August 21, 2005
Romans 12:1-8
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Psalm 124
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Matthew 16:13-20
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Who Do You Say That Jesus Is?
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
14th Sunday after Pentecost – August 21, 2005
Rev. Samuel Schaal
Romans 12:1-8
Psalm 124
Matthew 16:13-20
“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Jesus asks the disciples. They answer with the names of historical prophets they have been taught about—John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or others.
“But you,” Jesus says, “Who do you say that I am?” That is the penetrating question of this passage. Jesus isn’t concerned with the polls, with opinions about what the wider culture is saying about him – he is concerned about his disciples, about the community gathered around him. “And you,” he says, “Who do you say that I am?”
Well, if Jesus had asked me that question through different periods of my life (and perhaps in some ways he has been asking me that question), I would have answered in different ways. I’d like to talk about that this morning, in perhaps more of an autobiographical way than normal.
As a child growing up outside the church, I might have answered, “Jesus, who?” Really, that’s not true, as I was very aware of the presence of Jesus in most people’s lives. (As I much later in life counseled parents in dealing with the religious questions of their children, I would say that religion is like sex. If nobody teaches you anything about it, you learn it on the streets, and on the playground, and indeed, this was my earliest religious education.)
Jesus was said to be the son of God, and this just didn’t make sense to me. How a human could be God’s son, how a majestic, all-knowing, all-powerful deity could either adopt or take the form of a human, strained even my childhood rational nature. So my earliest answer to that question might have been honestly, “I don’t know.”
In my early adulthood, having been exposed to enough of the Bible to have a sense of Jesus’ ministry, I began to think that Jesus was a nice man, a human prophet, a radical prophet perhaps, who called for a new social order and got executed in the process. That much was true, I reasoned, and all the stuff about the miracles and his resurrection must be legend and myth, the vain aspirations of a humanity so desperate for a God they will invent one.
And so in my early adult years if asked “Who do I think that Jesus is?” I would have answered, “A human prophet whose work stands alongside other human prophets … Elijah, Jeremiah, Buddha, Confucius.”
So given this Christology, one can see why, when I felt called to ministry, I went in the most logical place, Unitarianism. The Unitarians, while once believing in the divinity of Christ, had for the most part given that up, except in a few old and odd congregations. This all began way back in the days of Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s greatest essayist, of good Puritan stock, former minister at prestigious Second Church in Boston which had become Unitarian.
In his famous 1838 Divinity School Address to the graduates of Harvard Divinity School, Emerson opines, “(Historical Christianity) has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.” (In Conrad Wright, Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson. Parker, Boston: Skinner House Books, 1961.) Indeed, this mirrored my own feelings of how could a mere man, a human prophet, really reflect the majesty of God?
Then I entered the local seminary which happened to be Methodist. So I was studying for Unitarian ministry at a Methodist seminary. It was in the Introduction to Biblical Studies that the Bible came alive for me. I began to see how the sacred scriptures were mediated by human experience, and how this human experience didn’t diminish but accentuated the sacred quality of these writings. This book, indeed, didn’t just pop out of a cloud, but represented the deep well of wisdom of how two communities (the Jews and the Christians) experienced the holiness of life, the divinity of creation, how they had encountered the living God.
But still I struggled with Christ. The God part I got; that was easy. But all that sin and salvation stuff, all that stuff that Paul talks about of being sanctified in Christ Jesus—that was the hard part for me.
I guess if there was any one thing that really changed my mind about Christ, it might have been this. One night our New Testament professor was trying to help us understand the crucifixion in new ways. The crucifixion of Jesus is such a familiar part of the story, that it can lose its power over us. He explained how crucifixion was a common way of executing criminals and it was a particularly cruel way. He read us a dispassionate medical description of what happens to the body, of how crucifixion kills through a slow suffocation. Then, no doubt to alarm us, to wake us up, he gave us a particularly violent and disquieting description of the God of Çhristianity—that our God was left to die on the cross. He said if the Christ event happened today, the symbol of our faith would not be a cross, but an electric chair.
It was then that I began to realize something about Christ and Christianity I had never before realized. How Christianity indeed represented an inversion of worldly wisdom. I began to understand those sayings of Jesus when he says the first will be last and the last first. I began to understand the existential depth of Christianity because it takes suffering seriously.
