In a modern translation of the second article of the Nicene Creed, the church’s most official statement of its beliefs, we read:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God…. 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. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.

Thus, according to this statement from the 4^th century CE, Jesus of Nazareth was born to a virgin named Mary and crucified on orders from the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. That’s it. That’s the sum total of his earthly life in the official view of the church. He was born and he died. It’s a sign of how upside down this religious world has become that what people are most interested in today, the adult life and teachings of Jesus, rated no mention whatsoever in the church’s defining statement about him.

The Nicene Creed was just one step in a centuries-long process of establishing a metaphysical definition of Jesus Christ as the savior of humanity. But as I wrote in the post before last, the salvation edifice created by the church has collapsed like a house of cards. The church’s notion of salvation is a leftover of the ancient world which has no meaning today. Not only do secular people not buy it but it has lost much of its value for church people, as well. But Jesus is still here. Perhaps there is more to him than being born of a virgin and dying as a divine sacrifice.

At the same time that modern science and philosophy were undermining the church’s ancient dogma, a new fascination arose with the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus as savior was losing interest but people wanted to know who was the person Jesus. The critical study methods developed by scholars were remarkable and much was learned about Jesus and the ancient eastern Mediterranean world in which he lived.

Nonetheless, after 300 years the results of this historical research and scholarship have been less than satisfying. In a famous gospel scene Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” But they come to no consensus. “Some say you’re this; some say you’re that.” That’s pretty much where biblical scholars are today and with no prospect of that fog lifting.

One explanation, besides the lack of hard information from that ancient time, is that there were differences of opinion about Jesus during his lifetime, even among his followers. The gospels and Paul agree that Jesus represented something new and different. Not only is a genuinely new idea often hard to accept, it is often hard to even understand. The gospels and Paul also agree that Jesus’ own disciples were not all on the same page about him (and Mark portrays them as not being the sharpest knives in the drawer).

So, for that and other reasons, it’s not surprising that the Bible has a fractured understanding of Jesus. The result has been that for centuries churches and individuals have been able to construct a Jesus to suit their needs and prior beliefs. It may be a stretch to say that “you can get the Bible to say anything,” but in the case of Jesus it certainly provides a lot of options.

For a long time I, like many others, have bewailed this situation. Behind this dismay has been the belief that we need to find the “real” Jesus and follow him. But I have now come to accept that there is no “real Jesus.” We have, instead, only the enigmatic, hazy, yet powerful figure of the Bible, and that’s all we’ve ever had.

I also have come to believe, that’s all we need. What we have is not enough to create some objective historical foundation for a “Jesus religion.” But there is enough to make Jesus relevant again as an important example and guide for meaningful life today. And that’s what I am going to sketch out below.

Now the immediate objection will be, “How do we know you’re right?” And my answer is, “That’s the wrong question.” As I said above, there is no single “right” Jesus, but there certainly are “wrong” Jesuses. To separate them, I believe there are three criteria for judging any depiction of Jesus today: 1) congruity with the biblical material, 2) congruity with the world’s religious and spiritual traditions, and 3) congruity with contemporary life.

The meaning of #1 is simple: you can’t just make Jesus up. He has to be grounded in what information we do have, though he doesn’t have to account for everything the Bible says about him. As we’ve seen, that just isn’t possible. Portraying Jesus as a visitor from outer space could make for a fascinating book but it wouldn’t be about the biblical Jesus.

Criterion #2 sounds new but it’s actually been around for a long time. It assumes our faith and spiritual practice don’t exist in a vacuum. There is an important and fundamental sameness to the human experience, even in the midst of all our cultural diversity. While institutional religions have wanted to emphasize their differences, in truth all religions try to meet a remarkably similar set of human needs and aspirations. Our understanding of Jesus has to reflect this. To say he taught something drastically different from other traditions and a revealed a unique and singular way of salvation (as Christianity has often done) is not a defensible position in today’s interconnected world.

The final criterion sounds obvious yet it is one Christianity has often failed. From the Constantinian church of the 4^th century onward, the “gospel” has often been a message about escaping the world, rather than how to live holistically within it. The church’s sacramental rituals provided a ticket, redeemable upon death, to a heavenly realm outside time and space. Guidance for life now was vague and often inconsistent. But as modern scholarship has made clear, the primary concern of the Jesus of the Bible was life here and now. A contemporary view of Jesus who conjures a magical life escape act would be unbiblical, unbelievable, and irrelevant (though many churches still promote it).

