Mark 8 | Who Do You Say That I Am?

Who do you say that I am? This is the central question when considering Christianity, and how we answer the question determines for most of us whether or not we actually call ourselves "Christian" or not.

Last year one of our most stalwart members of the Festival of the Holy Names was a Lutheran Seminarian named Barbara. Barbara was from Canada, and was in Berkeley to do internship work as a prison chaplain.

Barbara was in rough shape when she first started attending. Because Lutheranism is confessional in nature, it can be dogmatic, and Barbara was really wrestling with many of the things she was "supposed" to be confessing, as a Lutheran. When she found our little group, she was trying to decide whether or not she could even call herself a Christian, let alone whether she could in good conscience pastor a church.

Almost immediately I told her that in my opinion a Christian is anyone who reveres the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, and makes a commitment to live a life informed by those stories. What exactly those stories meant to her are of necessity different from what they mean to me or her bishop or anyone else. In fact, what those stories mean to any of us is different at different times in our own lives.

For instance, as a child, I had some very interesting ideas about who Jesus was. Fundamentalist theology had taught me that God the Father was a raging tyrant out for blood, and the only thing standing between me and this monster God was Jesus, the human shield.

Later, in Junior college I went through my "agnostic" phase. Jesus was a wise teacher who never wanted to found a new religion. In college I converted to the Episcopal church and discovered the Cosmic Christ of the 3rd century church, in whom all things live and move and have their being.

My understanding of who Jesus was and is is far from complete. I have no idea how I might answer that question in 5 years, but I hope that my seeking after the Nazarene will be as fervent and sincere as my seeking is now.

Barbara and I are not anomalies. Oh, sure, lots of folks say "this is who Jesus is and if you don't completely agree, you're a heretic." I would just like to point out that folks who say such things would themselves have been considered heretics at various points in the Church's history.

For not unlike individual Christians, the Christian church is not in total agreement about who Jesus is. With every new century, and with every new culture to which the Gospel is introduced, we hear differing interpretations. As Albert Schweitzer said, "Each successive epoch found its own thoughts in Jesus, which was, indeed, the only way in which it could make him live."

Jaroslav Pelikan has written a phenomenal account of these various views of Jesus through time in his book Jesus Through the Centuries. In this monumental work, he traces Jesus' history as The Rabbi to the disciples, standing in a solid Rabbinical tradition as a traveling teacher and re-interpreter of the Torah.

Jesus then became the Light of the Gentiles for the first and second century goyim who embraced the Gospel, finding pagan "anticipation's of Christ" in Socrates and others. Early theologians scoured the Platonic philosophic literature and found many references and alleged "predictions" of the Christ.

In the third century Christianity became a state-embraced religion, Jesus became Christ the King, ruling over not only heaven, but earth itself through his regent, the Emperor. Suddenly, sedition against the state became a heresy condemned by the church, and much of the regal imagery we still employ was put in place.

As the Neo-Platonists sought to make Christianity intellectually palatable in the fourth century, the concept of The Cosmic Christ was propounded, as Jesus was identified with the Logos, taken far beyond the germ of this idea found in the Gospel of John and Paul's epistles. The Cosmic Christ was the Spirit of God residing at the heart of all things, pervasive and persuasive in all of God's vast Creation.

In the fifth century, Augustine would advocate a Son of Man theology in which Jesus revealed both the promise of human life and the power of evil, the beginnings of psychology and anthropology in Christian thought.

In the eighth and ninth century, Orthodox Christians saw in Jesus the blueprint for the True Image of the human being, creating a vast iconography and an architectural movement based on the metaphysical correspondences gained by meditating upon the "perfect man."

Meanwhile in the West, a medieval theology of The Crucified swept the religious imagination, inspiring centuries of devotees emulating Jesus' sufferings in the hope of gaining spiritual merit for themselves or deceased loved ones.

In the high middle ages, Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt and Julian of Norwich and many others viewed Jesus as The Bridegroom of the Soul, and described Jesus' ministry as a courtship between God the Lover and humanity, the Bride.

The Renaissance then painted Jesus as a contemporary philosopher, while in more modern times we have seen Jesus portrayed as the ultimate pacifist, The Prince of Peace, or the de-mythologized Teacher of Common Sense, or in Liberation Theology as Christ the Liberator.

Now you may be asking yourself, "Yes, these are all very interesting, but which one is correct?" You might just as well ask which ray of light coming out of a prism is the primary one. There is no single answer to the question "Who is Jesus." When Jesus asked Peter in today's Gospel, Peter also gave him several answers: "Some say you are John the Baptist, or Elijah or one of the other prophets." Peter himself says he thinks Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus does not deny any of these answers.

Nor would he deny any of the portraits painted of him throughout our history. This is because every time, every culture has new situations and new realities unforeseen by previous generations or other cultures. The mystery of the Gospel is that Jesus can enter into even the most alien culture, and Jesus will redeem that place as well. The mystery of the Gospel is that Jesus can enter into even the most distant and removed time, and Jesus will redeem that time, too.

I have witnessed Punk Rock churches for whom Jesus is the Righteous Rebel, and who redeems their lives from disintegration and violence. Are they right in their interpretation? Yes. For Jesus has entered their world, and has redeemed it. The social programs and discipleship disciplines some of these churches have would put most of us to shame.

I would rather, however, that instead of wasting time on shame, we would simply be good students, and learn from what Jesus is saying to the different cultures and subcultures around us, and from the generations that have gone before.

This Lent I invite you to set aside your time-honored ideas of who Jesus is, to make room for a larger view. As Meister Eckhart said, "I pray to God to rid me of God." What he meant was that the idea of God given to him was so small, so limited that it became for him an idol. The true God was beyond categorization, beyond language, beyond culture. So he asked God to rid him of his preconceptions, his blinders, his prejudices.

Let us do the same. God is bigger than our ideas about God. Jesus is bigger than the picture our culture has painted of him. We don't need to worry about the weird ideas about Jesus that are flying around these days. We don't need to worry because so long as the stories of Jesus are being told, re-told, re-imagined and inculturated, redemption is happening. Jesus is truly "All things to All People."

My friend Barbara went back to Canada a much different person than she was when she first started to worship with us at the Festival. She sang, she danced with us, she presided at the liturgy, she wrote liturgies and she told the stories about Jesus. And when she boarded that plane for Toronto, she went back a pastor, and most importantly, a Christian.

Let us pray.

Jesus, if your every role was committed to paper, the books would overrun the world. You are our Rabbi, the Light of the Nations, the Ground of all Being, the Bridegroom of our Souls, the Prince of Peace and the Liberator. Help us to hold open our hearts for whatever else you might want to be for us and for others. Help us to affirm the spiritual journeys of others, no matter how alien or different they seem from our own. For truly, although we might not want to walk that path with them, surely you do, and surely you are there in every age, amongst every people, and on every path. Help us to recognize you and to appropriately greet you whenever we encounter you, whenever we encounter another human soul whom you have sought to redeem. For it is in this precious name, Jesus, which means all things to all peoples that we pray. Amen.