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“Why Jesus Matters” a sermon by Rev. Brian J. Kiely
Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008 Unitarian Church of Edmonton
This being Easter, Jesus seemed to be a good topic for a sermon. As the phrase more often heard in December says, “He’s the reason for the season!”
Well, actually, he’s not. The season of Spring and the worship of the goddesses surrounding the re-emergence of new life is as old as humanity. It long predates the first century Jewish prophet. But in the Christian world at least, Jesus has in large measure become the reason for the season... and therein lies my topic: Why Jesus matters. Perhaps I should re-phrase that at the outset to why the idea of Jesus matters or the story about Jesus matters. I’m not really sure the man himself matters much at all, or at least not any more than any other human being who has walked this earth.
Why do I say that? Well, what study I have done of the Bible and its history places me firmly in the camp that sees Jesus as a Jew and not as the first Christian. By this I mean that I think Jesus saw himself as someone trying to fix his own religion. I think he would have been terribly surprised to find any new faith built around him as a divine figure. I think he would have been even more surprised to see the size of that faith and both the wonderful and terrible things done in his name. As many of you know, the religion of Jesus differed greatly from what later Christian theology has projected onto him.
Jesus was born into a time when three different powers exploited the wealth and the work of the people of Israel. First, there was the Roman Empire, a body that ruthlessly put down dissent and that imposed high tributes on the local governments. Second there was the local government of King Herod Antipas which handled most of the direct taxation of the people both to maintain the king and to pay the tributes to Rome. And thirdly, there was the Temple, a collection of high ranked castes each comprised of families with a lifestyle to maintain under the justification of religious observance.
Between the demands of these three, the local people were kept impoverished and subjugated by taxes, secular laws and religious restrictions. We can have little sense of what it was like to live in a world where religion determined the work you did and when you did it, how you met and with whom you could be friends, how you married, when and how you had sex, how you raised a family, what you ate, where you slept and how and when you prayed.
I believe that Jesus was most likely born out of wedlock and was therefore an outcast. Many scholars agree that there is a pretty good chance that Joseph was a fictional figure created by the Gospel writers to explain away his problematic birth. From the get go, Jesus would have been shunned by the highly ritualized and purity obsessed Temple authorities and probably by many in his town as well. Not surprisingly, he identified himself first as a downtrodden peasant with little to lose and a thirst for freedom and respect. He was, I think, a pretty bright and charismatic guy, but also a compassionate one who never lost touch with his people.
I do believe Jesus had a mission, but I don’t think it was to save humanity from sin or the devil. I doubt that he ever dreamed of opening the gates of heaven, for heaven is a pretty iffy concept within Judaism at the best of times. I think, rather that he was trying to loosen the imposing and burdensome restrictions of the Temple on the people. After all, what had the temple ever done for him, but tell him that he was the unclean product of a sinful union? He was seeking a measure of freedom so people could live and love and work and play in a more relaxed way and with a lot less scrutiny. The Gospel accounts contain several stories of Jesus clashing with the temple hierarchy and calling them hypocrites. If this was a George Lucas movie ( he of Star Wars fame), I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that his father was actually one of the Chief priests! When he said that he came to destroy the law, he meant Jewish law, not Roman law. With goals like the Quebecois Catholics of the Quiet Revolution 50 years ago, Jesus sought a loosening of restrictions that allowed Temple courts to regulate every aspect of daily life. The kind of existence he rebelled against was the kind of oppression the Taliban imposed on Afghanistan. For Jesus Temple culture and the obsession with purity and ritual observance missed the point. It was a gross misinterpretation of the will of Yahweh. Hypocrisy and subservience were the only “original sins” Jesus battled. In the face of this oppression he preached a radical new idea. He spoke of a loving God, a gentle paternal figure who loved people for themselves and not for how perfectly the practiced ritual. He resurrected – to borrow the word - a simple and ancient Jewish core rule of love your neighbour as yourself.
These beliefs probably led him to a new kind of Gnostic spirituality developing in the desert, one that threw off the trappings of religion and called for a simpler and more honestly spiritual world. In fact, it is likely that he embraced the radical idea that God was within each human being and not apart or outside of us at all. Spreading that belief would have been an enormous threat to the Temple machine.
I believe Jesus was advocating for a simpler and freer and more personal Judaism. And I believe he failed miserably. For his trouble he was killed, and his Jewish following melted away within a generation under the relentless and growing orthodoxy of the Jewish elite. The Temple would dominate Jewish life for another six decades until violent revolution caused the Romans to destroy the Temple and exile the Jews from their lands.
But I do believe that the man Jesus mattered, for he touched many lives. He spread ideas. He moved hearts and probably made the lives of the people he knew brighter and more hopeful for a time. In that he had an inherent worth and dignity and that he celebrated human worth and dignity, he mattered. But by any measureable sense, he failed completely in his mission to change Judaism. In that sense he didn’t matter.
But as we all know the story about Jesus did not end with his death. After his execution a Greek educated man named Paul began to tell the story. He took the message to the non-Jewish Gentiles in the Roman Empire. In fact there is good evidence that Paul was at odds with Jewish Christianity until it disappeared under the onslaught of orthodoxy.
