RethinkingOurStory

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Following a path laid out by the historical conversation about Jesus, in our year-long project, we’ve looked first at Jesus’ humanity, and now turn to look at his divinity. What does it mean when Christian people say Jesus is divine? Does it mean, as seems to be implied in many of the conversations we Christians have on the topic, that Jesus is a “deity?” If so, we need to take a look at that word and ask ourselves about the unspoken meaning it causes when we unconsciously frame our understanding of Jesus in these terms.

The word “deity” informs thinking other than our Judeo Christian thoughts about the divine. Romans, Greeks, the Norse, and Aztecs all framed their understanding of their gods in a way that gives meaning to the word “deity.” Consequently, the dictionary has several meanings for the word. One thing it means is attaining to the estate or rank of a god or a goddess. This evokes the understanding the Greeks had of their deities, Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus, Apollo, and Aphrodite. They were beings very much like humans, but bigger and more powerful. Is that what we mean when we Christians say Jesus is “divine?” Most wouldn’t say so if asked directly, but often these themes inform our unspoken assumptions about the word, and about Jesus.

But we Christians also think of Jesus as human, sometimes, causing the Greco-Roman notion of the demi-god seems to unconsciously apply. Some frame Jesus in their minds as half god, half human, like Herecles, son of Zeus and Alcmene, half god, half human.

The dictionary also uses the word in another sense, as a person or thing that is revered as a god. In this meaning, when a person or thing becomes highly valued to people, it is elevated in revered status equal to the gods (In this society, money is the only deity).

Is that what we mean when we say Jesus is divine? Are we saying that because of his ability to perform miracles, and the profound wisdom of his teachings, or because of the drama surrounding his death and resurrection, that we have come to revere him so deeply, that we have elevated him to the status of a god? Again, if asked directly, I don’t think many of us would say this is what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.”

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Yes, there is a danger to our Christian spirituality when we don’t think carefully about what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.” However, because this has been such a controversial topic in our ancient past, we Christians tend not to discuss it very openly. Feeling the pressure to acquiesce to the party line, we don’t do our best thinking on this subject.

On the one hand, we’re afraid we’ll be out of the club if we tinker with something as sacrosanct as the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity. When we Christians determine who is in the orthodox club, and who is out, who is part of a cult, our primary litmus test is this question; Do you hold that Jesus “was god,” or was he merely “a god.” If you say Jesus “was God,” you’re in; “a god,” you’re out.

Preparing for this mini-lesson, I was speaking to a devout Christian on this topic a while ago. As soon as I brought up the topic fireworks went off. “Go ahead and do this “rethinking Christianity” project if you must,” she said, “But you just can’t be rethinking this topic. Some things are just too sacred to mess with.”

However, on the other hand, if we don’t reconsider some of our instincts about Jesus’ divinity, our spirituality will suffer. If we unconsciously put Jesus in the same camp as Zeus or Apollo, or if we frame him in our minds as a half god, like Herecles or Perseus (Zeus fathered Perseus, another demi-god, this time with Danae.  The guy got around!), or if we frame the divinity of Jesus in these ancient, familiar mental constructs people have always had for their gods, we reduce Jesus, and we reduce the concept of divinity.

Also, if we unconsciously invite these constructs about divinity from other religions to inform our thinking about Jesus, we ignore much of the teaching of Jesus himself. We certainly ignore the teaching of the ancients who insisted we hold Jesus’ divinity in tension with his humanity. If we think of Jesus as an improved version of Zeus, in a very visceral way, it lets us off the hook.

Many times in the Christian scriptures Jesus told us to live the way he lived, to do the things he did. He told us to to heal those who are sick, to confront injustice the way he did, to express the divine nature the way he did, and to live virtuously the way he did. But if Jesus is a Greek deity, that makes no sense. Yes, Jesus lived and died selflessly. But, we say to ourselves, of course he lived nobly.  He was a god, for goodness sake. True, it would be better if I lived selflessly and virtuously myself. It would be better if I healed people’s wounds or confronted social injustice, but what hope do I have to live at this elevated level?  I’m a mere mortal. We see Jesus discern the heart of the Divine and living accordingly, and we say to ourselves, “I can’t do that, I’m just a man, just a woman. He was a god.”

