Luke 9:18-27
When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of weekends at my grandparents little farm-ette in the little hamlet of Tunnelton, PA. I loved going there for a lot of reasons—playing ball with my cousins, helping out with the garden, driving the tractor, eating bacon and toast with my grandpap every morning. But one of the other things that I loved about that place was that on Sunday mornings we went down to the little Presbyterian Church in Tunnelton (my grandparents lived in the Tunnelton suburbs) and went to Sunday School and worship. It was a tiny church with a one-room Sunday School for the kids, an outhouse out back, a choir of six wheezy voices, a funeral home organ, and some of the sweetest people in the world. What I remember most, however, is the picture of Jesus that hung on the wall in the middle of the chancel, kind of where our cross would be—this picture of Jesus knocking on the door. I didn’t much listen to sermons back then (my grandmother bribed me to be quiet with Beeman’s gum), but I did look long and hard at that picture. For the longest time if you asked me what I thought of when I thought of Jesus, it was that picture. I remember being paranoid that Jesus would come to my house and I wouldn’t be able to open the door or I wouldn’t be home!
My guess is that every one of you has a similar story—a picture of Jesus in your mind. Indeed, people have been coming up with images of Jesus for a long time, and like that picture on the wall in Tunnelton they have a tendency to shape our understanding of Jesus.
Take these pictures, for example (Check out other pics here: Download Jesus Pics). Here we have the iconic Jesus—the classic icon of prayer and worship, but we also have Rembrandt’s portrait of Jesus as one who is more human, more thoughtful. Over here is a popular image—Jesus as a buddy Christ, a personal Savior who’s all about me, or the mysterious image of Jesus in the Shroud of Turin. There are some who get excited when they see the image of Jesus on a piece of toast or a fish stick (this one is from a toaster that’s actually designed to burn the image of Jesus on your breakfast), and others who want to make Jesus so big as to be unavoidable, like this picture of a 106 foot Jesus being constructed in a small town in Poland. Almost nobody likes it because they believe a strong wind could topple it over and crush the local supermarket—Jesus coming down from heaven with a vengeance! There are many pictures of Jesus out there, and many ways that people perceive him, and that was true even in Jesus’ own day.
Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do the crowds say that I am,” and they started to post similar pictures. Some say you’re the spitting image of John the Baptist come back from the dead, others are painting a picture of the prophet Elijah who’s come back in the same whirlwind he left in all those years ago. Others aren’t quite sure, but they’d put you in a gallery with a lot of the old prophets. It’s pretty clear that the crowd pictured Jesus as someone amazing, given the fact that he had just fed five thousand plus people with only five loaves of bread and two fish. Some might have even pictured him as a meal ticket as a result.
But while the crowd was posting a gallery, Jesus turns and asks his disciples for their snapshot. “Who do you say that I am?” What’s your picture?
Peter takes a stab at it. You are “the Messiah of God,” he says. Good answer, we think. Peter named his picture of Jesus, but it soon becomes clear that Peter’s image of Jesus is distorted by his own expectations and desires, and those of many others—a Messiah who will be a spiritual and political superman, driving out Israel’s enemies and restoring truth, justice and the, um, Israelite way, with him and the other disciples as his sidekicks and cabinet members. When Jesus speaks of quite the opposite – a Messiah who suffers and dies at the hands of their enemies, they can’t imagine it. They’re looking for the way to power and glory, Jesus is showing them the way to a cross.
While we understand that the disciples and the crowds were blinded by their expectations then, we don’t often get the fact that often our own expectations and images of Jesus continue to keep us as much in the dark as they were. We construct images and expectations that are based more on our traditions, our culture, our political persuasions, and our assumptions about who God is, what the Bible says or doesn’t say, and what the future holds, and we miss the real picture that Jesus painted of himself, his God, his mission, his life, and his death—a picture that is fleshed out not only in a few verses of Scripture, but in the whole story of Israel and God’s creation. We debate and defend pictures of Jesus that are caricatures of the real Gospel. In terms of 21st century Christianity in the US, there are two of these opposing pictures:
The first picture is the one that images through the lens of skepticism. It’s a picture that you’ll find on the cover of mainstream magazines every Christmas and Easter, one that you’ll hear trumpeted by non-Christians, and even one that you’ll hear in some mainline churches. It’s a picture of Jesus that looks something like this: Jesus was just an ordinary man, a good first century Jew, who was born in the typical way (not with all that miraculous virginal conception stuff – that’s a fairy tale added by the church much later). This Jesus was a remarkable preacher and teacher with a good moral sense about him, and was clearly popular, but only in the way that all charismatic leaders are popular. He certainly didn’t perform miracles, and he absolutely did not believe that he would die for the sins of the world. He was simply trying to get people to be kind to one another, especially the marginalized.