One writer, Frederick Buechner, says the symbols of other religions suggest beauty and light: a six-pointed star, a crescent moon, a lotus. He says the symbol of Christianity is an instrument of death. And that, he says, suggests hope, paradoxically.
This is a thumbnail theology of the cross, perhaps better suited for a sermon around Lent. But at the center of Christian theology is the cross of Jesus Christ, the one who suffered. And it is clear in the event of Jesus Christ that God is present – we might quibble on exactly how – but we know that in Christ, God is present and so God knows our suffering. The Philippian hymn (2:6-8) says it best: “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God … emptied himself, taking the form of a slave…and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”
So this was a God who knew suffering, who knew our suffering, who knew my suffering. And a God who did not merely overcome suffering, but who discovered a reality within and beyond that suffering, a reality in whose presence we live and move and have our being.
I still struggle, if truth be told, with the historical reality of the resurrection. I accept the metaphorical reality of the symbol of resurrection as a poetic way of trying to talk about the truth of the resurrection quality of life in God through Christ. But I’m not 100 percent convinced that if we had a time machine, when we went back to the first century, that we’d find Jesus historically resurrected in the body.
Many would say that the historical reality of the resurrection proves the truth of Christianity, and yet I would counter that to so hold the truth of our faith hostage to any historical experience is to limit the truth of Christianity, to narrow the truth of Christianity, to calcify and concretize the generous and universal spirit of the Christ into a mere doctrine to either accept or reject.
In fact, I have stopped worrying over the Trinitarian or Unitarian nature of God. I am less concerned with doctrine and more concerned with knowing the Living God. We will be of various minds about this, no doubt. And this shows the strength of our congregational way of being Christian. As one old divine said, “We need not think alike to love alike.”
The church’s majority opinion about Jesus Christ is that he was “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God … of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.” This is part of the Nicene Creed which came out of the Council of Nicea of the fourth century which was the first major church council to assert the Trinitarian nature of God in Christ. The church has had other minority opinions over the ages, to be sure. And these creeds and statements of faith are useful keys to going deeper in theology.
But to use them as tests of membership, as standards of faith, as deciding who is in and who is out of religious fellowship is not in our way of being Christian.
We might ask, Who do we – as a church – say that Jesus is? In this morning’s gospel story, this is precisely what Matthew has Jesus asking the disciples. In verse 15, the word translated “you” is in the original Greek plural, so a better translation would be “you all.” He was addressing all the disciples, the community of faith.
So who do we say that Jesus is? According to our covenant, we say that Jesus is the one we follow. Our relationship to Jesus Christ is defined in the first few words: “As followers of Jesus Christ, we commit… So we are followers, not merely believers. Following suggests an active life of faith. It is not merely asserting a correct or approved doctrine about Jesus, it is following Jesus and living our lives in accord to how we think Jesus lived and how we think God wants us to live. It is to confess that it is Jesus Christ who is at the center of our religious lives and our religious community.
So the climax of this passage is about the church, the community, not merely about an individual faith confession. This account of Jesus’ question is in all synoptic gospels, but only Matthew has the discourse with Peter being the church’s foundation, so the recognition of Jesus as Christ is in context of the church. So the church is rooted in the confession of Jesus as Son of God.
That we individually experience Jesus in different ways only enhances our corporate life when we gather to worship God in Christ. Paul in Romans tells us to think of ourselves in relation to others. He speaks of individual gifts, but points out that we are one body of Christ, as indeed we are here on Church Street.
So this much we can certainly say, that whatever we may believe about Jesus, we covenant as a community to follow Jesus and moreover, recognize ourselves as somehow, mysteriously, mystically, as being the Body of Christ for this community.
Over the ages I’ve changed my mind about Jesus. I am still working on it. My faith is still evolving. I think who Jesus is depends in part on who is trying to answer that ancient question. Indeed, Jesus puts a human face on God. We need Jesus, for otherwise how can we relate to a God who is so majestic, all-knowing, all-powerful? How else can we worship a God who truly knows our human experience? Indeed, Emerson was right: the Soul knows no person. But the Christ does.
One of the early church fathers, Ireneaus said: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God,” Or, God became man so man could become God.
Who Jesus is cannot be answered for all people and all time, for the question has to be answered in the heart of the believer. Albert Schweitzer recognized this in the final paragraph of his 1906 book In Search of the Historical Jesus.
This is for me one of the most eloquent statements on Jesus and so I close with it:
“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”
Amen.