God with a Human Face (Original Jesus, Chapter 7)

^{The closer we get to the original Jesus - to the storytelling Jesus, the healing Jesus, the welcoming Jesus, the Jesus who declared God’s judgment on those who rejected the way of peace and justice... the closer we are to recognizing the face of the living God.
(Original Jesus, 83)}

What do we mean when we say "Jesus is God"? Too often I fear this is a matter of detached theology, simply affirming that Jesus is the incarnation of the God of the universe. You know, "that's just what we Christians are supposed to believe. So drop it already."

But when it comes to God, are we all on the same page for the above statement to make sense? Do we really know enough about God to know what a personal visit from him might look like? In our culture today this is an important question. Do we really want to attach Jesus to most popular conceptions of God? Many in our world imagine a detached and distant creator -- up there somewhere. Do we imagine Jesus to be that god? (or do we prefer to pick the god of New Age or Americanism or something else?)

Our confusion on this point is precisely why we needed Jesus. Not just to set our ideas straight. But to introduce us to something of what God is like. As Wright put it, "We don't know, off the top of our heads, exactly who God is; but we can discover him by looking at Jesus." (p.79).

The God Jesus knew (as a first century Jew steeped in the Old Testament) is both the Almighty Creator and the Caring Father who hears and is willing to roll up his sleeves and sort out things himself; a God involved in the world and invested in turning things around.

Jews actually did have an idea of what it might look like for this God to visit, though Jesus wasn't quite what they had in mind. They had pictures like these: Lady Wisdom calling out in the streets (in Proverbs); the Law as the means through which God would personally gather and guide His people; and the Temple itself as the place where the presence of God dwelt.

Enter Jesus. He called out and taught as if he were that Wisdom. As if he were the Law and Lawgiver sent to gather and guide. As if he were Temple, housing the living presence of God himself.

And so in Jesus, we see what this God, the involved God of sovereign love, might look like if he were to become human. The closer we get to understanding the "original" Jesus (the real, in-your-face Kingdom-of-God Jesus), the closer we are to seeing the face of the Living God.

This Jesus cannot be contained. He can't be treated as a mere signpost to God, or a supporter of our agendas (however well-intentioned or religious or "Christian"). This Jesus upsets our ideas about God, our religion.

This Jesus lived among God’s people telling stories about the kingdom of God, healing the sick and confronting the powerful. He died under the weight of the world’s pain, and rose again having defeated death.

Fast forward to today: If the living God was uniquely and personally present in Jesus... so what? What does it mean for us?

Ultimately this question brings us to a journey. Not just a personal, more-or-less self-centered spiritual quest. As Paul reminds us: "God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ." (2 Corinthians 5:19 NIV) This journey begins by recognizing the love of God in the face of Jesus of Nazareth but continues as we join in God's work of healing the world.

Biblical Text: Philippians 2:1-11

Embedded Questions:

• Do we know enough about God to answer the question ‘Is Jesus God’?
• Can we fit Jesus into our God picture?
• Is it true that the living God was uniquely and personally present in Jesus?
• What might it look like today if people were captivated by the Spirit of this (the original) Jesus?

Resurrection (Original Jesus: Chapter 6)

When people died they stayed dead, in first-century Palestine just as much as in the technological twentieth century. Jesus' followers weren't expecting him to die in the first place; when he did, they certainly weren't expecting him to rise again. Yet they said, loud and clear, that that was what had happened.
Original Jesus, 72

Why did Christianity ever get going anyway? There were other Jewish would-be messiahs and revolutionaries within a hundred years of Jesus’ life (Judas the Galilean and Simeon ben-Kosiba, among others). A leader would gain a following, people would proclaim him to be Messiah, and then he would be hunted down and killed by the occupying forces. Every time, the movement would die with the leader.

But the Jesus movement didn’t die with the crucifixion of Jesus. His followers kept following him. They didn’t even visit his grave to pray and grieve (with the exception of that first Sunday), as would be custom in Jewish culture.

Rather than going back to their old lives or looking for a new Messiah (perhaps in Jesus’ brother James?), Jesus’ followers were emphatic that Jesus was the Messiah. Three days after his execution and burial, they said, Jesus was raised to bodily life again, leaving an empty tomb behind him. The current Jewish understanding of a final resurrection at the end of the age left little room for a single person coming back to life in the middle of history. The last thing they would have expected was for Jesus to be resurrected.

The accounts we have are "mostly quite breathless and artless" (p. 72), more like eye witness sketches than carefully planned stories. They knew that it had happened, and that it would change everything. The resurrection meant that the kingdom of God had come to birth, that the real return from exile had happened, and that evil had been defeated. They, and others, had to go on taking Jesus seriously. The victory that Jesus had won over evil and death (which is the good news, the gospel) must be taken to the ends of the earth.

Biblical Text: Luke 23:33-38, 44-56; 24:1-12

Embedded Questions:

• After Jesus’ execution, why didn’t Jesus’ followers give up or find a new messiah?
• Why did they think he was the Messiah after all?
• Why didn’t the story end when Jesus was crucified?