Should Jesus Matter?

Should Jesus Matter?

Jack Miles won a Pulitzer prize for his book God: A Biography. Recently, he came out with a new book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. Here are the opening paragraphs of this book from the chapter entitled “Crucifixion and the Conscience of the West.”

All mankind is forgiven, but the Lord must die. This is the revolutionary import of the epilogue that 2000 years ago a group of radical Jewish writers appended to the sacred scripture of their religion. Because they did so, millions in the west today worship before the image of a deity executed as a criminal and, no less important, other millions, who never worship at all, carry within their cultural DNA a religiously derived suspicion that somehow, someday the last will be first and the first last. (Matthew 20.)

The crucifixion, the primal scene of Western religion and Western art, has lost its power to shock. At this late date, perhaps only a non-Western eye can truly see it. A Japanese artist now living in Los Angeles once recalled the horror that most Japanese feel at seeing a corpse displayed as a religious icon. And of their further revulsion when the icon is explained to them. “They ask,” she said, “’If he was so good, why did he die like that? In Japanese culture,’ they said, ‘good people end their lives with a good death, even a beautiful death, like the Buddha. Someone dying in such a hideous way, for us, he can only be a criminal.’”

Her perception is correct. The crucifix is a violently obscene icon. To recover its visceral power, children of the 21st century must imagine a lynching. The body of the victim, swollen and distorted, the head hanging askew from a broken neck, while the bystanders smile their twisted smiles. They must imagine that grisly spectacle reproduced at the holiest spot in whatever edifice they call holy. And yet to go even this far is still to miss the meaning of the image. For this victim is not just innocent, he is God incarnate. The Lord himself, in human form.

Winners usually look like winners, and losers like losers. But thanks to this paradox of a feature of the Christian myth, there remains lodged deep in the political consciousness of the West, the readiness to believe that the apparent loser may be the real winner, unrecognized. And Christianity’s epilogue to the God story that is inherited from Judaism, the Lord God becomes human without ceasing to be the Lord and unrecognized by all but a few, experiences the human condition at its worst, winning in the end a glorious victory.

SERMON:

If you are a member of this church, or of another Unitarian Universalist congregation, you should have received your copy of World, the magazine of the UUA. The cover article, written by Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker, entitled, Can Violence Save?, challenges the Christian theology of redemptive suffering. I am sure it was included at this time because it’s Easter: The central, the quintessential message of Christianity is right now. It is not Christmas, or another holiday or holy day—it is the Easter crucifixion and resurrection, this is what makes Christianity unique. This article about the crucifixion and resurrection is not easy. Brock and Parker explain that it’s not the story they don’t like, it’s what the church has done with the story.

It’s the creed and the dogma, the theology that has been built up around this Christian story. Here’s just a bit of what they say:

The actual historical event of Jesus’ crucifixion was not historical nor saving. In Jesus’ time, the Romans occupied all of Palestine. The Romans suppressed resistance by terrorizing the local population. Crucifixion was their most brutal form of capital punishment. It took place in full public view to teach a lesson through terror. To say that Jesus’ executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing. That torture and murder are the will of God. It is to say that those who loved and missed Jesus, those who did not want him to die were wrong. That enemies who cared nothing for him were right. The dominant traditions of Western Christianity have turned away from the suffering of Jesus and his community, abandoning the man on the cross.

I don’t think I saw my first crucifixion icon until I was in high school. You see, I was raised in a Protestant tradition where Jesus had abandoned the cross: Jesus had already been taken down and put into the tomb. I remember the first time I saw a crucifixion, and it was just as Miles describes it: I was in shock. There is a lot that can be said about this, a lot of theology and reasons for why one tradition puts Christ on the cross and one doesn’t. But I am not going to get into that today.

I do think that seeing that icon for the first time holds, probably somewhere in my subconscious, some of the reasons why I have never liked Easter. It is one of two holidays and holy days that are on my hit list of days to avoid. Of course, this makes it very awkward for me because as a minister it’s tough to avoid Easter. But part of my dislike of it must be this grueling message, as Jack Miles describes it: I appreciate and understand the Japanese response to it. Then to put this icon in places that we call holy. What does that mean? Again, some of it has to do with the church’s distortion of the redemptive message, according to Parker and Brock, and I think they are right, and the way this message has been manipulated and used in an oppressive way.

It may only be in the Unitarian Universalist church, as I am doing this morning, where I could take this theme and speak about the distortion of atonement theology, a theology of redemptive justice; it may only be in a UU church on Palm Sunday, of all times, that I could take this message and talk about it under the title of “Should Jesus Matter?” Today, everywhere else in the Christian world, they are celebrating Passion Week. Yet here I am suggesting, Should we even bother with the figure of Jesus?