But, I suggest, these ancient Roman and Greek and Aztec and Norse constructs of “the gods” don’t apply to Jesus. I’m suggesting that the divinity of Jesus can’t be reduced to the term “deity” as our social and historical instincts would dictate. Jesus was something much more, an expression of the mysterious, uncontainable divine (More on that next week).

The dictionary suggests yet another usage of the words “divine” and “deity” which I believe serves as a better mental framework. It says this of the word “deity:”  of divine character or nature; holding the very nature of God; proceeding from God.

If we frame the words “Jesus is divine” this way, it does not let us off the hook. There’s no room for “well Jesus was a god, for goodness sake” kinds of thoughts. Jesus and the book of Genesis both teach us that we ourselves, are made of the divine, that we holding the very nature of God within our beings, and that we proceed from God. Yes, we’ve been corrupted, as we saw in the section we did on rethinking our humanity, but those essential characteristics were never erased.

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In AD 451, a group of bishops got together in a town in Turkey called Chalcedon. There hadn’t been much trouble on the topic of Jesus’ divinity in the early years of Christianity being as influenced as they were by the Jewish mind. They had been so rooted in the one-ness of the Hebrew God, that they understood Jesus as an expression of that divine oneness. They did not see Jesus’ divinity as a separate Zeus-like deity. But when Christianity spread into Rome where the Greco-Roman mind did have the Zeus-like images of God, they needed clarification. So they got together, talked it over, and issued a proclamation.

“Jesus is a oneness,” they said, “a fully human and a fully divine oneness.” Mostly what they said was negative, “Jesus is not what those other guys are saying he is.” They were defending against separatist doctrines that said Jesus was two entities, a spiritual one and a physical one.

But what this Council at Chalcedon did not do, was try to explain the mystery. They just left it in its unexplainable ambiguity. This Jesus figure, so important in our history, in our religion, we’re not going to try and pin down exactly what he is, or how this whole human-divine thing works.

And now, this many years later, mainstream Christianity hasn’t made any formal statement about Jesus that goes much beyond the one we made at Chalcedon. The divinity of Jesus remains a mystery we’re just content to live with. We’re ok with defying explanation, and in a way, this makes sense.

To say Jesus is divine, is to say that somehow he expresses God, and, as we saw in the earlier sections of our project, we cannot in any way, ever get our minds around the nature of God. “Ineffable,” “transcendent,” “incomprehensible,” these are the words we apply to the doctrine of God. Even though popular Christianity reduces God to being a guy in the sky, it is not our faith. We hold that one cannot contain the vastness of the divine in the human mind. Experience tells us there is something there, but wisdom is content to leave the immensity of the Divine in the realm of mystery.

So, long ago when people experienced Jesus as something beyond themselves, a reality bigger than their reality, it made sense that they would use the word “divine.” Jesus is beyond our capacity to contain, bigger than we can control or hold on to. So for centuries, we’ve said this; “Jesus is a man, a human being like you and me, having the same kind of body, the same emotional upheaval, the same hurt and disappointment and ecstasy that go with the reality of being human.” “Jesus is also an expression of the invisible God, a way of putting flesh to a reality that can’t be contained in flesh, an imperfect expression of the inexpressible, but a visible, tangible expression nonetheless, a way of putting into three dimensions, a reality that can’t be contained in three dimensions.”

We’ll hold these two truths in tension, we Christians say…

• Jesus a human being like you and me, and…
• Jesus an expression of the Divine that cannot be expressed

And we’ll live with the mystery that imposes on our brains. We’ll live with the tension that creates, because we believe there is a reality that is bigger than our brains and hearts can contain, and we believe the person of Jesus somehow expressed that bigger reality.

However, we humans (and we Christians are no exception to the rule), we don’t like mystery. We don’t like tension and we don’t like our truth to come to us in the form of paradox.

Even though the church has never said more than we said at Chalcedon in any kind of formal statement about Jesus, popular Christianity certainly has. And when we have, we’ve tended to swing to one or the other poles of this paradox. We give lip service to Jesus being human and divine, but we live, speak, and worship as though he is one or the other. Some generations, some denominations, give rich focus to Jesus’ humanity, others to his divinity.

In conservative American Christianity in our generation, we’ve tended to focus on the divinity of Jesus, Jesus exclusively as the Son of God.

