Scripture: Mark 8:27-29; Mark 1:21-28, 31-35.
I thought we should talk about Jesus. At least I’m going to talk about Jesus in my sermons in the weeks ahead, for the forseeable future. Meanwhile a few of us will be studying the gospel of Mark, and talking about Jesus quite a bit there. I just thought it would be good if we focused in on Jesus here for a while.
Not that we’ve been ignoring him. I think I have referred to Jesus fairly often in my preaching, drawing pretty regularly upon gospel stories and teachings. Not always, I admit. I know when I was preaching from Genesis over the summer that as that series went on for a number of weeks at least one Sojourner told me flat out that she’d had enough of Genesis and thought it was time to get back to Jesus. So sometimes maybe I have sort of ignored Jesus. But I try not to do it too often, although I figure too that Jesus is a pretty secure type of fellow and doesn’t really need for us to make him the center of attention all the time.
But I want to do that today, and in the weeks ahead for the most part. I want to ask us to reflect together on the person of Jesus. Not just refer to him or highlight something he said or talk about something he did. We can touch on the teachings of Jesus or look in on him as he goes about his ministry, and we can pay that kind of attention to him without ever having to confront certain basic questions about who he is and what role he plays, or what role we want him to play, in our lives. So I want to at least begin to ask some of those basic questions today.
Actually I don’t need to ask the questions. The questions are already there, right there in the gospel of Mark. Do you remember what they were?
Let’s begin with the first of two questions that Jesus himself asked. He and his followers were on the way somewhere (they usually were), and Jesus turned and asked those who were with him, “Who do people say that I am?” In other words, what are people saying about me? What’s goin’ around?
That’s one way to talk about Jesus, isn’t it? We can talk about what others have said about him. Over the centuries Christians have developed a language about Jesus that tried to express what Jesus meant to them, and some words seemed to have meaning to many people and have stuck around. Words like Savior, King, Lord, Master, Redeemer, Son of God, very God of very God.
That would be one easy way to sort of focus on Jesus: just take one of those words every week and discuss it, ask what it has meant to people and what it might mean to us to say that Jesus is Savior, for instance. And then the next week we could focus on Jesus as King or Son of God or Redeemer. It might be interesting.
But there’re some problems with this approach too. Sometimes what others say about Jesus is not helpful. Sometimes it is harmful. Sometimes what some people say can keep other people away.
Sometimes, as we all know, Jesus’ name has been used to justify racism, either directly or more often indirectly by just glossing it over and pretending it doesn’t exist. Jesus’ name has been used to condemn human beings who happen to be gay or lesbian. Jesus’ name has been used to condemn anyone who does not believe in Jesus, so that the Jesus who said, “come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” turns into a Jesus who says “come to me or else”. Sometimes what others say about Jesus, or say in his name, gives a false picture that ought to be rejected. But what is being rejected is not Jesus but that false picture created by what others have said.
So sometimes what other people say about Jesus can be a stumbling block. Sometimes it’s not so much what they say as how they say it. My family going back several generations has vacationed at a place called Lakeside, which is a quaint Methodist campground in western Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. It’s run as a Chautauqua, which means that there’s a full range of recreational activities but also things like a resident symphony and entertainment every night and speakers and religious programs. Part of the summer fare is that every day around twilight there would be a vesper service held in the park. It was a beautiful setting really for a worship service, but I never went. I was often, however, in the park at the time the services were going on—riding bikes, playing on the swings, or whatever. And it seemed like the preacher was always sort of a pompous big man with a loud voice who seemed sort of angry and said the word Jesus a lot. I knew these people wanted me to believe in Jesus, but frankly the way they talked about him I didn’t think I wanted much to do with him.
It took me a long time to get over that. In fact the honest to God truth is that I’m not over it. I have to admit that I have this negative image in my mind of people who talk about Jesus a lot, or who use the name of Jesus as a club to beat people over the head with. I don’t want to be like that.
So for some of us anyway what other people say about Jesus and the way they say it is something we need to get rid of. Though I should also say that after I became a minister I decided I should ask for forgiveness for those uncharitable thoughts I had about those ministers when I was a kid. They couldn’t help it if they were big, and they may have been more earnest than angry, and they probably spoke of Jesus a lot because Jesus meant a lot to them. Still what others say about Jesus and the way they say it may not always be helpful to me. And in any case discussing what others say about Jesus has the effect of keeping the discussion objective and analytical and impersonal. Let’s talk about other people. Let’s not talk about me.
