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Sunday, November 25, 2001
Rev. James A. Todhunter

I expect that each person brings two questions to church every Sunday. First, who is Jesus Christ? And second, what difference does Jesus Christ make in my own life and in the world?

Jesus refers to Jesus of Nazareth, a human being, a Jew who lived in Galilee during the first third of the first century. Christ is a title, the Greek version of a Jewish term meaning the Messiah. The term first meant One Anointed by God, that is, very special; then became the One who fulfilled the prophecies about a liberator for Israel, and eventually, in the eyes of Paul and the Gospel writers, the Christ became a cosmic figure: the image, the form of God in the universe. What is the connection between the two – the human Jesus and the Cosmic Christ?

Jesus was this first century man we read about in the New Testament. We are told, mainly in the four Gospels, that he traveled around Northern Israel, taught, cast out demons, told stories about the Reign of God (in contrast to the Reign of Caesar), had followers, and eventually went to Jerusalem where he was executed as a criminal. Then many people claimed that he appeared to them after his death. So shocked and amazed were they that a Jesus Movement began. He later appeared to Paul, who had never actually met him. Paul thereafter preached about the Risen Christ. Jesus’ ministry, from beginning to end, lasted less than three years.

So what do we know about this human Jesus and what was he really like? Here it gets difficult. The earliest writing we have about Jesus is probably from Paul (about fifty C.E.) and he says practically nothing about the human Jesus. He is concerned with the Risen Christ. The earliest Gospel, Mark, was probably written around 70, that is forty years after Jesus’ death. And all four Gospels describe Jesus’ words and the story of his life differently. And there is no easy way to harmonize them. The Jesus of Mark is rough, blunt, and given to short pithy aphorisms. The Jesus of John is quite sophisticated and gives long, philosophical discourses. In John, Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple comes very early in the Gospel; in Mark near the end of Jesus’ life.

What we know is that the historical Jesus had a profound impact on people. He gathered followers and they remembered what he said. He was crucified and then appeared to some of his followers. They remembered that new experience and what Jesus now said. But they also remembered what Jesus had said and done before he was crucified and perhaps saw all that in a new light. These eyewitness remembrances were then passed along over a generation, eventually written down in different places, and then collected into Gospels. And all these Gospel writers had no reservations about shaping and organizing this Jesus material to suit the immediate needs they saw in the communities that concerned them.

To try and get back to the real historical Jesus may be like peeling an onion, layer by layer. Our Church recently sponsored a visit by two fellows of the "Jesus Seminar," a group of New Testament scholars devoted to trying to recover (or "reconstruct") the true Jesus of history. The Jesus Seminar is the latest initiative in a process that began hundreds of years ago with the Enlightenment when scholars began to explore the presumed differences between the Gospel record and the historical Jesus. These arguments continue. Some say that at the end of the day, there is very little indeed that we can know about the historical Jesus, and we are left only with the Gospel accounts. Others have argued that, in fact, through careful analysis of the texts, using methods of historical and linguistic research, we can uncover at least some of the Jesus of history behind the Gospels. For example, Christians in Mark’s day believed, with Paul, that the Reign of God was coming and that the end of the world was at hand. Did the historical Jesus believe this, or did Mark set this current concern back into the words of the Jesus of his Gospel? Scholars hotly debate this. The Jesus Seminar says, in fact, Jesus didn’t really say anything about the end of the world, and that he believed the Reign of God was already fully present. Other scholars fiercely disagree.

Some in the Jesus Seminar would argue that the historical Jesus was an illiterate rural Jewish peasant who was basically a wandering sage. Others argue that he was a literate small town carpenter, like his father. The Jesus Seminar maintains that less than 20% of what is attributed to Jesus in the New Testament was actually said by him. Some in the Seminar hold that how we regard the teachings of the Jesus in the Gospels must be held up to what this itinerant sage would or would not have likely said. At one of the presentations, Edie Rasell from our congregation asked the question, "The Jesus of my faith is very special. Are you saying that the historical Jesus was not particularly special, just one of a number of wandering sages and healers at the time? If so, why should I follow him now?" That was a good question.

The historical Jesus, whoever he was, was special enough to attract followers who paid attention to what he said and what he did. He was apparently good, wise, caring, and just. And he talked about the Realm of God. Whatever he did and said, it was enough to get him in big trouble. So frightening was his situation that each Gospel reports that his followers fled for their lives. And he was crucified.