When I was a middle-schooler, I participated in an irreverent discussion that took place in a Sunday school class. The topic of our discussion was the degree to which Jesus experienced every-day bodily functions. A kind, older, church-lady who happened to be in the class that day was appalled at the suggestion that Jesus would ever pass gas. It was inconceivable to her, that Jesus, the visible expression of the invisible God, as Paul calls him, could ever be reduced to a world of blood, semen, and gastric juices. “How could such inexhaustible Truth and Beauty as is contained in divinity ever coexist in such proximity to bowels and foot odor?”

Next week, I’ll suggest a way we can think that can help us live with the paradoxical tension, the mystery of humanity and divinity. As I said in the section on rethinking human nature, what I say will have implications for how we think of our own humanity. We’ll see that Jesus himself, suggests that the same kind of oneness with the Divine that he experienced is ours to experience as well.

Next week.

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We’re  rethinking how we tell the Story of Jesus, following the ancient framework for our discussion, the humanity and the divinity of Jesus. To understand Jesus the human being, to understand his message, we must understand his times. We must understand the social, political, and economic pressures he, and all of his country lived under. This means we must understand how the Roman occupation and the Jewish aspiration for freedom and sovereignty informs Jesus’ life and message.

So thus far in this section, we’ve looked we looked at how the writings of the Qumran community shed light on both the pattern John the Baptist followed, and the path Jesus followed. Both were following a genre of leadership that in their time was shaped by a national resistance to Rome. John walked the path of the Qumran wandering prophet and Jesus followed the path of the God-sent, warrior-messiah. As we said, these were well-worn paths in Jesus’ society, and they came with clear expectations, vocabulary, and actions. It was clear to everyone, that Jesus was playing the part of warrior messiah.

But, we also saw, he used the role, to subvert the role. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus as a provocateur, firmly rooted in the tradition of resistance to injustice and oppression. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus working on the side of the downtrodden, demoralized and the broken. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus the champion of the exploited, and an opponent of the exploiters. (Which of course, demands we, Jesus’ followers, see ourselves in that same light.)

The role of the warrior-messiah role came loaded with another expectation as well, an expectation of military might and retributive violence. This, we saw, Jesus both transcended and subverted.

Indeed, Jesus called his followers to resist injustice, but to resist taking up the tools of violence and hatred to do so. “It just doesn’t work,” we can hear Jesus intimate. “You can live by the sword if you like, but you will die by the sword. You’ll cut some Roman throats, but they’ll hate you for doing so, and inevitably, they’ll be back around to cut your throat in turn.”

No, we need another form of resistance, another way to fight injustice, another way to struggle, another way to oppose. And his subversive strategy was to gain the heart of one’s adversary.

In one of Martin Luther King’s speeches, he was talking about Bull Conner, a particularly obstinate and violent man, and an aggressive and cruel opponent of the civil rights movement. We cannot, King said, simply defeat Bull Conner. If we do, we’ll just reverse the same power dynamic that he perpetuates on us, now. And while that seems attractive to us when we’re on the bottom of the heap, in the long run it is not what we want. We need to win the heart of Bull Conner. We need Bull Conner to be our friend. We need him to be fighting for what is just, just like we’re fighting for what is just. We’ll continue moving forward whether he comes or not. While our actions will anger him by upsetting the status quo, let us never do anything that will wound him, or his loved ones, or his people.

What makes this all the more remarkable, is that while King was preaching these themes, his own children were being threatened,  civil rights workers were being murdered, and innocent children were bombed in churches.

As followers of Jesus, it is not our way to stoop to the tools that will only perpetuate the system of retribution and alienation. This is true for social injustice, it is true among friends who are at odds, it is true during marital strife, it is true in all the contexts of our lives.

Ours are to be strategies that draw people into a new vision of reality, not to drag them back to the old one. Consequently, we show grace and love. Our confrontation will highlight evil, but not harm people. We will create a context of healing, restoration, forgiveness as the backdrop for our work toward freedom, life and light. Yes, we will highlight injustice, but we will never return evil for evil. We’ll completely change the dynamic by returning good for evil.  And, yes, it’ll take longer, but it’ll also last longer.