He definitely wasn’t divine. All that divinity stuff he said was referring to God and not himself. In fact, he’d have been horrified to think that people were calling him that, and he would not have wanted a “church” founded in his memory. Of course he didn’t rise from the dead (we all know that dead people stay dead, after all). Sure, his followers felt like his good teaching should continue, so that started using language that seemed to imply that he had been risen from the dead, but they meant it only in a spiritual sense. All that talk snowballed out of control until some literalists started to believe those legends as facts. The “gospels” were the result of that inventive process—written much later and, by the way, excluding some other gospels that were much more realistic and spiritual about Jesus and should have been considered as well.
To sum up that view, Jesus was a sage teacher of wisdom, who had a spiritual sense about him, but all that stuff about the cross and rising from the dead shouldn’t be taken seriously. All that matters is that Jesus is alive in our hearts, and if we follow his example we’ll just continue to make the world better and better on our own, and while we do it we’ll adopt some of that Buddhist and Hindu and other spirituality because, after all, we wouldn’t want to leave anyone out. All religions are simply paths to finding God, whatever that is. Jesus is just one teacher on the way to our personal enlightenment.
This is what we most often call the “liberal” paradigm. Some of its forefathers are people like Thomas Jefferson, who actually took a pair of scissors to the Bible and cut out all the parts about Jesus divinity, the cross, resurrection, miracles, etc. The Jesus Seminar would do the same thing a couple of hundred years later. The picture of Jesus we’re left with is one that’s not good news, just some good advice.
Now some of you are saying, “See, those nasty, godless liberals are at it again!” But before you go there, let’s look at the other view, which I believe is equally disturbing.
That’s the view of the “conservative.” The conservative (some would say “evangelical” as a synonym) picture of Jesus looks something like this. God creates the world and humanity, humanity screws up the world irreparably because of their sin, which brings down the death penalty on them and on the world. As a last ditch effort to save some of his people from the corrupt earth, God sends his supernatural son out of his natural habitat in heaven to come down and take the death penalty for those few who believe in him. While he’s on his way to die, he preaches a few moral lessons and he does a few extraordinary miracles, the biggest of which is rising from the dead, where after he returns to heaven, his true home, and waits there to welcome his faithful believers (those who pray a prayer of confession and belief in Jesus) after their deaths. The now useless earth, after all, will be destroyed in a cataclysm, thus heaven is everyone’s true home, unless of course you’re an unbeliever. In that case, you go straight to hell…do not pass Go…do not collect anything at all but a pitchfork. In the Roman Catholic version of this picture, Jesus instructs Peter to found the church and anyone who wants to be with Jesus will be part of that church. In the Protestant version, Jesus instructs his followers to write the New Testament, which tells them how to be good people, but mostly tells them how to get to heaven when they die.
Now some of you are saying, “Hold on a minute! That’s the gospel you’re messing with there. I’ve believed that my whole life. You’re dangerous mister…maybe even one of those liberals!”
Well, here’s the thing. Both of these pictures of Jesus, while they have some variations and maybe even a little bit of truth, have the same distortions. First, they are both edited versions of Jesus. The liberal view cuts out all the stuff in the New Testament about Jesus’ divinity, the cross, and the resurrection. The conservative view, on the other hand, tends to practically cut out most of what Jesus taught and did prior to his death. One cuts out the cross, the other cuts out Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom.
Look, for example, at the Apostle’s Creed, which we recited a while ago. Now I believe the creed—always have—and without qualification. I believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead—that it wasn’t a metaphor or an illusion. But notice what the creed does:
“I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary…suffered under Pontius Pilate…
Wait, what happened? You can almost hear the Gospel writers going, “Hold on! What about all that stuff we wrote about that Jesus said and did in the middle?! All that stuff about the kingdom, the healings, casting out demons, etc.? That was no sideshow!”
No, it wasn’t. See, we miss the fact that the creeds were developed for the specific purpose of dealing with controversies over Jesus’ relationship to God—his humanity and divinity. They were never meant to be the sum total of the gospel of Christ, but we’ve made them that way and, in doing so, we’ve cut out or at the very least downplayed some of the most vital pieces of the picture of Jesus and his mission and self-understanding.
Both liberals and conservatives suffer from a truncated gospel. Liberals might quote a few verses about the kingdom and some quotes from Ghandi, conservatives quote John 3:16 and a few verses from Romans. Neither is enough to give a complete vision of Jesus. As one of my seminary professors put it, “If the Bible is simply about the four happy hops that get you into heaven, then why is it so thick?”
