Why Jesus is boring
We've forgotten our Creed
Here’s what I said to the people of Saint James Episcopal last Sunday. It’s about how people who don’t know Jesus hear about Jesus, and why that’s a shame, and why it’s our fault.
Easter is a time of proclaiming. And we’ve got a lot of proclaiming to do.
But ever notice, when you’re talking about Jesus with someone outside the church, the conversation goes in one of two directions? Either they’ll say ‘Yeah, well, Christianity is really just a way to control people,’ or, if they’re feeling expansive and generous, they’ll say, ‘Oh yes, Jesus was a very great teacher, for sure.’ And that’s a nice way of saying, ‘You Christians mean well, but of course we know the Universe is bigger than that Bible stuff. And if you say, ‘Well, Jesus didn’t talk about himself as a great teacher …,’ they’ll get fidgety, and kind of not want to talk about Jesus any more. They’re afraid you’re going to say, ‘Whatever your religious system is, Jesus is actually the way, the truth, and the life.’ And you can kind of see why that might grate. That kind of conversation, it seems to me, deserves to bog down. It’s obnoxious.
And it undersells Jesus.
Which is the problem with that conversation. The problem is actually not quite what you might think it is. And if we’re in the business of proclaiming, this is worth knowing.
See, the problem when the world hears Jesus talk isn’t that it doesn’t want to hear about Jesus. Not in my experience.
The problem is that the world doesn’t want to hear about that Jesus.
And the reason they don’t want to hear about it is not that that Jesus is too big, and threatens to overpower whatever their tenets about the Universe are. It’s that he’s too small. And that Jesus is too dinky to be taken seriously.
I have found that when you start talking about an unexpected, different Jesus, and by that I mean the Big Jesus – really Big, the way he talked about himself – the non-Christian world, funnily enough, starts to listen.
Well, it wouldn’t be Easter V if we didn’t cover this very topic today: that Big Jesus, in the language he and other commentators in the Bible used. Because it’s been scheduled in our lectionary. And we do well to be reminded about it. The world doesn’t know about Cosmic Jesus as a rule, and WE ourselves inside the church, kind of forget about it too. We’re used to talking about the Nice Guy Jesus, and the Rabbinic Debater Jesus, and the Suffering Jesus on the Cross. And these are good things. True things.
But what about the whole Jesus, the Big Jesus, the way he is, eternally, in the big picture? The one he self-described, in words, when he wasn’t too busy showing in actions, by healing people, and forgiving them, and doing all those Jesusy things? He talked about himself a lot. And if we’re going to spread the word, as he told us to do, and for that matter, if we’re going to live by that word ourselves, and die by it, and live again by it, we better remind ourselves about this basic, whopping, and overlooked definition of the Super Jesus, the Cosmic one, the co-eternal and co-extensive with God one. The one – in case this flies by you in our Creed today – the one through whom all things were made. That Jesus.
When people who don’t know Christianity hear this language … they tend to like it. We should too.
And that’s why we have these readings today. They’re all Giant Jesus. Easter V is the loud end of the megaphone, that started tiny, and locally, and intimately, about a few people seeing the beginning of the Jesus event in a garden tomb. And then got louder and more sweeping through the Easter season, telling us about lots of people beholding the Jesus event. And now it’s universal. In today’s readings we’re told galactic things: that the Gospel is huge, so huge that it belongs to everyone. We’re told about adoration of the focus of the Gospel that’s huge too: it’s happening at the level of the sun and the moon, and all the shining stars. There is praise above the waters of the heavens, and among sea-monsters down in the depths. The divinity revealed in and through the Christ isn’t just for Upper Judea, we learn. It reigns over the whole earth, and heaven. The home of God is now present among ALL mortals, and the death of us mortals (ALL of us) has itself been put to death. God, the Alpha and the Omega, outside time and creation, is in the Son of Man, glorifying him. Through the Son of Man all the commandments have been superseded by a new one, the basic love-rule of the Gospel.
That is a whopper of a Jesus. And we forget him a lot. And we rarely, in my experience, tell anyone about this Jesus. Well, the outside world, in my experience, loves it. And there is much indeed to love.
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Wanna know why we forget to talk about Jesus this way, even though he’s in Scripture? And wanna know why the world today is startled if we do? And you wanna to know why the very first thing the early church sat down to figure out was who Jesus was, cosmically? And then made a credal statement out of it?
It was because, unlike us, the first-century Greek-speaking world was actually very used to thinking about God like gigantically. We actually aren’t, except when we stammer and conjecture about the Universe, and Fate, and things. When it comes to divinity, we don’t think about God the way the first audience did at all.
