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Untangling Jesus

Untangling Jesus

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Tangled yarn

16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.  1 Thessalonians 4

26 “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels and gather the elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven…. When you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.  Mark 13

20 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, 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among and within you.”  Luke 17

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.”  Thomas 113

What is the kingdom of God? How do we find it, or when is it coming? The passages above are examples of how the New Testament can contradict itself. Even more, they represent the fundamental divide in the church’s understanding of Jesus’ message.

The first quotation is from the oldest Christian writing we know, Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Writing about twenty years after Jesus’ death, Paul is convinced Jesus will return very soon “in glory” to bring about the consummation of all history and establish his reign over all creation. In the passage from Mark, Jesus expresses essentially this same idea. This time, however, writing twenty years after Paul, it will be Mark’s readers, reeling from the catastrophic Jewish-Roman War, who will experience this.

In the passage from Luke, however, written fifteen or twenty years after Mark, Jesus explicitly rejects the notion that God’s kingdom is coming, sooner or later, because it’s already here! The quotation from the Gospel of Thomas expresses a very similar idea, with Jesus adding the explanation that, while the kingdom is here, most people don’t see the it.

The difference in these texts is not just about timing. The kingdom envisioned by Paul and by Jesus in the Mark passage is very different than Jesus’ idea of the kingdom in the stories from Luke and Thomas. In the first instance, the kingdom represents the apocalyptic establishment of God’s eternal rule. The statements by Jesus in Luke and Thomas, however, are enigmatic. What does it mean to say the kingdom is among you or within you or “spread out upon the earth”?

I think Jesus left most people puzzled, including his disciples. The curious scene where Jesus asks the disciples who people think he is points to the popular confusion. As I wrote last time, Albert Schweitzer came to the conclusion that Jesus thought his mission was to be the spark that initiated the coming of God’s kingdom, but it didn’t happen. He failed.

There are scholars today that agree with Schweitzer but I think they are wrong. Nonetheless, I recognize that there isn’t the evidence to resolve this conclusively one way or the other. As I quoted Robert Price, we have too many Jesuses. But neither do I think figuring out who Jesus really was is our concern. Instead, I believe we need to listen to the many Jesus voices to hear what speaks to us here and now.

Regardless of what Jesus intended, most of his followers, aka the church, have interpreted his teaching about the kingdom in one of two ways. Either God was going to bring about the establishment of the kingdom with Jesus’ return and at a definite time which Christians could anticipate, or the kingdom was coming at some indefinite and unknowable time in the future.

The Paul and Mark quotes obviously are in the first category. As time when on and Jesus did not return, this first interpretation fell out of favor. But it didn’t disappear. Over the centuries, movements have sprung up, usually in times of social crisis, which believed that Jesus’ return was imminent. Quotations from Paul’s letters, the gospels, and especially the book of Revelation have been patched together to support these groups’ predictions. Most recently, large numbers of evangelicals have held such beliefs, often with bizarre consequences.

It is the second view of Christ’s return and the kingdom’s coming which has been more common, however. The church became Christ’s interim institutional representative, keeping the lights burning, however long that might be, until the bridegroom returned, as one of Jesus’ parables says. But waiting is hard (as the same parable teaches). What are we supposed to do in the mean time?

As the centuries went by, the church found it more and more difficult to come up with an answer to that question. In effect, the church itself became the answer: build up the church as an institution, recruit lots of clergy and religious, develop elaborate doctrines and theology, and create more Christians by birth or conversion. I think we all know how well that strategy has turned out.

The institutional church has gone through endless cycles of growth, power abuse, corruption, infighting, division, and reform. The folks in the pews were mostly taken for granted. “Go to church, live life as best you can, and when you die God will take care of you.” Since the Enlightenment and rise of modernism, fewer and fewer people have been satisfied with either the church or its message of salvation after you die. In the West, at least, the church is now on life support and Christianity as a religion is hardly taken seriously.

The natural response of those distressed about this turn of events is to wonder how the church and Christianity can be revived. In other words, how to turn the cycle once again. I’m not sure that’s possible anymore. More importantly, I don’t think it’s even desirable because I don’t believe it’s what Jesus ever intended.

