SUNDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2005 : Third Sunday in Lent
Five Foundations for a liberal / progressive Christian faith
3. A perspective on Jesus of Nazareth
Two weeks ago I spoke about a perspective on humankind, and last week I continued by both reflecting on human beings and on a perspective on God. Humanity, I said, is ?´a work in progress??, our creation is not complete. We are constantly moving on from that miraculous time when our earliest ancestors not only knew that they were alive and would in time die, but also knew that they knew this. Self-awareness was the beginning of a journey into what we call religion. Perceiving other, but non-human, selfs in the world of their experience, they recognised these spirits as needing to be placated or cajoled into being kindly disposed towards them. Over tens of thousands of years our ancestors moved towards more systematic, organised forms of religion as in the polytheisms of Asia and the Middle East, Egypt and Greece and Rome.
What we call religion is the response of human beings to their experiences of awe or dread, anxiety or wonder, of shame and of gladness in relation to the Other, the Divine. Religion, whatever form it took, helped give coherence to life in an unpredictable and uncertain world; it helped explain and inspire, to enrich communal life and to allow people to deal with their own and others?? mortality. Religion produced codes of conduct for living, and the divine was claimed as the source of authority for chiefs, rulers and kings, not to forget priesthoods.
Out of all the varieties of religion that humankind expressed, a handful of religious geniuses appeared in widely scattered places over a period of about a thousand years. In China, Confucius and Lao Tze were at different times the sources for reframing the religious life and thinking of the peoples of that ancient nation. In India, Hinduism with complex ancient roots emerged into a recognisable coherent faith system. Also, in India a Hindu prince left palace and family and after many years of searching found enlightenment and became the Buddha. From him came a religion which embraced much of Asia. Meanwhile, in the Middle East monotheism emerged from a nomadic people who finally settled in a land they believed their God had assigned to them. Their great figure was Moses, and later some deeply insightful prophets. Out of this emerged Jesus of Nazareth, who began a reform movement within Judaism which after his death attracted non-Jews and became a new religion called Christianity. In the deserts of Arabia, Christianity and Judaism provided the background and together inspired another monotheistic religion, Islam ?± the way of submission to God opened up by the prophet Mohammed.
Six faith systems; six ways of interpreting life??s purpose and meaning; six ways of expressing the human encounter with that which is radically Other. All emerged over a period which some scholars are calling the Axial Age stretching from the sixth Christian century back to the latter part of the previous millennium.
Very few people ever were, or are, ?´spiritual?? or ?´religious?? outside of some systematic, organised approach to matters of the spirit. Over the last two to three thousand years, a majority of the world??s population has followed a faith originating in the work and insights of an historical person ?± Hinduism being an exception. For Christians, this historical person is, of course, Jesus of Nazareth.
I have deliberately approached Jesus this morning not from the perspective of his arising out of his Jewish faith ?± which of course he did ?± but from the perspective of world religion. I offer the perspective of Jesus emerging as one of a small number of truly great religious figures who changed the world. The point is that while the experience of religion , or the ?´spirit?? is common across the human race, these experiences do not exist in a vacuum. People??s religious experiences and insights are interpreted and understood and often systematised from within a particular framework. For us the framework is Christian, for others it is Hindu, or Islamic, or whatever. Each of these frameworks began with a human person, no matter how those persons have been subsequently interpreted.
One of the foundations of a liberal or progressive Christian faith is Jesus of Nazareth seen and understood from the perspective not just of the Judeo-Christian heritage, but in the context of the growth of human spiritual and religious life throughout the world. Jesus is one of a number of great figures from the Axial Age who have moved people on.
A conservative Christian might be likely to respond by saying that the uniqueness of Jesus is being challenged, even denied, by this understanding. There indeed is a challenge for the person who on one hand does not wish to deny the validity and importance of other religious faiths and their significant figures for the holders of those faiths, and yet who on the other hand also wishes to acknowledge the centrality of Jesus for Christians. You can??t be Christian without acknowledging a centrality for Jesus in this faith; but you don??t have to play down the importance of other great faith figures in order to affirm the centrality of Jesus for Christians.
The centrality of Jesus is that it is through Jesus that Christians see and understand God. Note how that was expressed ?± it is through Jesus that Christians see and understand God. There are two things about that statement.
First is that it acknowledges that other people of other faiths find their insights into, and their understanding of God from other sources. It is not, as old-time missionary theology suggested, that they are benighted and have no sight or understanding or experience of the Divine. Rather, the profundities of their faiths have other sources and other roots. Buddhism associates the ultimate with the Buddha, Islam with Mohammed and the Koran, Judaism with Moses and the Torah, and Hinduism with a whole pantheon of very specific beings.