I’m sure there is a book’s worth of material available for my contemporary Jesus’ portrait but I don’t want to write a book, or need to. I think you will recognize this Jesus, and perhaps be persuaded by it. Again, not persuaded that my portrayal is “right” but that it is meaningful and relevant to our life and to the world. And to start, we need to start, as Sister Maria says, at the very beginning. Which is to say, the beginning of the story of Jesus’ ministry in the earliest gospel, Mark.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:14-15)

The English word “repent” is simply wrong here, a mistranslation, even if its use is centuries old. The Greek word is metanoia which means, “go beyond your mind.” Think differently about this than you have before, Jesus is saying. About what? That the kingdom of God is here, now, at your fingertips, and not far off in time and space. This is the “good news.” And in the context of Mark’s story, now is the time for this good news to be proclaimed.

In the Old Testament, “kingdom” almost always meant the literal kingdom of Israel, either existing or to be restored. Later, it was thought of either as God’s heavenly realm or of a divine kingdom to be established on earth, often with Jesus as its ruler. Yet, the kingdom Jesus talks about repeatedly in his parables and other sayings almost never corresponds with either of these notions. Rather, for Jesus the kingdom is something present now but often hidden from view and different than what people expect it to be.

The occasions where Jesus becomes explicit about this are few, yet they are so clear it’s impossible to reconcile them either with the notion of a political kingdom or some divine realm to come. Consider Luke 17:20-21.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”

This is very similar to saying 113 at the end of the gospel of Thomas.

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?” [Jesus said,] “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

And near the beginning of Thomas, in saying 3, Jesus says:

“If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.”

In his famous nighttime dialog with Nicodemus in John 3, Jesus declares, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Jesus goes on to say that to enter the kingdom one must be born of the Spirit. “Seeing” or “entering” the kingdom are both metaphors for an experience that is possible here and now.

How does one have such an experience? Jesus’ blunt answer is one echoed in spiritual traditions around the world: “you” have to die. All four gospels have some version of this statement by Jesus, such as in Matthew 16:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life … will find it.

It’s in Paul, however, where we find the clearest understanding of this idea for followers of Jesus. In Galatians, Paul appropriates the idea of Jesus’ cross as the means by which we experience our spiritual death and rebirth.

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Who is this “I” that has died? It is Paul “in the flesh.” And in modern terms, “flesh” is probably best understood as ego, our mental and psychological self and our identity in the world. In Romans, Paul calls this our “false self,” but perhaps illusory self would be better. In any case, it is what hides from us our fundamental identity as Spirit, as divine.

In a dramatic story in John 10, Jesus infuriates his listeners when he declares, “I and the Father are one.” When Jesus asks why they are about to stone him, they say it is because he has made himself equal with God. Considering the ways he could have responded to this, what Jesus does say is remarkable.

“Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled— can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am a son of God?”

Jesus is quoting Psalm 82 to say, in effect, that he is “God’s son” because all the people of God are divine.

In John 17, just before his arrest, Jesus prays for his disciples

“… that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, … so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”

To be a follower of Christ, in John’s view, is to realize that you are both one with Jesus and one with God, just as they were one.

Alan Watts said that while in the West if you say, “I am god”, you will be stoned or put in an asylum, in the East they will say, “So glad you’ve figured in out.” But this idea is not so far from the biblical tradition as we’ve thought. In the creation story we are told that humans are made in God’s “image and likeness” (Genesis 1) and created by God’s Spirit breathing into the dust of the earth (Genesis 2). The division between sacred and profane has always been artificial.

Supported by texts like these and their own experiences, it is the mystics who have kept this awareness alive within Christianity. The medieval mystic and theologian, Meister Eckhart, expressed our divine identity simply yet profoundly.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

The gospel is not about Jesus’ dying so our sins can be forgiven. The “good news” is the incredible nearness of God and our oneness with God. It is about a God who surrounds us, is within us, and fills the universe. “Salvation” is the discovery of our sacred identity here and now. As Jesus says in John 8:

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

The gospel is, above all else, a message of freedom. In Luke’s account of the start of his ministry, Jesus goes to his home town synagogue and claims for himself this passage from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

These are not the words of a political revolutionary but of someone seeking to release people from the bondage of religious oppression and spiritual ignorance. That is why he goes on to say, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Salvation (if that word is still usable today) is not the awarding of some special metaphysical status for an eternity to come. Rather, it is an awakening, the discovery of our true nature, our sacred identity, in the Eternal Now of being, transcending the everchanging forms of existence.

Yet as profound as the words of Jesus and his interpreters may be, they come from an ancient and distant time and place. Does even a renewed understanding of Jesus still have meaning for us? And do the traditions of Christianity and the church have any value now? That’s what I will tackle in the third and final part of this series.

 

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