RethinkingOurStory

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To rethink Jesus, we’re following a framework that has been part of the Christian conversation from the beginning. How can Jesus be a human being, and yet be so pure an expression of the Divine? And how can these two disparate natures dwell in the same being? And so this sometimes discordant Christian conversation has gone for many, many centuries. So if we are going to rethink Jesus, a good framework for doing so, it to look both humanity and divinity.

Last week we laid some historical groundwork for a second look at Jesus humanity by seeing the context of Roman colonial imperialism, under which Jews, Palestine, and Jesus lived. We looked at how this violent occupation was eroding the ancient value systems of Jewish solidarity, respect, and mutualism, and we saw how in this crisis, while different groups responded differently, each one was looking for a messiah.

We will have a very difficult time understanding Jesus’ humanity without a clear understanding of this deep, primal, Jewish expectation. Further, the expectation of a

messiah was not the anticipation of a Prince of Peace. Not at all. Theirs was the expectation of a military, warrior-deliverer. The Zealots, the Pharisees, and even the Herodians, all shared the expectation that when God sent them a messiah, they could expect the return of David’s kingdom. David had been a warrior-king, and had extended the boundaries of the Israel, so of course, this was their expectation of the coming messiah. David had protected them from invaders and occupation, so of course, this was their expectation. David haddefeated their enemies, destroyed the nations that came against them, had fought great battles, and overcome great cities. So of course, the return of these days of military supremacy was their expectation.

They came by this expectation honestly, even biblically. The Hebrew scriptures teemed with promises of such a messiah. The writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Zechariah, and others, all raised expectations of a promised military-messiah. Isaiah promised the messiah would “tread down Assyria, like mire in the streets”  (Is. 10). He had similar expectations for enemies like Babylon and Moab (Is. 15), Damascus, and Egypt (Is. 17). Jeremiah (Jer. 23), threatened the Philistines, the Amorites, and the Moabites once a “Branch of Righteousness grew up in the land to execute judgment and righteousness.”

But what is not immediately evident from reading scripture, is that these vengeful prophesies were accompanied by several warrior-messiahs and their wars of liberation. Guerrilla uprisings cascaded through Jewish history regularly fed by prophetic expectations, and enjoying popular support. These were wars and skirmishes intended to restore Jewish independence, to eliminate social and economic inequity, and to overturn exploitive systems of political and economic colonialism. When the Jewish people were under a particularly cruel system of oppression like the Romans, their ire was particularly worked up. Fueled by injustice, fueled by cruelty, and fueled by a sense of Divine promise, Jewish guerilla warriors had long been waging a prolonged struggle against the Roman system and the Roman army.

Josephus, a prominent and reliable source of the history of this era, reported beatings of absentee landlords and tax collectors making these wars and skirmishes of harassment, robbery, provocation, assassination, and terrorism. (Consider how Jesus’ parable of vineyard workers rebelling against the owner played out.)

And there had been many of these warrior-messiahs. From 40 BC to 73 AD,, Josephus recounted in detail at least five major campaigns led against Rome by warrior-messiahs and indicated many others that he didn’t chronicle at all.

The point is that Jews had both a clear expectation and an established experience of this genre of leader. A warrior that was “God’s appointed messiah” would regularly arise to help them overcome their social and political oppressors, and Jesus, the human being, was influenced by this commonly held expectation. Jesus, the human being, lived his life within the national hope and anticipation of this social, political, military leader.We will not properly understand Jesus, the man, absent and understanding of this genre. It defined the times, defined Jesus himself. Jesus, like all his countrymen, was anti-colonial, anti-Rome, and anti-occupation. Jesus’ life and message was rooted in the resistance of Roman occupation and a sense of betrayal by countrymen who were collaborating with the occupiers.

Further, to understand Jesus’ humanity, we must understand that others interpreted Jesus through this same lens. Disciples, religious leaders, Roman antagonists, expected Jesus to be a military messiah sent by God to overthrow political and economic oppression.

It will be critical to our rethinking of Jesus, to see (next week) how Jesus’ fundamental teachings did not break with this tradition. We will have a hard time interpreting Jesus’ teachings, especially those such as “turn the other cheek,” without an understanding of the role the warrior-messiah played in Jewish society, and in Jesus’ own self-assumptions.