But I know my audience. Among you the range of opinion about the figure of Jesus runs from outright hostility and suspicion, to people in the center who think he’s interesting but so what, to the other end where some say that Jesus is important in their lives. I can run the entire spectrum of belief, depending on what I have read and what I feel.

My portrait of Jesus is in harmony with John Dominick Crosson. He says that the original message of the Jesus movement was a shared egalitarianism of spirit and shared material resources. A shared egalitarianism of spirit is symbolized in the healing stories of Jesus. And shared material resources is symbolized in the stories about Jesus inviting people to eat with him. Healing and eating, healing and eating. Throw in a few parables, and you’ve got the entire gospels. Jesus does a lot of story telling, healing and eating. Crosson says this is the heart of the original Jesus movement. But what the church did with this is something else.

These stories are about the love of God for all people, stories of distributive justice, of prophethood and justice seeking. Stories of healing and justice can be read throughout the Christian texts, because these are the themes people keep coming back to over and over again. The stories of healing, stories about Jesus asking people, as Diane Eck talks about it, to “trust me, I am the way, not the only way, but I will walk with you.” Trust me, Jesus is saying, I affirm who you are as a human being.

A lot of hymns and sermons refer to these messages healing and justice. Sometimes religious liberals have made fun of these hymns and sermons and the theologies they reflect. For example, several years ago at a ministers’ meeting I had the opportunity to hear seminary professor Tex Samples. He told this story:

I remember once in class I was making fun of the song, “In the Garden.” Not only did I parody its lyrics as hopelessly individualistic, privatistic, and full of escapist spirituality, but I launched out into singing it in a nasal voice, with affront aforethought. I was on a roll until after the class, when a 35-year-old woman approached me and told me this story.

“Tex, my father started raping me when I was 11. And he kept it up until I was 16. And I found the strength somehow to stop it. After every one of those ordeals, I would go outside and I would sing that song to myself. [If you don’t know the song, it goes, “I go in the garden alone, while the dew is still in the roses. And he walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own.”] Without that song, I don’t know how I could have survived. So don’t you ever, ever make fun of that song in my presence again.”

Samples went on to reflect that a word’s or theology’s meaning depends on how it is used. It is one thing to sing “In the Garden” as privatistic sentimentalism. It is quite another when it sustains the survival of people who struggle to make it one more day.

Jesus as the healer. It has different nuances, different understandings, different meanings for people, and so it must be read contextually: Meaning depends on who is saying it and how they understand it. The message of Jesus as the healer, of the egalitarian spirit of healing, is still a dominant theme today, but it is interpreted in many ways. Everything from Diana Eck to what Tex Samples has to say.

The other message, the prophetic justice-seeking side of Jesus, is seen today in liberation theology, a theology of people from the underside, the underbelly of life. There is a concept in liberation theology called God’s preferential option for the poor. Liberation theologians state that to choose to side with the rich, or the powerful, or the wealthy is not portrayed at all in the Christian Bible; and what’s more, to remain neutral is to take sides. The only way a follower of Jesus can act on Jesus’ message of prophethood and distributive justice is to act on behalf of the poor. It’s as if to say that God or the Universe, or the Cosmos, or whatever you want to use to describe that Truth, sides with the poor.

Both of these themes, of healing and justice making, I saw for a whole week when I was in the Philippines. Filipinos celebrate Holy Week, the week prior to

Easter, with extreme passion, which is why it’s called Payson, Passion Week. What is amazing is that that week is given more energy than Easter is. As the week builds, stores close, schools close, and then it’s almost as though everything goes back up again at Easter, after the resurrection. These two messages, of healing and justice, they are so alive during that week. I am sure that in other predominantly Catholic third-world countries you’ve seen pictures of somebody walking on the street carrying a cross, and there will be a line of people following them. People identify with that healing side of Jesus. That Jesus can help to wash away the hurts. It’s similar to what Tex Samples talked about. They find in Jesus an identity and a message that is very powerful and redeeming in their lives, lives filled with poverty and oppression.

And Payson has contributed to and helped to create some of the strongest revolutionary movements in the Philippines. During Payson, Filipino Christians identify with the Jesus who was oppressed, who, just like them, was from the underside of society. Here is the justice piece. Both of these are in balance with each other. It’s not one or the other. It’s not just healing or eating, not just the spiritual side or the prophetic side, pastoral or justice. It is both, and they have to be read in context.