People who think such a strategy is naïve in the face of the darkness of the human heart don’t understand history very well. Oppressors perpetrate injustice, sure they do. They even do so very effectively for a very long time. But the hurt they render will always get its revenge in the end. And when it does, the cycle of alienation, division, hatred, and even violence just won’t stop.

I’ve seen it in my marriage; we see in the struggle of nations.

So yes, Jesus role was one of resistance and provoking change. But he was unwilling to do so using the same worn out tools that had created the oppression in the first place.

Gandhi was a fervent follower of Jesus. He wasn’t a Christian man, primarily because his experiences of Christians were so awful, so bigoted, so hurtful. But Gandhi followed Jesus. He immediately recognized the similarity between the position of the Jews under Roman occupation and the Indians under British occupation. While there was tremendous pressure to throw of the colonial, imperial exploitation with violence and hatred, Gandhi challenged these instincts, inspired by teachings of Jesus. Resist, challenge, overturn, overcome, but do so without creating more oppression and more hatred tomorrow. Yes, it’ll take longer, but it’ll last longer.

This brings us to the primary framework for understanding the life and teaching of Jesus the human being; the term he used so often: The Kingdom of God, or The Kingdom of Heaven. The sheer number of times Jesus used the terms, and the centrality they played in his messages make them a primary interpretive lens through which we understand his teaching.

Despite current instincts, very little of what Jesus referenced when he used these terms had to do with the afterlife. Some did, but not much. American Christianity’s fixation on getting people saved so they can get to heaven was decidedly not Jesus’ emphasis.

Jesus’ focus was on salvation, but it was salvation from Rome, it was salvation from oppression and foreign domination, salvation from injustice, and salvation from exploitation. At a deeper dimension, it was a focus on being saved from the internal ravages of evil, it was Divine salvation from hatred, dishonesty,  fear,  mean-spirited, and small-heartedness. It was about being saved from life without connection to the indwelling Divine, and being saved from the forces in our souls that fracture our relationships, fracture our personalities, and fracture our destinies.

In a manner typical to the Jewish framework of his day, Jesus’ focus was on this life, this world. Jesus was about bringing Divine rule, Heaven’s rule, God’s rule to bear upon the kingdoms of this earth. Jesus was about bringing the law of love, the law of grace, and the law of forgiveness to bear on the kingdoms of this world.

In all his interactions with people; with the sick and diseased of body, with the sick and diseased of soul, with tax collectors, with smug, self-satisfied Pharisees, with seekers, with obstinate Romans, with collaborating Jews, his interactions all worked toward a singular objective, to make things on earth, as they are in heaven. To bring to bear on the earth, Divine goodness, Divine justice, Divine Truth, and a Divine value system that breeds Divine Beauty.

To tax collectors who labored under the shame of their collaboration, but who were also desperate to guard the rewards their collaboration bought them, Jesus worked toward a healed soul, a mind that could see Divine Truth, and a life that was lived in the freedom of that Truth.

To adulterers bearing the shame of failure and exposure, Jesus healed the shame, and advocateed a life that wouldn’t perpetuate the harm. To Roman soldiers, Jesus ministered the Truth that set them free. To Pharisees with blinded eyes, Jesus ministered rebuke so they would see. To Pharisees who had authentic questions Jesus sat through the night answering. And to the crowds, Jesus taught forgiveness, grace, and goodness. He taught them to connect to the Divine Spirit, the Divine will, and he taught them how this strange new Kingdom works.

I have my children read a book every year. When they were early in high school, I had them read a compilation of stories about people who were setting right what is wrong in the world, fighting injustice, resisting poverty, and undercutting child labor and human trafficking.

When they were finished, I asked them to my office to talk it over. “Why do you think I had you read that book this summer?” I asked. They stumbled trying to get the right answer so they could get on with their summer. I particularly remember my son answering with a series of canned Sunday school responses, one after another. To each of his responses, I’d reply, “Nope, that’s not why I had you read the book.” Finally, semi-joking, he laid out the limits of his childhood religion. “I don’t know exactly how this is going to work out, but I’m pretty sure the answer has to be is either, “God loves me,” “Jesus saves me,” “the Bible tells me,” or “we should pray about it.”

I laughed, and let him off the hook. “Daniel, I wanted you to read this book about people serving the earth, healing what is wounded, fixing what is broken, because this is your religion.” If you’re a follower of Jesus, this is your religion.