As we’ve seen, Jesus either believed the kingdom was coming very soon, or it wasn’t “coming” at all because it was already here. The option the church chose, that the kingdom would come at some indefinite time in the distant future, was not one of the options. It made that one up. The church has had an amazingly long run with it but has finally run out of gas.

But what about that second option, that the kingdom of God is already here? Well, that actually is part of the story, as well, though one largely unknown or forgotten. In fact, it is a thread that has run throughout the church’s history.

It is the story of the monastics and the mystics. It is the story of clergy, theologians, and lay people who quietly snuck this idea into their conventional beliefs and practices. It the story of others who boldly declared such beliefs in contrast with official teaching and were persecuted and even martyred for their efforts. And it is the story of everyday piety, often simple, sometimes superstitious or magical, but which believes that at any time and in any place, we are in God’s presence.

There is a tradition found in nearly all religions, but especially in the East, that the greatest source of humanity’s suffering is our own ego. In traditional Christianity the ego is our sinful self which we must struggle to control and subdue. But there is another understanding, shared with religions of the East, that the problem actually is that the ego is a fraud. It is an imposter, a “false self” blocking our vision of our true self, our sacred sense of “I am”, the indwelling Spirit, or simply God.

To discover this is to awaken to our true nature. The ego doesn’t need to be fought in a moral wrestling match in which few succeed. Rather, it needs to be seen through, discovering in the process that we are not separate selves but we are all united as incarnations of the one Self. In Jesus’ words, we need to lose our life to find it. In describing his own spiritual awakening, Paul says that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

Our world of 8 billion separate egos is careening towards disaster. And the more of us there are, the more isolated, lonely, angry, and afraid we become. Yet that is how our culture wants us to view ourselves, “growing the economy” as we all scramble to get ahead of everyone else.

But what if we took Jesus seriously, and literally, when he says the greatest commandment can be expressed in two ways, which in practice mean the same thing? That our life’s purpose is to love the one God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That true peace and happiness are found when we unite in love with the Being who is the ground of all reality, and that when we love our neighbor, we are actually loving ourself since we are all manifestation of the one Self.

In another passage near the beginning of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says this:

“The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

“Spiritual poverty” may be one of the best descriptions of life in our world today. Yet there is a thread running through the world’s religions that says it doesn’t have to be this way. This wisdom tradition says that we suffer from a case of mistaken identity, a global amnesia about our true self. The Jesus tradition, and the Christian religion which grew from it share that thread, though few have known to look for it. While mostly falling on deaf ears in the past, it is this voice of Jesus and the Spirit that we most need to listen for.

 

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Can Jesus be saved?

Can Jesus be saved?

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Road to Emmaus painting
Road to Emmaus (crop) by Robert Zund (Swiss 19th century)

A retired Lutheran pastor (who I don’t know) had a letter to the editor in our local paper this past Sunday. It was titled “How Christian nationalism ignores Jesus.” In his view, the tenets of the Christian nationalism that has risen in popularity here in the US clash with many of the teachings of Jesus found in the gospel. The pastor is appropriately passionate, cogent, and reasonable. He describes the understanding of Jesus common to most moderate and liberal churches and the attitudes and behavior such a view supports.

Practices of hospitality, welcoming strangers, feeding the hungry, supporting those in distress, bringing healing to those who suffer, and creating communities of love and understanding — these acts are central not only to Christian teachings and beliefs, but also central to the vast expressions of religion and spirituality. However, they are not part of the Christian nationalist perspectives.

Members of denominations like mine are often astounded at the beliefs and values of conservative Christians. But then the reverse is also true.

The central problem is how these Christians define and understand the values embedded in the Christian tradition.

And “those Christians” are also puzzled and often angered by the values liberals find in their understanding of Jesus. The real “central problem,” however, is that such splits have been true of Christianity throughout its history and there is no way to resolve them.

This problem became baked into the cake with the rise of orthodoxy and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire in the 4th century. While Jesus-inspired values and right behavior were always taught to folks in the pew, they were not the church’s main concern. Christianity’s core was the salvation that Jesus had procured for believers by dying as the only Son of God and being raised from the dead.