We know from Paul’s experience in Corinth that there were people who took the gods of Olympus seriously, or at least aspects of them. He took pains to converse with them, for example, about Apollo, who they thought they were seeing in the Apostles. He said Apollo was a good way of imagining layers of divinity bringing creation into being. (The details of this are for another sermon.) But the idea that there must logically first be a central, originating divinity, a basic monotheism, that was eternal, and created things, was already in place. So too was the idea that there was an earth-facing divinity, co-extensive and co-eternal, and of one being, with that central, unknowable divinity, through whom all things are made. The words they used were “urge” and “demiurge.” John suggested ‘the Word’, with God and as God. John knew who he was talking to. And his listeners knew what to do with this two-, or even three-part God-in-one. And the first-century Greeks had no general problem conceptualising a Cosmic Christ. Way beyond sermons on the mount, and making water into wine, they were receptive and ready when it came to giant, creative divinity. That ‘Christ’ part, that was Greek too, and they knew what it was to be a Christos, an annointed one, with oil (the word that gives us ‘chrism’ and ‘christen’).
All this was familiar in the first century. Had been since Plato. For 500 years. It’s not for no reason that the first intellectual underpinnings of our faith were, clear until the medieval period, ‘neo-Platonist’. That was the first line of apologetics, because this is where it all germinated. That’s why our Creed today is the way it is.
Paul’s contemporaries heard Jesus’s self-descriptions in a way we don’t, in other words. They knew better than we how to understand ‘I and the Father are One’. Or ‘Before Abraham was, I am’. Or ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ (There’s a piece of Aramaic apparently that handles this last expression better than the Greek does: The original sentence was probably about participation in the great I Am and not about some pathway to salvation, like it sounds to us. It wasn’t ‘There’s all these apparent ways to God, but I’m the only real one’ … it was actually a way of saying ‘I AM God.’
This is why the Greek world wasn’t mystified when they were told, ‘You ask to see the Father; well, if you know me, you know the Father.’
We by contrast ARE kind of mystified by that. We think it means we know how nice God is because we know how nice Jesus is. Actually, it means, you’re looking at God.
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The unchurched like this when they hear it. The people for whom Jesus is a half-heard rumor like this. WE should like this. For a lot of reasons.
It gives us, for one thing, a Jesus who is big enough to respect, to put it bluntly. It gives us a Savior who isn’t just a skyward projection of us, or another nice guy long ago from the land of sandals and centurions. That kind of Jesus is way too small. He does seem like ‘a very great teacher’ … but that’s it. I know I wouldn’t be impressed if that’s all I’d ever been told about Jesus. I wouldn’t want a God I could understand. (I wouldn’t belong to a club that would have me as a member, either, as Saint Groucho of Marx has it.)
A Jesus who is as big and God-sized as he always said he was delights and reassures the world when they hear about him. That’s my experience. That’s why I talk about him to people the way I do. People who have never heard about Jesus, and that can include people who go to church sometimes, by the way, have in the Whole Jesus the promise of someone who can meet them where they are, who created them and still cares for them, and is coming after them, and can do the things he promises. He’s someone who cares for every human on the earth as though he created them, which he did. It delights people who fret that, I dunno … the medieval Japanese, or the ancient Pacific islanders, or anyone else historically denied the Bible somehow doesn’t have Jesus. Well, nobody ever created doesn’t have Jesus. He’s that big.
It means even the cavemen, like the ones along Lake Bonneville 12,000 years ago, who mourned their dead, loved art, and called their daughters ‘flowers’ (that’s the provenance of the Indoeuropean word, ‘girl’) – even those people were called into being and are offered eternal life by and with Jesus. What’s not to rejoice about in THAT kind Jesus? He hasn’t just been waiting for the Episcopalians to come along, in other words – which is what the world often thinks we think.
It even means that when people out in the world who are taking their religious cues from science, like the physicists who show the mathematical reasonableness of an eternal, timeless, Now, or the the neuroscience team at NYU medical school who are mapping stories of patients brought back from brain death and hearing what they themselves call encounters with Jesus – all these listening, watching, searching people have in the Big Jesus, the way he described himself, answers … BIG answers … that satisfy and intrigue the way the Gospel is supposed to. And why shouldn’t they! I heard Richard Rohr say once, ‘Hey, if something is true, we SHOULD be seeing in in science, once science catches up.’
Well, our readings today remind us that we sometimes forget, or don’t take seriously, or are too embarrassed to verbalise, that the scale of Jesus, taking him at his word, is … well …
… my most recent conversation with someone who was surprised and delighted to hear about this Jesus and this Gospel, and ran off to the Bible to see if it was true, ended like this:
She said, ‘It sounds like Jesus is who I’ve been groping for all my life, honestly. And I didn’t realise that any of this was in the Bible. And I sure don’t remember Sunday School being like this.
Yeah. That’s the Big Jesus. The Easter V one. Pretty much in his own words.