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May 9 - July 29, 2017
But if “son of God” is given the meaning that it carried within Judaism at the time of Jesus, then it is possible he did. There, “son of God” was used in three different contexts to refer to three different entities, though with a common nuance of meaning. In the Hebrew Bible, it referred to Israel as a whole or to the king of Israel.40 Contemporary with Jesus, the image of God as father and a particular person as God’s son was used, as already noted, in stories about Jewish charismatic holy men. All three uses have one element in common. All designate a relationship of special intimacy with
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Jesus’s intense relationship to the world of Spirit thus enables us not only to glimpse what he was like as a historical figure, but also to understand the origin and appropriateness of the titles with which he was later proclaimed.
Yet those who have such experiences also insist that it is a knowing, and not just a feeling; it is a noetic and not simply a subjective emotional state. The knowing is direct, immediate, intuitive, quite unlike the modern Western understanding of knowledge as necessarily involving observer and observed and thus subject-object separation.
In these texts, marked by an imaginative and poetic appeal to nature, Jesus invited his hearers to see reality as characterized by a cosmic generosity.
To see God as gracious, nourishing, and encompassing is consistent with the Hebrew Bible and the tradition in which Jesus stood.12 But the freshness of imagery and intensity of expression in these texts require more of an explanation than tradition. The most satisfactory explanation is that he knew God in his own experience.
The sense of mission that he received as a Spirit person led him to undertake the role of prophet. As a prophet, he aggressively and provocatively challenged the corporate direction of his people. Violating the taboos of table fellowship, subverting the Sabbath, criticizing traditions regarding the Temple, he reversed the expectations of the future held by his contemporaries. Motivated by a profound love for his own people in a time when their future was at stake, he repudiated the burgeoning momentum leading toward armed resistance to Rome and called his hearers to the path of peace.
The admonition “love your enemy” would have been understood as an explicit reference to the Roman enemy and an unmistakable command to eschew the path of armed resistance. The saying, a source of perennial debate in Christian ethics, was in fact intended not simply for personal relationships, but as “public policy” at a particular time in history toward a particular state.14
Jesus’s attitude toward Rome was not based on an apolitical stance, but on the conviction that in the political affairs of the world the judging activity of God was at work. Regarding his own society, he was intensely political in the sense we have given to that term: he was concerned about the institutions and historical dynamic of Israel.
For repentance, though done by individuals, was not a turning from individual sins so much as a turning from a certain understanding of God and Israel to a transformed understanding.20
The perspective from which the astute observations flow is commonly age, that is, from reflection upon experience over many years. Frequently an older person, the sage has observed much and pondered long, and many cultures associate wisdom with “the elders.” Occasionally and remarkably, sagacity is found in younger persons, as in Jesus and the Buddha. In such instances, the vantage point is obviously not the product of age. Rather, the transformation of perception is the product of the sages’ spiritual experience.
As a sage whose perception flowed out of his experience of the sacred, Jesus developed a set of teachings about God, the human predicament, and the way of transformation.
Though almost certainly Marcan and not to be attributed to Jesus, the words are an appropriate commentary, extending the meaning of the previous saying and explicitly introducing the notion of the heart. Impurity is a matter of the heart, not of external behavior.
The intensification of Torah by applying it to what is internal is thus seen most centrally in Jesus’s teaching concerning the heart. In Jewish psychology, as disclosed in both the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic tradition, the heart is “the psyche at its deepest level,” “the innermost spring of individual life, the ultimate source of all its physical, intellectual, emotional, and volitional energies.”
The rabbinic tradition affirmed that the heart in turn was ruled either by the “evil inclination” (ha-yetzer ha-ra) or the “good inclination” (ha-yetzer ha-tob).23
Jesus accepted this understanding of the heart and made it central to his perception of the human condition.