“Jesus’ message was only a little bit about what happens after we die,” I continued. “That was almost an afterthought. Sure, Jesus acknowledged what we believe inside ourselves, that some part of us continues when we die.  He assured us that the hunger we have for the Divine will be satisfied. But it’s almost like he was saying there will be time to think about that at a later date, when we die. For now he told us think about this stuff; Be salt, spread across the earth to bring out the God flavors. Be light, spread across the earth to show forth the God colors. Heal what is wounded. Restore what is lost. Challenge what is evil. Enlighten what is blinded. Repair what is broken.”

“This, Daniel…  This is your religion.”

And this, friends, this is our religion. If we are followers of Jesus the human being, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the sage, Jesus the warrior-messiah, the opponent of injustice, the provocateur, the maker of right over wrong, then ours is to take up the mantle and become better-ers of the earth.

This is our religion.
This is the implications of following Jesus, a human being.

Next time we’ll begin to talk about what it has meant throughout the centuries when Christians have said that Jesus is not just human, but that he is also divine.

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Rethinking Jesus is a pretty critical part of rethinking the Christian Story.  Thus far, we’ve seen that our thoughts about him were set out for us long ago by a series of ancient discussions and controversies. The questions were these; Was Jesus a human being like you and me, or was Jesus somehow special, somehow divine? And if divine, what does that word mean?

Honoring this ancient conversation, we’re following this framework. We’re thinking first about Jesus’ humanity, then in a few weeks we’ll think about the word “divinity,” and how we might think of a divine Jesus.

To think clearly about the human Jesus, we have to understand the times in which he lived, so in our discussions, we looked first at the anti-Roman-colonialism that informed Jesus’ life and message, seeing how the occupation divided Jews into different responses, but how in each of the disparate responses, there was a commonly held expectation that God would eventually deliver them, and that it would happen by the rising of a warrior-messiah to lead them to victory over their enemies.  We began to see in specificity, how Jesus life was informed by the prophesies of one particular community, Qumran.

Last week we said that the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in the 1950’s and 60’s have given us a much better understanding of the human context of Jesus’ life. Seeing the form John the Baptist’s life took, gave us understanding of the givens and assumptions behind his message. We’ll see the same thing with Jesus; the form his life and ministry took, informs our understanding of the core of his message.

The form Jesus was living out, was that of the anticipated warrior-messiah. His ministry, his public life, was set to Jewish expectations. To be sure, we’ll see, he subverted the form, he reframed and contorted it, stretching it to the point that some did not see him fulfilling the role at all. However, Jesus was clearly playing the part of a Jewish messiah.

On this side of many centuries of interpreting Jesus, we tend to focus exclusively, on Jesus’ subversion of the warrior-messiah role, but failing to see the form Jesus’ life took, we miss the point of his subversive approach.

To begin, Jesus started his ministry with the same people John the Baptist did. He stepped into their prophetic expectations as laid out by the Qumran community and their missionary-prophets. Two of Jesus’ disciples (Andrew and Peter) had previously been followers of John. When Herod encountered Jesus, after he had beheaded John, he saw so little difference between the two that he remarked, “It is John, whom I beheaded. He is risen from the dead.”

And like John, Jesus began his preaching in the back country. His miracles and powerful message eventually drew such a crowd, that he had to keep moving in order to stay one step ahead of the priest-police.

Here’s where we see how the form of Jesus life unveils his intent. Jesus, the messiah, was precipitating a change in the social order; that’s what Qumran prophets and warrior-messiah’s did. He was contending for the divinely-directed downfall of the power structures of his day, and his posture toward Rome and its puppet government was clearly one of resistance.

For example, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, we think of it as a peaceful symbol. What could be more humble and peaceful than a donkey? But to Jews, it invoked the prophesy of Zechariah…

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem!  Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with your salvation, He is humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; and the bow of war will be cut off. He will speak peace to the nations; and His dominion will be from sea to sea, from the River to the ends of the earth.

The act of riding into Jerusalem clearly invoked military-messianic expectations in the people. Yes, the messiah will appear lowly by riding a donkey, and yes, he will bring peace to the region, but watch out, Ephriam!  Watch out nations to the ends of the earth! He will establish peace, but to do so, he’s going to cut off your engines of war. He’s going to establish his dominion from sea to sea.