For that reason, both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds can go directly from Jesus’ birth to his crucifixion and say nothing about his adult ministry, nothing about his teachings or his behavior. This, of course, fit very well with the injustice and cruelty of the Roman empire. And it’s fit well with every similarly inclined culture and government since then.

Those believing in a Jesus of compassion and mercy often react by saying, “They just need to read the gospels!” But it isn’t that simple. Orthodox Christianity is a version of Pauline Christianity. Paul never knew Jesus and says nothing about Jesus’ life. For Paul, the gospel is all about believing in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus. As he writes to the Christians in Corinth, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Paul. We know now that Christianity from the beginning was a diverse, fractious, and divided movement. Paul’s biggest conflict was with the church in Jerusalem, led by Jesus’ brother James. These Christians believed Jesus was a reformer of Judaism and that its rules and traditions remained in effect. In the first few centuries there were also other Christian sects, many of which drew on a variety of spiritual and religious traditions from Greco-Roman culture.

Orthodoxy arose from the desire to corral this motley crew into a centralized belief system and organization. Was it right? Is orthodoxy the rightful successor to Jesus? Or was one of the other groups more like what Jesus intended? No one knows and it’s unlikely anyone ever will know.

Perhaps, even Jesus wouldn’t know. “What was Jesus’ intention?” is the question that hangs over the New Testament and the church. What was Jesus’ goal? What was he trying to do? Consternation over those questions can be found even in the gospels themselves.

The most famous modern person to attempt to answer those questions was Albert Schweitzer. To most people he is the French-German missionary doctor of colonial Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner. But prior to that, he was an accomplished Lutheran pastor, theologian, and musician.

Dissatisfied with what modern historical critical biblical scholars were saying about Jesus of Nazareth, Schweitzer undertook his own investigation. The result was the bombshell publication in 1906 of The Quest of the Historical Jesus (English title). Schweitzer asserts that the scholars of his time were simply finding the Jesus their prejudices wanted to find, rather than the Jesus who really was and who may have not been all that appealing or relevant to us.

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb. This image has not been destroyed from outside; it has fallen to pieces….

But Schweitzer was no conservative traditionalist. In his view, Jesus believed his purpose was to be the catalyst for bringing about God’s kingdom on earth. He had an apocalyptic vision of God acting soon to turn the world upside down. But it didn’t happen and he died a humiliating death. Jesus tried to spin the wheel of history but it only ended up crushing him. It is no coincidence that soon after writing his book Schweitzer began medical training and then left for Africa as a missionary doctor.

Then and since, Schweitzer’s book has been both condemned and praised. Over a hundred years later, it is still considered a significant work in theological and biblical circles. Even among those who reject his specific conclusions, Schweitzer is recognized as the one who exposed theology’s inability to say definitively who Jesus really was. Savior? Apocalyptic prophet? Reformer? Revolutionary? Mystic? Wisdom teacher? Religion founder? Religion destroyer?

Support for all of these can be found in the ancient texts, but there is no way to combine them all into one person. As New Testament scholar Robert Price has said, our problem is that we have too many Jesuses. It’s like the old To Tell the Truth TV program. The announcer says, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?” and the guests each pretend to stand up but none of them ever do.

Since Schweitzer, the church has avoided the consequences of this realization by playing its role as a cultural institution, but that’s no longer working. As a result, millions are leaving Christianity. Among those who remain, new groups are re-imagining Christianity as an amazing array of self-help philosophies, social service organizations, nostalgic recreations of the past, and apocalyptic authoritarian political movements. But no one can point and say with authority, “That’s what Jesus intended.”

Can Jesus be saved? Does Christianity have a future? “Maybe” is about the strongest answer I can give. How ever understood, Jesus has inspired millions and remains a powerful symbol. I think he’s worth saving. So, next time, I will give at least a sketch of how this ancient tradition could survive and be of value to our perilous world. And that’s the key point. Perhaps our global crises may be the needed catalyst for the church to pull its feet out the mud of its long-irrelevant doctrines, theologies, and structures. We can only hope.