The Christianity of Paul extracted the elements of Jesus’ message that most fit the dominant Greek philosophy in the Gentile world. Whatever Jesus may have taught, and scholars are far from certain about what exactly he did teach, was slowly adapted by Paul to fit the non-Jewish empire. Along the way, Jesus acquired a miraculous birth – kind of a requirement for Roman religion. He also became divine, an expectation in Greece and Rome and a shocking blasphemy in Judaism.
Did he rise from the dead? That is a matter of factual conjecture and faith. The earliest Christian writings – those of Paul who predated the first Gospels by many years - speak only of a spiritual rebirth. It is the spirit of Jesus that inspired Paul, not any physical presence. It is only when we look back through eyes shaped by centuries of Christian theology and bad translations that we project a physical resurrection onto Paul’s words. The first Gospel, that of Mark, written a mere 20 or 30 years after Jesus died, did not originally contain a resurrection story. Scholars generally agree that the brief Chapter 16 account we read as our responsive reading is a later and clumsy addition. It isn’t until some four or five decades after Jesus died that we can find the first resurrection account. And if you pause to read the Gospels, you will see that none of the four tales agree.
The conclusion today by most who take a rational approach to religion is that there was no bodily resurrection. This is not a new idea. The idea of a single or Unitarian god goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. In the first 3 centuries after Jesus there were a good many that saw Jesus as prophetic, perhaps even divinely inspired, but not as divine himself. They did not believe that he was brought back to life and taken into heaven. They didn’t need to. They believed in the message of Jesus crafted by Paul without the magic or the miracles.
But others were heavily invested in that magic, because a divine Jesus made the claiming of power easier. It wasn’t until the Council of Nicea in 325CE that the Trinitarians won out and established the creed including an affirmation of the divinity of Jesus and the bodily resurrection as a requirement for calling yourself a follower. Before that it was all open to argument and debate.
But after that fateful date, Jesus the man finally faded in importance completely. His motivations and most of his actions were reinterpreted to convey the message of the new faith. His attacks on Temple culture were turned into an attack on Judaism as a whole. His quest for justice and respect for an impoverished people was spun into a celebration of poverty and humility (and subservience) in order to perpetuate the power of imperial Rome..and the newly growing church. Everything political Jesus may have done or tried to do to better the lot of the people was transformed into a statement of moral virtue. Every promise of a better future was transferred from the earthly realm to the afterlife. His calls for social change became exhortations to personal transformation.
I don’t think this was a nefarious or evil reshaping of the message of Jesus. It is the nature of religion to adapt to fit the social landscape. Making Christianity a religion of the personal quest for saintliness and right relationship with God allowed the faith to come up from the underground and survive and thrive in the Roman world. In the centuries to come the Church would do as much to protect the people from their rulers as it would exploit the people for the growth of the church. But most often it succeeded because it gave the people a moral framework and set of beliefs that did deliver hope and solace, comfort in times of strife and strength in times of adversity. It did provide the people with a means of dealing with and understanding everyday life, and that is ultimately the mission of any religion.
So I would argue that Jesus the man doesn’t matter much anymore, except possibly to scholars who make a living researching and writing and the sceptics who want to argue endlessly about ultimately unprovable facts. What he did or did not do is really not known. It has been filtered through time, though translation and transcription, through theology and church structure. Jesus the man is lost to us.
On the other hand the legend of Jesus, the belief in Jesus has shaped the world so dramatically that we have to acknowledge his impact. And that’s a problem. Many find it difficult to think positively about Jesus because they don’t trust the reliability of the accounts. Many look at the history of a faith and see only the wars, the corruption, the instances injustice and the subjugation of classes, races and the entire female gender. They see a faith so badly perverted that it becomes a tool and justification for a President to go to war in Iraq. Given the flaws, some find it necessary to reject the entire faith tradition out of hand. Words like ‘God’, Jesus, salvation, heaven, hell, sin and grace frankly give them the willies. They wish the whole thing would just go away. They might even go so far as to say that Jesus doesn’t matter...wishing desperately that it was true.
But the fact is, well, the fact of Christianity just IS. Trying to dismiss is, I think, misguided. Our legal system may not be built on the Bible, but much of our culture and its core values are. It is hard to discuss the idea of self-sacrifice, the notion that the poor and oppressed have value, the call for us to become justice makers, or even the very notion of hope for a better world without bumping into Christian theology. Western culture is dualistic because Christians borrowed the idea from Greek philosophy. So we see things in terms of right and wrong, life and death, good and evil, grace and sin, greed and sacrifice and so on. The Christian framework pervades every part of our culture including, most importantly, the unconscious assumptions and moral standards.
The parables of Jesus and the stories about him are part of our linguistic culture. People who help out strangers are called Good Samaritans. Offspring who eventually make peace with their families after a tumultuous youth are called Prodigal Sons. Finding the way to feed more people that you expected is spoken of in the language of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
When I meet people who claim that Jesus doesn’t matter, I feel sad more than anything else. To deny the importance of Jesus is to dismiss huge parts of our cultural inheritance. To suggest that our children need not learn about him is to deny them entrance into a rich heritage of art and story, of morality plays and cultural iconography.
It is possible to teach Jesus without teaching belief in what Jesus has come to mean. It is possible to study his life without bowing before the limited vision of the orthodox. I suspect that we Unitarians even have the capacity to appreciate the irony that the man who stood up to orthodoxy gave rise to a new faith that became mired in it. We are smart people. Surely we have the ability to reclaim the good that this man brought to the world. If we don’t we risk letting the orthodox corrupt his vision forever.
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