As  seemingly peaceful an act as riding into Jerusalem on a lowly donkey, was in fact, an act of direct provocation. This was not gentle Jesus, meek and mild. No this was a descendant of David, emboldened by the prophetic expectations of his people, arising from apparent weakness, to confound and subdue the horsemen and chariots of Rome. This was the act of direct confrontation to the Roman empire. And to these expectations, the people sang:  “Blessed be the one who comes in the  name of the Lord. Blessed be the son of David.”

As messianic expectations would have it, Jesus immediately entered the city and provoked a fight. He fashioned a whip, stormed the Temple, and physically attacked those licensed by Rome to exchange currencies in the Temple. He drove out the collaborators who were profiting on the backs of Jewish citizens. That’s what warrior-messiahs do.

Also, he played the part of the agitator coming to town when he did, just before Passover, Jesus and his band were strategically protected by the crowds in town as holiday pilgrims were arriving from all over. These were zealots, bandits, peasants, laborers, beggars, all of whom had experience the oppression of Rome and the puppet Herodian government. Their presence created a tinder box of indignation against foreign oppression, and acted as a buffer of protection for Jesus. But in the night, when it was dark, and the crowds were gone, strategically, just as a provocateur would, Jesus slipped into the night, and was nowhere to be found.

Jesus played the part of the warrior-messiah. He looked the part, he spoke the part, and the establishment clearly understood what he was up to. From the time Caiaphas saw him attack the money-changers, the scriptures tell us, he plotted to arrest Jesus. He looked for a way and a time to put him away without interference from the mob who thought of him as a warrior-messiah, a descendent of David, a liberator. Caiaphas told the police to arrest Jesus, but not on a feast day when the mob was around to witness it, “lest there be an uproar of the people,” the text tells us.

Even Jesus’ band of followers fit the expected genre of warrior-messiah. Simon, was called “the zealot.” The term “Iscariot” in Judas’ name resembles the word sicarii, the word used by Josephus to describe dagger men in the resistance. James and John were called “Boanerges” which Mark translates as “sons of thunder.” They are the ones who wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village because people hadn’t welcomed Jesus. Jesus’ disciples carried swords. Jesus taught them to. He told them, “If you don’t have a sword, you better sell your coat to get one” (Lk. 22:36).

The life Jesus lived, the band he formed around himself, the words Jesus spoke, they all fit him neatly into the warrior-messiah genre expected by his country, by his times.

Listen to these texts…

Mt. 10:34:  Don’t think I have come to bring peace to earth.  No, I have not come to bring peace, but to bring a sword.

Lk. 12:51  Do you think I have come to give peace to earth?  I am telling you not, but rather to bring division.

As we just mentioned…
Lk. 22:36  If you have no sword, sell your coat and buy one

And in the Jn. 2 episode where Jesus made a whip of cords, and drove the money changers from the temple, overthrowing their tables in the process, he clearly met the criteria and the prophetic expectations of the people for a warrior-messiah.

However, Jesus did not only play the role of warrior-messiah. He used that familiar and powerful role, in order to enact an agenda that deviated from the norm.  He used the role to redefine the role. Yes, Jesus was a warrior-messiah, but he was also a Prince of Peace. Yes, he was in the business of resisting Rome and establishing justice, but he was also subverting the people’s expectations of how that would happen.

Those same texts we just listed have corollary texts that seem to undermine them.

He said in both Mt. and Lk. that he did not come to bring peace, but he taught on the mountain, “blessed are the peacemakers.” The sword figured heavily in Jesus self-identification, but he also taught people struck on one cheek, to turn the other, people demanded to carry a soldier’s kit one mile, to carry it two, people sued for their coat, to give their antagonist their shirt as well.

Yes, Jesus drove the money changers out with a whip, but he also taught that we are to love our enemies, and do good to those who hate us (Lk. 6:27).

So…
Jesus was a warrior messiah, and Jesus was intent on bringing justice to those oppressed. That’s what messiah’s did. Jesus was fully committed to overthrowing the “might makes right” narrative.

But at the same time he fit into this role as a change agent, he was undermining the expectations everyone had about how it justice was to be achieved.

We’ll see more on his message next week.

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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.