Mythbusters: The Inconceivable Jesus

About fifteen years ago, I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant with my best friend Tom.  Tom was a college professor of classical languages.  That night we were joined by a friend of his, another professor named Alan.  Now when you get people like us together we tend to talk, and analyze and analyze.  Having two professors at the table only raised the level of analysis.

Now on this night, the topic of our conversation was very controversial.  The issue at hand was one of our identities, and how we were perceived in the world.  Entering a new phase in his life, Alan was thinking of making a big change and so was I. I had recently quit my job to start my own company and I thought this was as good a time as any to change who I was.  Alan agreed.  So we sat there for an hour debating the ins and outs of these proposed changes in our social identities.

Alan announced, rather seriously, his intention to make a big change in his life.  “Guys,” he said, “I’m thinking of buying a hat.”  Tom and I were taken aback.  “Are you sure you want to do this Alan?  A hat is a big step.”

“I know,” he told us.  “There’s a lot of risks involved.  If I start wearing a hat, people will start referring to me as ‘That guy with the hat.’ “

Alan was concerned that people would say, “Do you know Alan?  About six feet tall.  Dark hair. Glasses.”

“No don’t know him.”

“Wears a hat.”

“Oh the guy with the hat. Hat guy.  Oh sure I know Alan.”

Alan was afraid of being labeled the hat guy.  And my predicament was even worse, because I was feeling really rebellious.  I had a deep struggle in me about the direction my life was going to go.  You see, I was thinking of growing a ponytail.  Over the next few months I did just that.  In retrospect it wasn’t because I was rebellious.  It was mostly because I was unemployed and couldn’t afford a haircut.

As in any time of great decisions and turmoil, I did what people often do in that situation.  I went back to church.  One Sunday morning I walked into the local Methodist building.  I started showing up every Sunday and my worst fears were realized.  A few people noticed there was a new guy in the pews.  I later learned they went to the pastor at the time and said, “Hey Jim.  Who’s that new guy?  The one who sits in the back.”

“Which one?” Jim asked. “There’s a few.”

“You know.  He’s tall.  Younger.”

“Not sure…”

 “Has a pony tail.”

“Oh the pony tail guy.”

Alan was right.  I was now the ponytail guy.  And because I had a ponytail people made all sorts of assumptions about me.  They even asked Pam and I to lead their youth group.  Why?

“Well, the husband has a ponytail.  They must know something about kids.”

When something new comes into our world, the human tendency is to categorize it and label it so we can control it.  In the creation story, why did Adam want to name all the animals?  In the ancient world, naming something expressed your power over that something.  When we are confronted with originality, with new experiences, we immediately try to explain and describe those experiences in terms of the old ones.  We try to domesticate what we don’t know with the labels and expectations of what we do know.

Jesus was new.  Jesus was not a copy.  Jesus was an original.

That can get you in trouble.  One day Jesus was in prayer and when he was done he rejoined his followers. After spending time in prayer Jesus doesn’t come back to everyone and say, “Oh I had just had a lovely prayer experience I’d like to share with you.  Everyone get out your journals.”

That’s not what people who spend time with God do.  Instead, Jesus liked to ask provocative questions.  I can relate to that.  This time is no exception.  He comes back from praying and asks his disciples, “Say guys, who do all these crowds say I am?  What’s the buzz out there?  What are they saying?”

Basically, they tell Jesus the jury is still out.  The people, the pundits, the experts still haven’t reached a consensus.  Some said he was John the Baptist, the apocalyptic preacher who had baptized Jesus.  John was recently arrested and beheaded.  So maybe Jesus was the reincarnation of John, or possessed by John’s spirit.  It was a shaky theory, but John was a charismatic leader and many of his followers missed him a great deal.  So maybe Jesus was John, back from the grave.

Others said he was Elijah.  Elijah was a prophet in Israel a few hundred years before.  There was a story that Elijah had never died, that God just took him up into heaven in a chariot of fire.  Over the years, other stories developed that one day Elijah would return.  That would be a sign that God was about to transform the world, a new era would begin, and God’s kingdom would come to earth.

Still others thought that Jesus was one of the other ancient prophets come back from the dead.  Do you see a pattern here?  Most people could only think of Jesus as a recycled dead guy.  Jesus went around preaching, “You have always been told that, but I am telling you this.  You think God is unapproachable but I’m telling you God is a loving parent.  You think the powerful are God’s chosen; I’m telling you it’s the poor and the weak.  I’m telling you something new – new wine – a new covenant – a new day – a chance to have a new life.  I tell you about new birth and all you people do is ask me questions about death.  I declare the new era has arrived in me and you just label me a recycled dead guy. I am not what you already know.  I am not your father’s prophet.”