Jack Miles talks about how we have been hard-wired by our cultural DNA to these messages about Jesus. Miles says that whether or not we consciously think about the person Jesus, whether we call ourselves Christians or not, our culture is immersed in the stories of Jesus. He uses the passage from Matthew, “the first shall be last and the last first” as an example. This thought, and many others, is part of Western consciousness.

Tony Larsen, who is our minister in Racine, Wisconsin, has a different version of this same idea that he expresses as a concern. He speaks of meeting with his church’s youth group, YRUU (Young Religious Unitarian Universalists). He tells them a story about one UU who says to another, “I bet you $5 you don’t know the Lord’s Prayer.” And the guy says, “I know the Lord’s Prayer. Of course. I’ll take your bet.” The first UU says, “OK say it.” The second begins, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep, etc.” And the first UU says, ”OK you win. Here’s your five bucks.” But Larson says that the thing that really shocked him was the youth didn’t get it! They didn’t get it because they didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer. This is really a shame, because there are references made to that prayer, there are references made to a lot of the thing that Jesus has said, throughout our culture. But do people (in this case Larsen is referring to our youth), do they know what those references are about? It is a part of our culture, we have to admit that. It’s in our plays, it is in our literature. It is almost as though we have been hard-wired to a lot of the stories and parables, the stories of eating and healing, and we don’t even know it. We need to teach ourselves so that we know where we have come from, so we know where we are going.

There are two ways to approach Jesus. The way that I was schooled for years was to look for the historical Jesus. This was called demythologizing Jesus. I was encouraged to do what Thomas Jefferson did in his Jefferson Bible: cut out the miracles, cut out the things that we weren’t sure whether or not they happened, and so you end up with the generic Jesus. This is the search to find the real Jesus. I must admit that, even though I am not a Christian, as the years have gone by since seminary, I have been more and more intrigued with the historical Jesus. It is like a big detective story. I don’t read detective stories, so this is my detective story. You can just keep pulling away layer after layer after layer, finding out more and more and more. It is simply fascinating. But, we will never really know, there is not enough material to know. If you expect a clean-cut answer at the end, you are not going to get it. It just goes on and on and on. So where does that leave you?

It leaves you with the Jesus of faith, the Jesus of belief. This is not clear-cut either. Yet, by understanding the historical Jesus, I have come to have a much greater appreciation for the Jesus of faith. With the Jesus of faith, you don’t need all the facts in order to say. Yes, you believe; or, No, you don’t. It’s left up to the individual to decide what it is you believe about Jesus. And that is what I am interested in. What is it that makes you tick? What is it that makes you believe? It’s a matter of priorities. What is it that you value in your life? What is it that I value in my life? We have the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith. My experience has been that most Unitarian Universalists love to talk about the historical Jesus because we are very left brained. But it’s much harder to talk about the Jesus of faith.

So where do we come out on all of this is: Should Jesus matter? Of course he should matter. He should matter because Jesus is a significant central figure in Western civilization, to such a point that the stories of healing and eating, of pastoral care and prophethood, have shaped our culture. And if they have shaped our culture, they have shaped us. There is simply no way to get around it. In this sense, then, every one of us, whether we like it or not, has Jesus as a central figure in our lives. If we have been shaped by our culture then we have been shaped by Jesus.

Jesus should matter because I think his message is an important one that has been told by both sacred and secular prophets, but they are not where I am this

morning. We are talking about Jesus. His message is a challenging one for us. It challenges us in a very positive way, because it challenges us, asks us, pushes us, to say with clarity whether or not we will live with an attitude of scarcity or abundance. The choice is ours.

Here is the way John Shelby Spong puts it, at the end of his career. He is sitting in his library writing and he looks up at the hundreds of books in his library. And he says:

I don’t care about these books anymore. It’s not what is of value to me. My business is to live. To live now, to love now, and to be now. As I give my life, my love, and myself away, I hope that others can be called into deeper life, greater love, fuller being, and by expanding each other, we enter the infinity of what Paul Tillich called the eternal now. To live it, not to explain it, is my task. So let us live, my brothers and sisters, let us eat, drink, and be merry, not because tomorrow we shall die, but because today we are alive. And it is our vocation to be alive. Alive to our God, alive to each other, alive to ourselves. Jesus said, “Choose ye this day whom you will serve. I have come that you might have life, and that you might have abundant life. That is quite enough for me.”

To live abundantly. Now there is a message to which we all can say, “Amen.”

Thank you to Ms. Claire Morgen who transcribed this sermon.

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