In our generation, we live on this side of a great deal of interpretation of Jesus that has already taken place. Charles Wesley wrote a very influential hymn in the 1700’s that has dominated interpretation of Jesus in our times. The hymn was titled “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild.” To be fair, those words “gentle” and “meek” have powerful spiritual connotations. However, for the most part, Christians haven’t tended to think about these connotations very clearly or very deeply. We’ve tended to focus on a “Peaceful Jesus” with unconscious assumptions of “weakness,” “softness,” “non-confrontation,” or even “frailty.”

Now it’s true that from time to time, a school of interpretation about Jesus will rise up and use terms like “muscular” to describe Jesus, but the understanding of Jesus as warrior messiah has all but been lost to the sands of time.

This week, our focus is on how Jesus fit seamlessly into the genre of warrior-messiah. Next week, we’ll talk about how Jesus, by working within the genre, subverted it and gave it a very different focus, a new thrust, a new definition.

But first, we have to understand Jesus, the warrior-messiah, and to understand Jesus, we must understand the Qumran community, and John the Baptist.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were the collected library of a desert commune called Qumran. Their library was extensive, and gave us new understandings of many things, one of which was an understanding of the nature of Jewish messianic expectations and the form those expectations took. In the scrolls, scholars discovered the Qumran community’s prophetic belief. Theirs was the expectation that Jewish history was heading toward an Armageddon, in which Rome would meet its doom. The Roman Empire was going to be replaced by a new empire with Jerusalem as its capitol. A military messiah who was a descendent of David would rule there, and would be mightier than any Caesar had ever been.  SOURCE

The scrolls tell us that their belief was so strong, they sent out missionaries to the Jews to prepare the way for the Coming One. These missionaries ate locusts and wild honey, and wore the skins of animals. Their job was to call the people of Israel to repentance, thus preparing the way for the coming Empire of Israel.

In AD 68, Rome came to destroy Qumran, so before that happened, they sealed their library in jars, and hid them in remote caves where they remained undisturbed until 1947 and 1956. Without these scrolls, we’d know nothing of their prophetic expectations, but now, we cannot interpret John the Baptist (or we’ll see next time, Jesus) apart from their prophetic expectations.

The military-messianic tradition is integral to understanding both John and Jesus. When John uses the phrase “chaff burned in unquenchable fire” (Mt. 3), he’s using the same vocabulary the Qumranites used when they spoke directly of Rome’s demise. Jews were in a long, bloody, guerilla war with Rome, and this phrase represented a promise of God that they would be victorious. John is saying the same words, wearing the same clothes, eating the same food, and so we have to conclude John was focused on the same socio-political freedom the Qumranites were.

John was one of the holy men that Josephus described as wandering the badlands of the Jordon Valley, stirring up the peasants, and making trouble for Rome and the Jewish collaborators. John’s career directly mirrored the desert prophets of Qumran. When he was killed, the gospels say it was for criticizing the puppet governor Herod for marrying the divorced wife of one of his brothers. This may have been the spark that ignited the fire, but the fuel was the shooting war going on between Jews and Romans, and John’s role in stirring up the growing crowds. John’s preaching was pure threat; a military messiah is coming. Rome! Herod! you better be ready!

• One mightier than me is coming, and He will baptize you in spirit and fire: his winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing-floor, and gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire.

John paved the way for Jesus, and we’ll see next week  how little Jesus deviated from the confrontational expectations of the warrior-messiah. This will have tremendous implications for how we understand Jesus the man, the human being like you and me.

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In Christian history and belief, the questions about Jesus were framed long before we came along, and the dominant question was this;  Who was Jesus? And that question was in turn, framed by this question; Was Jesus a human being like you and me, or was he completely divine? Early church leaders agreed that Jesus reflected both humanity and divinity, but they struggled with how two natures could coexist in one being.

So, we said last week, in this section on Rethinking Jesus, our discussion will follow the historically-determined path. We’ll look first at Jesus’ humanity, then at what Jesus’ divinity might mean.

We begin today, looking at the humanity of Jesus. To do that, we have to understand how Jesus, the man existed in the history of his times. Today’s lesson will be the historical background necessary to understand Jesus’ life and message.

Jesus was born into a tumultuous time and place. In the years immediately preceding his birth, Rome had been transitioning from Republic to Empire. Julius Caesar had been appointed permanent dictator in 44 BC. The Roman Senate’s power was diminishing, and transitioning to Empire, the expansion of territory was ramping up, and heading toward its peak shortly after Jesus.

