Thy Word and the Human One

November 15, 2015

Mark 8:27-34

With the news from Paris still hanging heavily all around us I am tempted this morning simply to preach again the word from last Sunday about God and human suffering. Yet even in the face of the horrors from Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Garissa, and so many other places both far and near, I remain convinced that more than anything else we still need to hear and to heed the call to be a light in the present darkness. For followers of the Prince of Peace, responding to that call requires of us deep reflection and deeper relationship with the one who calls, with the one who asks, in our reading for this morning:

“Who do people say that I am?”

That’s been the question swirling around Jesus for a long, long time. It continues to swirl, and in all kinds of ways.

Jesus has his own web site, and he’s on Twitter – has been since 2006. You can follow him at Jesus Christ (@Jesus), where his profile says, “carpenter, healer, God.” Earlier this month he tweeted, “my dad once built a clock and then the universe happened.” Pretty good stuff, but Katy Perry still has about 75 million more people following her than Jesus does.

It’s handy – for me, at least – that Twitter uses the language of followers, because that does get right to the heart of the matter. It’s the language that Jesus uses – if not on Twitter then, at least, throughout the gospels. Certainly he asks, “who do people say that I am,” but far more often the crux of the matter rests on the response to his oft-repeated invitation, “follow me.”

Dozens of times in the gospels – and more than 80 times throughout the New Testament – Jesus said, “follow me.” As singer-songwriter (and UCC pastor) Bryan Sirchio put it, “He never said, come, acknowledge my existence / Or believe in me, I’m the 2^nd person of the Trinity / But 87 times he said, Follow me.”[1]

In the same song – which, I hasten to add, is a 3-minutes song not a systematic theology, Sirchio also adds,

“Yes, we need to know what we believe / to follow the Jesus who’s real /

God save us from the Christ’s we create in our own image.”[2]

Knowing what we believe is both crucial work and, of course, where things get murky. Thus we find ourselves right back where we began, asking “who is this Jesus?”

The global Christian community has proclaimed an orthodoxy around Christology for more than 1,500 years, dating back to the year 325 and the creed of Nicaea which declares,

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from True God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.

Those are lovely liturgical declarations, but they raise way more questions than they answer. To begin with, what’s the difference between God and True God? What does light from light even mean? Begotten not made – now there’s a distinction without a difference if I ever heard one.

The great creeds of the church are fascinating and important documents that tell us a great deal about the development of the tradition and about key moments in that development, but they really don’t tell us a much of anything about the Jesus who is real.

Indeed, the Apostles’ Creed, which many of us learned as kids, reduces the entire actual life of the real Jesus to a few commas. “Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried …” Not much in there about “follow me,” unless, against all odds, to follow Jesus means to champion an Oxford punctuation mark.

Where the ancient creeds leave off, however, a wealth of contemporary scholarship and theological reflection steps in with provocative suggestions about both the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, to use a distinction I first encountered in the writing of the late Marcus Borg.

While Borg offers some compelling insights in such books as Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and The Heart of Christianity, among others, I personally find more substantial ground in Walter Wink’s Christological work in The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man.

I hope you heard something in that title that doesn’t sound quite right: the Son of the Man as distinct from the Son of Man? As Wink, and others, have pointed out, the Son of the Man – the title that Jesus used most often in referring to himself in the gospels – is unusual and exceedingly rare in both older Hebrew texts and other contemporaneous Greek ones. In fact, the actual Greek in the gospels is both rare and awkward as it has two articles that would be more accurately translated into English as the Son of the Man. Most translations render it as “the son of man” because it sounds less strange.

The phrase son of man appears without the definite article in Hebrew scriptures more than 100 times, 93 of them in the book of Ezekiel. The Hebrew idiom was generally equivalent to human being, though its usage in Ezekiel is distinctive because it is the principle way that God calls on Ezekiel.

As Wink points out, the church has never made much, if any, use of this odd Greek phrase that Jesus used so often in reference to himself. In fact, the rest of the New Testament pretty much ignores it, as well.

So, Wink asks, what did Jesus mean by it? Another way of asking that question would be, “so, who did Jesus think that he was?”

If Jesus cajoled his contemporaries to follow him – and clearly he did – then whom did he think he was asking them to follow? The second person of the Trinity? Their first-class ticket to eternity? Lord and savior? Son of God? The son of the man?

If it is true, as John Calvin insisted in the opening lines to his Institutes of the Christian Religion, that “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God,”[3] then surely Jesus must have had a fairly well thought out self-understanding. Just as surely, if the point of Christian life and faith is following the way of Jesus, then it matters who he thought he was.

This is a brief homily not a graduate seminar in theology, so we’re not going to slog our way through 350 dense pages of Walter Wink this morning. The heart of his argument is deeply mystical, and is captured in a brief passage on Christian vocation, or the summons to follow the way of Jesus. Wink writes,

There is a summons, a call in the human self, for God to be born in it. But there is also God’s call to the self to be born in God. In God is hidden the mystery of humanity and in humanity the mystery of God.[4]

The point is quite simple, on the one hand, and incredibly difficult on the other. Simply put, the way to God is to live our lives as Jesus lived his.

Or, as St. Irenaeus, one of the so-called desert fathers of the very early church, said, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” In Jesus the disciples, and so many others, witnessed a human being fully alive – it is as rare and unusual as the son of the man.

It is also, however, precisely what we invited to become. This invitation is what Jesus articulates powerfully in Matthew 25 – which forms the heart of the hymn we sung a few minutes ago: whatever you did for the least of these my sisters and brothers, you did for me.

We realize our truest selves when we follow the way of Jesus, when we take up the cross and follow him, and when we allow ourselves to be confronted by him in and through the lives of the outcast, the poor, the marginalized, the broken.

This mystical way is far from easy, and, to be honest, it is not actually simple either. That is to say, the theology is rich, deep, and complicated, and worthy of a lifetime of reflection. So this is, as always, preliminary and partial, and I’ll draw it to a close this morning with a paragraph from the book that some of us read together over the summer, James Carroll’s Christ Actually:

The key to the actuality of Christ is precisely in the imitation of Jesus: the study, in Dorothy Day’s phrase, of our life conformed to his; the following, as [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer put it; what [Albert] Schweitzer called the stepping in to help in Jesus’ name. Why? Because what was revealed in Jesus – what made others eventually see him as Son of Man, Christ, Logos, God – was that his capacity for transcendence (transfiguration, resurrection, call it what you will) was exactly a capacity that lives in every person. Not just those we designate as saints. That is why the profound ordinariness of transcendence as beheld in him was essential – it was ordinary enough for each one of us to match, with our fears, irascibility, vanities, and doubts; also our hopes, gifts, desires, and strengths. Acting fully as who we are, the imitation of Christ is the way to actualize in ourselves what makes Jesus matter.[5]

Who do you say that I am? As for me, Jesus is the one who calls me beyond my deepest fears into my fullest self – the son of the man calls to me to be a human being, fully alive. He calls you, too. May we travel the way together. Amen.

---

[1] Bryan Sirchio, “Follow Me” on Justice & Love, Crosswind Music, 1999.

[2] Ibid.

[3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I, i.

[4] Walter Wink, The Human Being (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) 47.

[5] James Carroll, Christ Actually (New York: Viking, 2014) 265-6.