So Jesus just eggs them on a little further.  I love that about Jesus too.  Whenever people give him the status quo answer he just needles them until they lose it.  That’s kind of fun to do with people, isn’t it?

Jesus asks his followers, “OK guys.  We’ve been together a while.  You’ve been with me.  We’ve gone through a lot of stuff together.  You’ve heard the voice of the people – the polls.  You’ve heard the religious experts.  Now what about you?  You the former fishermen, blue collar workers, tax collectors, IRS workers, who do you say that I am?”

At this point in the story, many Bible readers simply reduce Jesus to a game show host looking for the right answer.  It’s not as if Peter gives a wrong answer and Jesus is going to say, “ No – sorry Peter.  The correct answer is Christ.  Christ.   But don’t worry we’ll be sending you to Hell with some lovely parting gifts and the home version of our game.  James you select.”

It’s not that Peter gives the right answer or Peter merely knows the correct information about Jesus. Through Jesus, Peter has experienced something bigger.  Something, in the words of John Lennon, “bigger than Jesus”.

Peter says, “I say you are the Christ, the Messiah of God.”  In that moment, Peter gets it. Ever been in a meeting where no one gets it?  Ever see the light in someone’s eyes when they get it? The “a-ha” moment?

Peter’s “a-ha” moment was that Jesus was the Christ of God.  Here’s a news flash for you.  Christ was not Jesus’ last name.  He was not Mr. Christ.  Jesus is a name. Christ is a title.  It comes from the Greek christos.  In Hebrew, it’s mashiach from which we get the word messiah.  It means God’s anointed.  The one God has appointed, ordained, sent on God’s mission.

Peter got it.  Peter saw that Jesus was anointed by God.  Kings and prophets used to be anointed with oil. It sealed their identity.  It labeled them as being bearers of God’s mission in the world.  Peter saw that Jesus was anointed, not just with oil, but with the very Spirit, the very essence of God.

Peter got it.  Jesus the Christ was not just working one of God’s projects, a particular piece of the puzzle.  Jesus was God’s project.  Jesus was the embodiment, the incarnation of the ultimate project, the metamission, to connect people with God, to reconcile the human and the divine.  To heal the separation and alienation all humans feel from what they know is true.  The new era, the realm of God had arrived in Jesus the Christ.

Peter didn’t just know that.  He experienced it directly as reality.  It wasn’t explained to him.  It wasn’t a label for Jesus that he merely chose and said, “Boy you know, That sounds good. I’ll take that one.”

It’s easy to get labeled, categorized and pigeonholed.  Labels make it easy for us make sense of the world.  It’s how our brains make sense of the universe.  Ask any physicist, the molecules in you and the molecules of the chair you’re sitting on don’t know they are different from one another.  At the subatomic level it is very difficult to tell where you end and the chair begins.  In fact at that level it is hard to tell where anything ends and begins.  Increasingly, cosmologists describe the universe as one big interpenetrating field of energy and matter.  Biologists talk less about disconnected species and more about one holistic biosphere.  It’s only our brains that neatly categorize things into objects, labels, species, countries, and people.

Like Peter, we try to categorize and label Jesus.  We make lame attempts to identify his genus and species as if that will help us better understand him.  The church has struggled with this challenge ever since.

Most historians believe the Apostle’s Creed originated sometime in the Second Century.  Its primary purpose was to bust the myths of a Christian group called the Gnostics.  Each line was designed to refute one of their beliefs.  For instance, some Gnostics believed that Jesus was not really human, that he was a deity who only appeared to be one of us.  That is why the Creed specifies that he was born - born as a human child.  At the same time, many Gnostics also claimed that Jesus’ divine nature was not bestowed on him until his baptism, when he Spirit descended on him.  That is why the Creed specifies that the Spirit was active in his conception, and that his birth was special.

When we speak of Jesus in the Apostle’s Creed, “who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,” we are not making a logical statement that scientifically describes Jesus’ DNA.  We are not claiming he got half of his genes from Jewish peasant girl and half of them from the Creator of the universe.  In contrast, we are expressing a mystery in a purposely illogical assertion.  We are saying that everything about Jesus was God and everything about Jesus was human. Declaring Jesus to be the Christ is not a decision we make.  It is a reality in which we participate.

That will never make sense to us.  That will never be explainable to us.  But our prayer is that through belonging to and experiencing this community of faith, it will be real to us.

A message on Mark 8:27-32 from Don Heatley, pastor of Vision Community Church, Warwick, NY