Rome’s expansion practiced the worst kind of imperial colonialism. Like all of Rome’s colonies, Palestine was exploited ruthlessly. The bulk of the population was displaced, landless, alienated, poor, unemployed, and enslaved. Subsistence farmers staggered under the heavy weight of double taxation and tribute. A 25% agricultural tax went directly to Rome off the top of each harvest. And on top of that, there was a 22% temple tax to support the local, puppet government of collaborating Jews. There was runaway inflation , and colonists were regularly conscripted against their will to labor for their Roman overlords. FOOTNOTE

It was a time of despotic rule and deep resentment, and Jesus, the human being, was born into this historical hotbed. We miss Jesus’ message if we don’t see how it was informed by this great social and political tumult. The role Jesus played in his society was shaped by the Roman occupation and the Jewish response to it.

Further, Palestine was unique among Roman colonies in that its religious history was so powerfully deterministic. How Jews thought of themselves was steeped in their religion. They were a people, chosen by God, blessed by God, and called to be a blessing to all nations. Their history spoke of Divine promise, Divine protection, and Divine prosperity. Under Roman rule, they were understandably gripped by the question of why God had abandoned them. Why had God allowed Rome to become great enough to dominate them so cruelly while they, the chosen of God, were conquered and enslaved? Why hadn’t God kept the promise made to their ancestors?

And this chronic, troubling, urgent question was in the air, in the water, it was everywhere, and it framed the context into which Jesus, the man, was born. It framed the message of Jesus, the life of Jesus.

Additionally, Roman occupation began challenging core Jewish values and identity when it began to disrupt its social system. Interpreting the Divine, Jews had created a society founded on respect for one another and on mutual camaraderie. They had codified into law, the prohibition of taking advantage of one another, of creating a perpetual class system.

It is a human reality that people are born with unequal abilities. Some are born with more capacity, others with less. Some are able to manage land better, others not able to manage well at all. Consequently, one person’s shrewdness leads to prosperity, while another’s lack of shrewdness leads to poverty. That’s just the way human nature unfolds. And when it does, the most natural thing in the world is for those who come out on top to want to pass their privileged position on to their children. And when they do, they make it much more likely that those who come out on the bottom will have to pass their un-privileged position on to their children.

But several Jewish laws prohibited this, prohibited the creation of permanent classes of haves and have-nots. The status of any one generation was not to be passed along to successive generations. Jewish law afforded an incompetent or unfortunate generation social security by allowing them to sell themselves. A more competent neighbor could buy their land and their indentured servitude, and in this arrangement, all could work, be fed, and survive. But their children were not allowed to remain in servitude. Every forty-nine years, the land once sold was returned to the original family. Freedom, once surrendered, was returned as well. Under the law, indentured servitude acted as a means of survival for those unable to manage land and life, but it did not create a perpetual class of haves and have-nots.

But in the time of Jesus, this ancient social system was being disrupted. Under Roman occupation, Jews were adopting the class system of their conquerors. A handful of Jews were appointed as puppet rulers by Rome, and they began to perpetuate Roman style divisions in what had been a more egalitarian society. Using the excessively high taxation, and the subsistence farmer’s inability to pay, they swooped in, paid taxes, and took permanent deed to land. The old laws were disregarded, and a new, permanent class system was imposed. High priests, wealthy landowners, and merchants began to live in great splendor, while most of the population was destitute.

This was the historical upheaval into which Jesus was born. This was the upheaval that shaped Jesus the man, Jesus the public figure, Jesus the message giver. Jews were facing a seismic shift in self-identification. “We are God’s people, God on our side. We are not to be subject to foreign rule, we are a free people, a noble people, a self-determining people. We serve the one and true God, the maker of heaven and earth and are not to be subject to the cruelty of foreign tyrants or to their gods. So what is happening to us? Why is Rome so powerful? What went wrong?”

And in response to this primal question of identity, they responded in different ways. The  Zealots saw Israel’s complacency to blame for Roman occupation. “We have negated the promises of God by our inaction,” they believed. “Once we rise up with bold action, then God will fulfill the ancient promises. Then, God will strengthen us to throw off our oppressors. In response to our boldness, God will come to our aid, and send us a messiah, a heroic liberator to lead us to victory.”