That’s why Jesus very quickly asked a second question of the disciples. After they had told him a few of the things that other people were saying, Jesus went on to ask them: “What about you? Who do you say that I am?” At which point Peter answered: “You are the messiah.”
This is getting closer to home anyway. We need to talk about Jesus but not just what some of the things are that are said about him or what the church says about him. It’s not what others say. Who do you say, who do I say, Jesus is? That’s more like the real question, not what place Jesus occupies in Christian theology, but what place Jesus occupies here, in me.
But I have to say that even this more direct, personal question is not quite where it’s at for me. When Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?” he elicits a response from Peter: “You are the messiah.” Now of course when I read what Peter says it is just one more title we can give to Jesus, one more name to add to the list. Savior, Redeemer, Son of God, Messiah. For me what Peter said is just one more example of what others have said. So I have to imagine Jesus looking me in the eye and asking me: “Who do you say that I am?” But am I supposed to answer the way Peter did, with a title, a name. Am I supposed to say, “I agree with what Peter said?” Or, “I like redeemer.” Or any other title, common or uncommon.
If I’m supposed to come up with an answer like that, then I’m in a little bit of trouble, because none of those words quite say who Jesus is for me. In fact all of them miss the point a bit as far as I am concerned. For 2000 years Christians have been debating what words are the right words to use when describing who Jesus is. For 2000 years some Christians have been trying to decide what the correct, the true, the orthodox words are for talking about Jesus. For 2000 years some Christians have been calling other Christians names, or sometimes persecuting other Christians, or killing other Christians because they didn’t use the right words or subscribe to the right formula.
For a long time I debated these issues with myself. As I was trying to decide whether I was a Christian or not, I somewhere got in my head that in order to be a Christian I had to be able to say with my head and with my heart that Jesus is Lord and Savior, that he is the second person of the trinity, both human and divine, not just Godlike, but God. I was having trouble with all this, working my way through some of my issues, trying to understand this language, asking myself whether I could say the things I thought Christians ought to be able to say.
And then it occurred to me that I was spending an awful lot of time with this, spending a lot of emotional, psychological, spiritual energy trying to figure out the proper words to use about Jesus. Not only that—I found that I had become fascinated with the Jesus I met in the gospels, who was a very complicated, complex figure, and yet simple at the same time. He was a figure who kept stretching me, stretching every part of me—my mind, my understanding, my commitment, my faith, my experience of God, my sense of who I was.
I was spending quite a lot of time with Jesus. More than I realized. More than I had ever thought I would, More than I had consciously decided I would. And I realized that the most pertinent question for me was actually not the question Jesus asked of the disciples but the question an unclean spirit asked of Jesus: “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” “What do you have to do with me, Jesus of Nazareth?” I was, back then, maybe not ready to say “everything”, Jesus has everything to do with me. But it was pretty clear by then that my answer was at least “a lot”. Jesus had undeniably come to have a lot to do with me. And wasn’t that enough, I asked myself, for me to consider myself a Christian? I still ask myself, “Isn’t that enough, for me, for anyone to consider herself a Christian?”
At least as a starting point, I believe that is enough. What role does Jesus play in my faith, my life? What does Jesus have to do with me? “A lot” may not be a really sufficient answer in the long run. In the short run, it’s good enough. We don’t need to be in a hurry to say more than that right away. In fact, it is probably not a good thing to come to any conclusions about who Jesus is too quickly—or to hold on to any convictions we may have too tightly.
Albert Schweitzer, in the short quote I printed on the back of the bulletin this morning, says that “Christ comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside he came to those who knew him not.” That seems to me a good place for all of us to be in relation to Christ. Strip away the theology, the creeds, the titles, the arguments and try to meet him again as one unknown, the way those fishermen did when Jesus first came to them, and they had really no idea about who he was, not just what titles he would eventually have, but what he would come to mean in their lives.
That means that if a person is unsure of their belief about Christ, unsure of who Christ is or exactly what role Christ is going to play in her life, that’s not only o.k. O.K. can sound sort of condescending. It’s not only o.k.; it may be pretty close to the place we all ought to be in relationship to Jesus.
If, on the other hand, we have spent a very long time with Jesus being a very large part of our life and have some pretty deep convictions about who he has been for us, then even so without giving up those convictions or denying one’s own experience, even so it can be important to for us to know that we are not done in our search for Jesus, nor is Christ done making himself known to us. Even those for whom Christ has grown to be a daily, living presence need to approach him in a sense as one unknown, not because he is like some big question mark, but because we always need to allow for Jesus leading us into some new territory. That I believe he will surely do, if we are willing to make the journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 21, 2001