Some would say that image is the Christ in us. But in any case as we begin to imagine ourselves that way, we can hardly help but begin to try to imagine the world that way, as though it had become once again the way God imagined it somehow at the dawn of creation and the way God continues to imagine it in the midst of the troubled history we have created for ourselves and surrounded God with. From within that troubled history God works not to release us but to redeem us and calls us to tasks that seek to redeem the life of the world—the concrete practice of love and justice and mercy and peace. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 12, 2003