The Pharisees agreed that God would indeed fulfill past promises, but not in response to bold action. “No,” they believed, “God will come to our aid as we begin to exercise a more energetic, national piety. We must castigate the drunks, the whores, the gluttons, and those who don’t observe religious law. Once we get them in shape, and we once again become a nation scrupulously observing the laws of God, then God will come to our aid, then God will send us the promised messiah to lead us to victory.”

The Herodians weren’t nearly as hopeful as either the Zealots or the Pharisees. They didn’t really believe anybody could go up against the Romans and win. Their posture was an old one; “if you can’t beat them, join them! Go along to get along (and make some money in the process).” They took on the role of running the puppet government for Rome. They became tax collectors for Rome, and for the puppet Jewish government. They became land-managers for the new absentee landlord class.

I suspect they didn’t see themselves as collaborators, but more as pragmatic realists. In private, they quite likely, still held the Jewish narrative as a personal and private belief. But in public, they worked with and for Rome. Clever, practical, and necessary, that’s probably what they believed their collaboration was. But in private, they too held the Jewish belief that if God ever did get around to answering their prayers, he’d send the promised messiah, to lead them to victory.

In each of these social responses, there was the underlying expectation. Jewish freedom would be finally realized only when God sent a messiah to lead them to victory. This, we’ll see next week, became the dominant shaper of shaping influence in how people perceived and experienced Jesus.

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We turn now, in our year-long exercise in rethinking how we tell the Christian Story, to how we tell the Story of Jesus. In previous sections, we’ve thought about how we think about the Bible, God, and our own human nature. This section on “Rethinking Jesus” will fill out the first section of our project, “Rethinking the Players in the Story.” In the next section we will begin rethink the Story itself: “What Has Happened,” and “What Will Happen.”

In the section we just finished, “Rethinking Human Nature” I left out one important point. We’ll come back to it at the conclusion of this section. It is the three parts of human consciousness; body-consciousness, ego-consciousness, and Spirit-consciousness. We’ll talk about the nature of Jesus first, which will inform how we think about our own human nature. But that will come at the conclusion of this section on Jesus, several weeks from now.

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When we Christians come to tell our Story, there is one burning issue that has dominated the conversation. It is the question of the nature of Jesus. Was Jesus a human being the way you and I are human beings? Was Jesus a deity, or a demi-god?  Was he part human, part god? And our thoughts on this topic profoundly influence how we live our Christian lives.

The discussions we’ve had on this subject over the centuries haven’t been placid or calm ones. No, they’ve been volatile, and ripe with controversy. Our controversies have focused on whether and how human nature and divine nature can coexist in one person. Also, our controversies have focused on the numerical nature of God. Is God one as the Hebrew texts indicate? Is God two, the Transcendent Divine, and the visible, human expression of the Divine, Jesus? Or, is God three?  Is God Father and Son, Spirit? As we began to conceive of the Divine Spirit as a person, we added a third member of the Triune God.

So a lot of ink and a lot of breath have been devoted to hashing out what Jesus is. He is Son of Man, he is Son of God, he is Word of God, he is the Incarnate Divine. We’ve argued for and against both his humanityand his divinity, and which side of the controversy people come down has determined their orthodoxy and heresy for centuries. Great schisms, great battle lines, and great hatreds have all whirled around the positions people have taken up on Jesus. Accusations of heresy have more than a few times led to persecution, ostracizing, torture, and even death.

Sadly, the way we tell the Story of Jesus has been a dividing line between us through the centuries. It has been a point of great hurt and pain, and a source of shame and disgrace to our religion. It has been to our dishonor and humiliation that we, while trying to determine who Jesus was, have deviated so far from what Jesus taught.

So we’ll spend this section thinking about how we might better tell this part of our Story. We’ll talk about the nature of Jesus. We’ll consider how we think about the humanity of Jesus. We’ll consider how we think about the divinity of Jesus.Drawing from the scriptures and from the ancient church councils, our way of telling the Story will be quite orthodox, however, I suspect that for people whose thinking on Jesus hasn’t been informed either by history or by much thought, our way of telling the Story of Jesus may be a little surprising.

There were several church councils from about 325 to about 700. The conclusions of these earliest councils have shaped how most Christians in the West tell the Story of God. They all happened in towns in Turkey, Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon (then back again to Constantinople and Nicaea). These councils debated subjects ranging from the nature of God to the humanity-divinity of Jesus. They declared certain teachers (Arias, Nestor, Pelagius) off-base. One time they decided Christians shouldn’t pray with icons present, then later they changed their mind and said, yes, they should.