Apparently, Jesus perceived most of his contemporaries as centered in the finite. In his parables, whose power depends upon the realistic portrayal of typical human behavior, people are concerned to receive what is theirs, undisposed to be generous to others, anxious about losing what they have, and fearful of defilement. In his teaching, he regularly identified four centers as most typically dominant in people’s lives: family, status, possessions, and piety. The last perception is particularly interesting. The heart can center in its own piety, its own holiness or purity, whether one
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The hope for a transformed heart was the basis of the new covenant of which Jeremiah spoke: But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. (31:33–34) Significantly, the passage combines the internalization of the Torah “upon their hearts” with knowing God.
However, this way had become normative among the religious, in part because of the particular circumstances facing Judaism in the Roman period and because of the particular intensifications of Torah that had established holiness as the exclusive way of being rightly related to God and as a blueprint for society. But as the normative way, this way cut off large numbers—perhaps most—of the Jewish people from a relationship to God and was responsible for the division within the people of God between the righteous and the outcast.
Jesus spoke of another way of transformation. Most basically, it was the path of death: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).25
Even though some of the early followers of Jesus were literally crucified, the saying was metaphorical, as the earliest commentary on it suggests: “Let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily” (Luke 9:23).26 As a metaphor for an internal spiritual process, the “path of death” involved the death of the heart centered in the finite and the birth of a new heart centered in God.
The way as the path of death and rebirth of a new heart was embodied in the life and teaching of the early Christian movement. The apostle Paul, the earliest of the New Testament authors, wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:19–20), and he affirmed that this experience was common to all Christians.
The Jesus movement in Palestine not only preserved the teaching of Jesus concerning the path of death, but arranged it into comprehensive patterns that emphasized the teaching even more sharply. Mark’s Gospel as a whole can be construed as the Gospel of “the way”32 and the massive central section of Luke’s Gospel (9:51–18:14) as a journey toward death.33
Put positively, the path of death involved trusting radically in the compassion of God and letting go of the self and the world as the basis of security and focus of concern. This way was simultaneously hard and easy. It was hard especially for those who were quite secure and who measured up to the standards of culture internalized within their psyches, whether the decisive standards were wealth, status, or observance of the Torah. For them to let go of those standards and the self that met them was very difficult. Hence the way was the narrow way: “The gate is narrow and the road is hard that
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Hence also the metaphor of death: dying is very hard and it is difficult to let go of finite centers. Yet it was also the easy way because it was a “letting go,” a cessation of striving.
Churches obsessed with growth cannot let go and rely on God, hence are challenged in teaching the Gospel.
Riches were not a temptation for the poor (except in societies that stress upward mobility); the poor knew that the world offered a scant measure of security. Righteousness was not a temptation for the sinner, social approval not a snare for the outcast.
The way of transformation thus involved becoming pure in heart through dying to the finite and living by radical trust in God.
Thus Jesus proclaimed a way of transformation that did not depend upon observing the requirements of the Torah as understood by the other renewal movements. Speaking of a divine compassion grounded in his own experience of God, he proclaimed a way of transformation whereby people could increasingly experience and live that awareness.
What has not often been noted, however, is that Jesus’s teaching about the heart had a number of immediate socioreligious and historical-political implications in the context of the Jewish homeland in the first century.
That is, holiness was to be achieved neither by driving the Romans from the land nor by withdrawal from society nor by separation within society. Intensifying the Torah by applying it to purity of heart also destroyed the basis for dividing society into the righteous and the outcast, for “once the norms had been intensified . . . so that they were quite beyond the possibility of fulfillment,” applying to internal disposition as well as behavior, no group could claim that it alone was the “true Israel,” for “all alike were sinners.”
Moreover, Jesus perceived that the orientation of the heart—its most deeply seated commitments—had historical-political consequences. He saw that the most fundamental commitments of his culture were leading to a collision course with Rome. Finally, the basic quality of a heart centered in God—compassion—had political implications. Compassion was to be the core value of the people of God as a historical community. Thus Jesus’s teaching as sage was not divorced from the conflict situation for which we have argued, but was integral to
Modern biblical scholarship has developed its own characteristic approach.1 Concerned with the meaning of the miracle stories as part of the early church’s story of Jesus, it has not been very much concerned with the historicity (the actual “happenedness”) of the miracles. The concern has been with what the Gospel writers intended to say with the miracle stories as components of a larger narrative or literary unit, the Gospels themselves.
