Who, or what, is Jesus of Nazareth?
A very religious man?
An avatar or manifestation of God, or one of the gods?
What do we believe about Jesus?
In
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Her name
was Jean Deemer, she suffered from dementia,
and she was a resident at the Mennonite Home
in Lancaster
when I was a Therapeutic Recreation Assistant
there
many years ago.
It was
around Easter, and we had those magazines
you have around nursing homes,
with pictures of flowers and eggs and Jesus,
you know, Easter-y things.
‘You
know who that is,’ I said to Jean,
pointing to a picture of our Lord.
‘Yes, I
do,’ she said. ‘That’s Jesus.’
After a
pause, she added,
‘He was a very religious man.’
Well,
Jean, yes, he was.
And
though I’m not going to take that
as her fully-formed statement of faith,
that’s all some people believe about Jesus of
Nazareth –
that he was a very religious man,
and that he taught wise and enduring truths
about God,
and that if more people listened to what he
had to say
about how to treat people,
the world would be a better place.
That’s a creed, if you will.
That’s a
different creed than what some people,
especially long ago, but some still today,
believe about Jesus –
that he was not a very religious man,
because
he wasn’t a man at all.
He was a
manifestation or an avatar of God in the world,
perhaps one of many sent time to time to
visit us,
who may have looked like a human being,
who may have appeared to suffer in the world
like a human being,
but in reality was not, could not have been
subject
to physical exigencies like hunger and thirst
and violence.
Who, or
what, is Jesus of Nazareth?
A very
religious man?
An
avatar or manifestation of God, or one of the gods?
What do
we believe about Jesus?
After
his death, those who believed Jesus had risen from the dead
had a lot of very interesting questions to
think about.
If he
was a man, then why were they worshiping him
and calling him Lord,
a title reserved in the Jewish tradition for
God alone?
If he was
God, or a god, could he really suffer like a man could,
and die like a man does?
If he was
God,
then who was this ‘God’ he kept praying to
and calling Father?
And if
he was God, and he’s praying to a God, then are there two gods,
and who’s this mysterious third ‘Holy Spirit’
he keeps talking about?
It took
the Church a few hundred years to puzzle this out fully,
and for the rest of the time
we’ve been trying to hold on to the teaching.
It is
this notion
that Jesus is both God – the Son of the
Father – from eternity
and man, born in time of the Holy Spirit by
the Virgin Mary,
that is the subject of our thanksgiving
today.
I’d say
understanding,
but there’s only so much understanding that
can happen
when you’re talking about the Trinity.
St.
Anselm of Canterbury said, Credo ut intelligam,
‘I believe in order that I may understand,’
but with the Trinity there’s only so far you
can go.
Analogies
are no good,
as St. Patrick famously tried with the
shamrock,
likely confusing the Irish even more than
they already were.
What
does a Church do which can’t draw a picture of its god?
For we
can’t draw a picture of the Holy Trinity.
I’ve
even probably gone too far
in putting that symbol on the cover of the
bulletin today.
We
can’t, or shouldn’t,
put an old guy, a young guy, and a dove on an
icon
and say this is what God looks like
when God is just sitting around in heaven doing
nothing.
What does
a Church do when it can’t draw a picture of its god?
It writes
a creed.
We say,
this is what we believe is, this is what we believe isn’t,
and we try not to imagine more or less than we’ve
been given.
The
Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God,
and yet there are not three gods, but one
god.
Jesus
Christ is fully God from eternity and fully human in time
and both of those statements are true –
not just a very religious man, not an avatar
of the divine-in-all-things,
but the only Son of the Father taking on
flesh for our sake.
But we
are people who tell stories and who need imagery.
Neither
the Athanasian Creed nor any creed satisfies us without context.
No one
likes to hear this statement,
‘Believe this highly speculative set of
propositions
and you’ll be saved.’
Even if
it is the first thing we hear in the Athanasian Creed.
But we can
‘see,’ we can ‘experience’ the Trinity
in the stories of the life of Jesus,
as at
his Baptism the Spirit alights upon him
and the Father testifies to him,
as in
the Garden of Gethsemane he prays earnestly to the Father,
showing the communion of Spirit he has with
his Father
even in extremis;
as in
the Upper Room after the Resurrection
he bestows the Spirit on the disciples.
We can
also ‘see’ the Trinity as we tell the story of the life of the Church.
In
Romans Paul tells us that we have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ,
and that we can boast of two things
the hope of sharing God’s glory
and in our sufferings.
The one
is highly attractive, the other is not.
Who
boasts about sufferings?
No one
wants to have them,
and if you do, it might be a sign
that God’s not really looking after you that
well.
Something
might be wrong with you,
or worse yet, something might be wrong with
God.
But we
suffer, as Jesus did in his life,
from both the ‘normal’ sufferings of hunger,
thirst, and violence
and the specific sufferings of being
God’s people
in a world that wants no part of God.
If we
find ourselves putting our hope, as Jesus did,
in the promises of God rather than the false
promises of the evil one,
then we can have boast that we have assurance
of faith
far more than we could
if our lives since baptism had been nothing
but a bed of roses.
Under
the attacks of the evil one,
we rejoice because it is the Spirit of the
Son and the Father
that is sustaining us in our sufferings,
keeping us sure of the Father’s love.
Because
the Father was faithful to his Son in his sufferings,
the Father will be faithful to Jesus’ sisters
and brothers
in their sufferings.
So the
message is not ‘believe in this set of propositions,’
but, ‘live in relationship with the God
who is described and proscribed in this set
of propositions,
and you will be saved.’
And if
you live in relationship with this God, you are being saved.
But if
you have a different Jesus of Nazareth,
not the Son of God who became like you for
your salvation,
but simply a very religious man
or a manifestation of God
for your ethical or esoteric insruction,
then your salvation is still really all up to
you, isn’t it?
That’s
why those blessings and curses are in there,
because the story we tell about Jesus
matters.
It’s
either a story about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps
and making ourselves more spiritual or
ethical,
or we ask our beloved brother Jesus to
fulfill his promise,
to ask the Father to send the Spirit to strengthen
us and sustain us
until all sufferings are at an end.
I think
I know which story I want to be part of,
and which story is going to have a happy
ending.
In the
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Rev. Maurice C. Frontz III +
St Stephen Lutheran Church