Which leads us to the second point, which is that there is not a first class religious compartment for people like us who see God through Jesus, and a second class compartment peopled by everyone else and their significant religious figures. This is not some kind of religious popularity competition. Rather, we recognise the diversity of ways in which disclosures of the Divine have come to different races and cultures. For Christians, as much as we may respect and even admire other religious traditions and figures, it is primarily Jesus through whom we find disclosures of the Divine. Jesus, for Christians, is the Way, the Truth and the Life, the Good Shepherd, the Door, the Light of the world, and all those other metaphors used to describe Jesus over the Christian centuries.
It does need to be said, however, that when we say it is through Jesus that we find the Divine disclosed, this is making a unique affirmation among the major religions of the world. For Judaism and Islam, although Moses and Mohammed are the receivers of divine revelation, God is not revealed in them as persons. Rather, God is revealed in the words of the Torah and the Koran. So also in Buddhism. The Buddha as a person is not the revelation of the Divine; rather, the Buddha??s teachings disclose the path to enlightenment and compassion, which are the supreme marks of the Divine. Christianity, on the other hand, finds the primary revelation or disclosure of God in a human person. This does not make Christianity superior, but it does make it different.
If it is through the life and actions and teachings of this Jesus that we have a window into God, what can we say that Jesus discloses about God? I want to suggest five basic points about the Jesus of history ?± Marcus Borg??s ?´pre-Easter Jesus?? ?± disclosing something about God.
First, Jesus disclosed that God can be known. For Jesus and the community built around him both before and after his death, the Divine, the Sacred ?± God ?± was not a distant reality who could only be believed in or who would be known fully only beyond death. Rather, God, Jesus disclosed in his life and manner of living, is a living presence in and with and through the world of our everyday experience. By his times of prayer, by the intimate ways in which he spoke of God, by the ways in which he expressed divinity to others in his forgiveness and acceptance and healing of people, especially the marginalized, Jesus disclosed that God could be known.
Second, Jesus disclosed that God ?± the Sacred ?± is accessible without the necessity of institutional religion. In many of his sayings and his actions, Jesus demonstrated a challenge to the authorized forms of religion, especially as expressed through the temple with its hierarchy and ritual. Jesus subverted the religious system of temple, priesthood and sacrifices by operating outside of institutional structures to teach about God and life and faith, and to heal.
Third, Jesus disclosed that God is primarily and above all else compassionate. Jesus, as we see him in action in the gospels, embodied compassion, and he invited other people to ?¨Be compassionate, as God is compassionate.?Æ A commonly-understood primary attribute of God was that of lawgiver and judge. Jesus, who was open and accepting, welcoming of the rejected and marginalised, the broken and the lost, demonstrated a God who was open and accepting. Because they are words that describe Jesus as we read his story in the gospels, words like inclusive and non-judgemental, welcoming and supporting, encouraging and loving, are words that can also be applied to God.
Fourth, Jesus disclosed that the divine-human relationship is not based upon human beings meeting requirements. In his life and the way he related to the people he met, Jesus showed disdain for the commonly-accepted principles of needing to do the right things, and to avoid doing wrong things, in order to be acceptable to God. Jesus based everything on relationship. People could be as intimate as he was with God, whom he addressed intimately, without needing to obey religious rules and fulfil religious obligations. God is both knowable, and loveable.
And fifth, Jesus spoke about and lived out a radical social vision which he understood as grounded in the nature and the purposes of God. He believed God had willed, and he himself lived out, an egalitarian social order which took no account of social status, political power, religious proscriptions, or earthly authority. One of the most striking examples of this was the way Jesus opened up unrestricted access to the meal table with him, in a social and religious culture that surrounded eating with a host of regulations. The feast of God which Jesus inaugurated at meal-tables around Palestine was open to all and to any without restriction. In the fact, the higher you were in the world, the lower the place you might well find yourself when seated at the table of God.
No-one can be truly a religious or spiritual person in a vacuum. The universal experience of the Divine which our earliest ancestors experienced in the spirits of nature is disclosed in particular ways in contemporary religious cultures. In the Christian culture, the disclosure is Jesus. So much so, that Christian tradition quite early on began to ascribe divinity to Jesus himself. That is a quite understandable process, and expresses the depths of the experience of the Divine through Jesus by people of previous generations. Contemporary scholarship has helped remove layers of divinity and piety spread over Jesus, and has helped us to see Jesus the man more clearly ?± and to glimpse in and through the depth of his humanity the fullness both of humanity and of the Divine. ?¨The glory of God,?Æ wrote Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century, ?¨is a human being fully alive.?Æ
Compassionate, open, welcoming, freely giving and free to receive, loving and celebrating ?± humanity itself can echo divinity, and enter more fully into its own humanity which the old creation myth described as being ?¨in the image of God?Æ. Jesus images God for us; and he also images humanity ?± that which we can be, that which we are in the process of becoming as a ?´work in progress??.