For example, the story of Jesus miraculously feeding five thousand people in the wilderness (Mark 6:32–44; Matt. 14:13–21; Luke 9:10–17) alludes to Israel’s period in the wilderness following the exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses.
The story of Jesus feeding the five thousand makes the points that Jesus was one “like Moses” or even greater than Moses, that his ministry was an act of deliverance parallel in significance to the event that first created Israel, and that the people of God were once again being fed by “supernatural food” in the wilderness.
The modern scholarly approach has thus led to the realization that many of the miracle stories have a symbolic thrust. The word “symbolic” makes some Christians uncomfortable, for they tend to hear it as a watering down of the “literal” or “historical.”
But to say that a story has symbolic elements is to say that the language or content points beyond itself to a web of meanings or associations, and those associations enrich rather than impoverish the story.
The modern scholarly approach is based on a solid insight: the miracle stories are part of the church’s story of Jesus, and the meaning of the stories is greatly enhanced by paying attention to the meanings seen by the early church and the allusions they make.
That is, the tradition that Jesus was a “wonder-worker” is historically very firmly attested.
Despite the difficulty that miracles pose for the modern mind, on historical grounds it is virtually indisputable that Jesus was a healer and exorcist.
The picture of Jesus stilling the storm makes the claim that he shares in the power and authority of God; what was said of God in the Old Testament is now said of Jesus.
An account cannot be made historically true by believing it to be so. For example, I may choose to believe that George Washington actually threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, but my belief has nothing to do with whether he actually did; he may or may not have.
Was Jesus God? No. Not even the New Testament says that. It speaks of him as the Word of God, the Son of God, the Messiah, and so forth, but never simply identifies or equates him with God.
Did some of his followers experience Jesus as a divine reality after his death, and have some Christians had such experiences in the centuries since, including into the present? Yes. These experiences led to the conviction that Jesus was “one with God” or “at the right hand of God” and ultimately to the doctrine of the Trinity: that God is one (monotheism) and yet known/experienced in three primary ways (as God, the Son, and the Spirit). This is the context in which it makes sense to praise and pray to Jesus. But this doesn’t mean that Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus during his historical life, was
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Does that make him ordinary? No. I think he is one of the two most remarkable human beings who ever lived. I don’t really care who the other one was—my point is that what we see in Jesus is a human possibility. That’s what makes him so remarkable. If he was also divine, then he’s not all that remarkable. If he had the knowledge and power of God, he could have done so much more.
To affirm that Jesus is the Word become flesh, the Word incarnate, means what another New Testament verse does: he is “the image (ikon) of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). He shows us what God is like—reveals God’s character and passion.
The conflict among Christians about whether or not Jesus was God is grounded in two different understandings of the Gospels—and the New Testament and the Bible as a whole. One view—generally embraced by “conservative” Christians—sees the Bible and the Gospels as “divine information.” That is shorthand for the view that the Bible and the Gospels are the direct revelation of God and thus have a divine guarantee to be true. For them, divine inspiration means divine inerrancy.
A second view sees the Gospels as the product of a historical process, written in a particular time and setting. Time: the earliest was probably written around 70, the last perhaps as late as the early second century. Setting: they are the product of early Christian communities, written from within and to those communities. As such, they combine early Christian memory of Jesus and testimony about Jesus: their memories of what he was like, of what he taught and did, and their testimony to what he had become in their experience and lives, his significance for them.
South African Jesus scholar Albert Nolan makes the same point when he says in a quotation that I’ve grown very fond of: “Jesus is a much underrated man. When we deprive him of his humanity, we deprive him of his greatness.”
the classic and traditional Christian affirmation about Jesus, namely, that Jesus is for us as Christians the decisive revelation of what a life full of God is like.
I speak of Jesus first of all as a Jewish mystic. By this I mean that Jesus is one who knew God, who knew the sacred, who knew the Spirit—terms I use synonymously and interchangeably. He was one for whom the Spirit of God was an experiential reality.
Second, I see the historical Jesus as a wisdom teacher. As a wisdom teacher, he was a teacher of a way or a path.