The Council of Chalcedon made a critical declaration about Jesus. At that gathering in 451, the main debate was about the nature of Jesus. They made a determination that remains the party line for most Christians to this day, formulating an answer to the humanity-divinity question by deciding to live in the tension of paradox. Jesus they said, is not exclusively God. Jesus, they said, is not exclusively human. Jesus is one being with both of these dimensions. “Fully human, fully divine,” that’s the way they phrased it. Think about Jesus and experience Jesus, as a human. That’s ok, the bishops at Chalcedon declared. Think about Jesus and experience Jesus as divine. That’s ok too.

Challenging a bishop named Nestor who taught that Jesus was in fact two distinct beings, here are some of the words they used…

• Jesus Christ [is] at the same time complete Godhead and complete manhood, truly God and truly man… Two natures, without division, without separation, his two natures in no way annulled by the union… The characteristics of each nature are preserved and come together to form one person, not two.

After the council, many Christians from both East and West declared that the doctrines, dogmas, and declarations of the Council were infallible in their orthodoxy. This afforded their declarations the same divine inspiration that was granted scripture! 1100 years later, Protestants wouldn’t give the Council that same elevated status, but they did declare their conclusions to be the orthodox view.

So for East and West, for Catholic and for Protestant, the Council of Chalcedon was an influential shaper of how we tell the Christian Story of Jesus. It was there we enshrined paradox regarding Jesus; made of human stuff; made of Divine stuff, both at once, not separated out. They used Greek words like “dyophysite” and “monophysite” to argue these things over, but in the end they said this; Jesus is a single being; fully human, fully divine.

Human beings being what we are, we prefer our doctrines simple, straightforward, and un-paradoxical. Consequently, we’ve not been particularly observant of the declarations of Chalcedon. We Christians through the years have tended to give lip service to the Council’s conclusions (they were infallible, after all), but we’ve not afforded it to do much to shape how we think about, or experience Jesus. We’ve tended through the centuries, to pick one of the two, human or divine, and give de facto adherence to that one alone. Giving lip-service to paradox, we nevertheless choose one or the other to work with. We act and think that Jesus is God, not really thinking of him as a person like ourselves (this has been the tendency of conservative theologians in our generation). Or, we think of him as human, a great teacher, a divinely inspired life, but not really unique, godlike, and certainly not a deity (this has been the tendency of liberal theologians in our generation).

The idea of holding two, seemingly mutually exclusive constructs in our minds, in our hearts, in our belief, in our religion, this just hasn’t been our way.

When I conclude this section, I’ll suggest that we haven’t been able to live in the tension of our own orthodoxy because we have a deeply flawed sense of our own humanity. Given the total-depravity, original-sin lens through which we view ourselves, we can’t imagine Jesus as fully human. With such a corrupted idea of humanity we can’t imagine Jesus being like that. By allowing the Gnostic curse to so profoundly and so negatively color our sense of how precious our humanity is, we’ve disallowed ourselves to see Jesus as both divine and human.

But our conclusion will come at the end of this section, after we’ve laid some groundwork.

In this introductory lesson, I want to set the parameters for this section. We’ll be considering both elements of Jesus’ nature, humanity and what it means when we say Jesus is divine. For the humanity section, we’ll focus on putting Jesus in his human setting, looking at the cultural and historical forces that shaped Jesus’ life, message, and self-definition. We’ll consider him, not as a timeless, divine Voice from heaven, but as a man shaped by his culture, his nation, his geography, a man influenced by the events surrounding the time in which he lived. We’ll consider his message in the context of his Jewish culture and nationality, consider how living under brutal Roman occupation influenced his message, consider how the people of his time thought about the genre of “messiah,” and how Jesus’ messiah-ness informed the meaning of his message.

That will take a few weeks, after which we’ll consider what that word “divine” means. When the Council of Chalcedon says that Jesus is “fully divine” what does that word mean?

And when we’re finished thinking about both Jesus’ humanity and divinity, we’ll revisit our own human nature. When Jesus said that the things he did, we would also do because we could be one with the Father as he is one with the Father, I’ll suggest that we have a hard time believing this, not because we think of Jesus as being too divine, but that we don’t think of human nature as being divine enough.

Next week, we’ll talk about the very human, very historical, very cultural and national events that shaped Jesus’ life and message.