Then came the Resurrection. What happened? As with the historical Jesus, we can’t know for sure. The reports are contradictory. But it seems clear to me that something happened. Was it historical or mystical or hallucinatory or cleverly contrived? I have no idea. But something happened. I don’t have to see or hear a bomb go off to know from the results that something dramatic happened. Something did. The least acceptable explanation, to me anyway, is that who Jesus was and what he stood for was so wonderful that he lives on as his cause lives on, like Che Guevara or Florence Nightingale. That doesn’t work. There have been other wonderful people and wonderful causes, but this was different. Something happened that was so amazing and unexpected that these weak-kneed and wimpy disciples were set ablaze with conviction and passion. Somehow they encountered Jesus after his death.

The theologian Matthew Fox points out that the Quest for the Historical Jesus was and is very much a product of the Enlightenment, that is in this case, the attempt to deal rationally and scientifically with Christian documents and history. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were extraordinarily skeptical of mysticism. But the fact is that one cannot talk about the Resurrection, the Risen Jesus, or the Cosmic Christ, without being open to the mystical experience. The Apostle Paul, when he writes of Christ does so in very mystical terms. John borrows and redefines the Greek term logos (translated as the Word) applying it to the Cosmic Christ. And there has remained in Christianity a strong mystical tradition that has, in recent times, come to be more and more appreciated. The Cosmic Christ is the form of God, the image of God in the universe. This Cosmic Christ is everywhere and is available to us now. We can "put on" Christ. We can be "in" Christ, and Christ can be "in" us. We can meet this Cosmic Christ through prayer and meditation, through nature, through art, and through acts of justice and compassion. As with Jesus, when the Cosmic Christ connects with the world, something new is created.

What I am getting to here is that we need both the human, historical Jesus, and the mystical Cosmic Christ in our life of faith. On the one hand, it is a mistake to construct our faith based exclusively on the historical Jesus (as best we can uncover his life), and throw out the Cosmic Christ, particularly if this means rejecting the Jesus of the Gospels. But on the other hand, we cannot focus exclusively on the mystical, spiritual Christ, and lose the connection with this real flesh and blood world.

I said earlier that one of the powerful things that happened at the Resurrection was that those who knew the earthly Jesus met him again as the Risen Christ. For them, it was as if the world had seemed to defeat and destroy this man of justice and peace and compassion, and everything he stood for. The Reign of Caesar had said "No" to the teachings, deeds, and example of Jesus of Nazareth. The Romans did not say "No" to his divinity (that was not the issue). They said "No" to the dangers to Roman rule represented by a fully actualized human being. But with the Resurrection, God said "Yes." God said "Yes" to what the authentically human Jesus represented. And if God says "Yes" to a human being who is authentically human, is not God actually saying that such a human being in all his or her humanity is divine?

The human and the divine connected in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus the Man of Nazareth became the Cosmic Christ. And the Cosmic Christ became Jesus the Man of Nazareth. Thomas Aquinas said this:

The Incarnation accomplished the following: That God became human and that humans became God and sharers in the divine nature…

The early Church leader Clement of Alexandria put it simply:

(The Divine)...has become human so that you might learn from a human being how a human being may become divine.

To talk about human and divine here, in our lives and in the life of Jesus, is not to resort to some traditional notion of a three-storied universe, with God "up there," patriarchal and mighty, intervening in the world. This is not the case at all. I don’t believe in a God who intervenes. Here we are talking about the profound biblical understanding of God as both "other" (transcendant) and "present" (immanent). God’s otherness is experienced as a profound, overarching providence shaping human destiny. And, at the same time, I believe that the way God enters the world is by revealing the cosmic right in the midst of creation. Jesus and the Cosmic Christ were one (whenever that happened, and it really doesn’t matter), when the divine spark of truth, love, justice, and creativity ignited in the life of Jesus of Nazareth – whether that was before his birth (John); at his birth (Luke, Matthew); at his baptism (Mark); or at his Resurrection (Paul). Whenever that happened, the human Jesus did not stop being human, and the Cosmic Christ did not stop being Cosmic. When they connected they became what Paul Tillich calls the "New Being." And this "New Being", this "New Creation" (St. Paul) is available to you and me right in this very moment in exactly the same way.

Nicolas of Cusa said "Divinity is in all things in such a way that all things are in divinity." And the wonderful 14^th century saint Julian of Norwich said:

See! I am God. See! I am in everything. See! I never lift my hands off my works, nor will I ever. See! I lead everything toward the purpose for which I ordained it,..by the same Power, Wisdom and Love by which I created it. How could anything be amiss?

AMEN.

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