In Luke 24, there’s the famous story of the two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus after the rumors of Jesus’ resurrection. Notice how this story goes. The two disciples are walking along when a stranger joins them. They don’t recognize the stranger as the risen Jesus (he doesn’t fit their picture), and he says to them, “What are you discussing with each other as you walk along?” And one of them named Cleopas says, “Where have been, living in a cave?” (that’s the Greek translation, sort of). “Don’t you know what happened?” And they tell him about the crucifixion and the empty tomb and the story told by the women. And then Jesus says this to them:
“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then, it says, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures.
Did you catch that? Jesus paints his own picture for these disciples—a picture that is not truncated or edited, but a picture constructed from the full witness of Scripture – the Old Testament, the law, the prophets, all of it. If we want to have a full picture of Jesus, we need to listen to it with the whole Bible as our palate. The Gospel isn’t just a few verses, it’s the whole story of God, the story of creation, the story of humanity, the story we all find ourselves within. It’s not about literalism versus metaphor, it’s about reading the Bible for all its worth. Jesus knew it and structured his mission around it, we must be willing to do so as well if we want to know who he truly is and what he aims to do.
The second related issue that characterizes both distorted pictures of Jesus is that both suffer from a dualistic worldview that separates the world into the spiritual and the material—a worldview that’s also known a gnosticism. Liberals, for example, can’t imagine why God, the ultimate spiritual force, would engage in the limiting exercise of investing in a human body and all of its problems. As professor Tom Long puts it, “The gnostic impulse finds it hard to swallow the gospel claim that the Word became flesh and lived among us. Rather, for the gnostic, the Word is always becoming the spirit and floating above us. The gnostic impulse is ‘spiritual but not religious.’” This is why liberals have a hard time with the resurrection. In the Platonist Greek world where this Gnosticism was born, the body was considered to be a bag of dung, and to be truly free meant to be free from the body. Immortality of the soul is preferable to resurrection of the body. According to Bart Ehrmann, a leading liberal scholar, most Gnostics believe that this material world is not their home. “We are trapped here, in these bodies of flesh, and we have to learn how to escape…Since the point of the soul is to leave this world behind and to enter that ‘great and holy generation’—that is the divine realm that transcends this world—a resurrection of the body is the very last thing that Jesus, or any of his true followers, would want” (qtd in Long 74).
Interestingly, many conservatives actually believe the same thing! While they believe in the Word become flesh, their ultimate hope is to live in a disembodied heaven, which is their true home. The earth and all of its trappings are decaying and corruptible, hardly worth taking care of. Jesus will come and take us away from all that (kind of like Calgon), and we can live with him in bliss way beyond the blue. This body, this world doesn’t matter. Only heaven ultimately does.
But here again, we miss the picture of Jesus himself—the one who was raised bodily. The one who shows the nail prints in his hands and feet, the one who eats fish and bread with his disciples on the seashore, the one who—over and over again the New Testament says—came to dwell on earth with his people, just as the divine glory of God dwelt with the people of Israel in the tabernacle and the temple—which were the places where the Israelites believed that heaven and earth met. Neither Jesus nor the Israelites were Gnostics. They believed in a unified whole as their ultimate hope—body and spirit together, heaven and earth together.
See, we have this divide between liberal and conservative, mainline and evangelical, each touting their picture of Jesus. What both don’t realize is that they each have the same distortions, couched in different language. The time has come, I believe, for a different vision.
Brian McClaren, in his work, talks about the fact that we tend to view things in our 21st culture in terms of a continuum between right and left, conservative and liberal. Our politics are divided up that way, and so is our theology. When you meet someone, they will immediately try to determine where you are on the continuum, because you have to be somewhere. Oh, sure, there are those who try to stay in the middle, to be a moderate, but nobody in this culture likes a moderate. They never get elected. You’ve got to choose one way or the other. Churches are either liberal or conservative. Our conference asks that on its church profile form. You kind of have to declare.
Or do you? McClaren suggests that the continuum isn’t binding on Jesus. That perhaps what Jesus was saying and doing doesn’t really lie anywhere along this continuum. Instead, it’s out here—it’s a whole new thing, a whole different vision. It’s a vision that emerges out of the story of Israel and the story of God—not just parts of that story, but the whole story. It’s a vision that touches some agreement with pieces of the two sides of the continuum, and yet blows them both up. It’s a picture of Jesus that is fully formed with the colors of Jesus’ own culture, place, and time. It’s a vision that can’t be simply appropriated into our existing categories. It’s a vision of Jesus that can change everything.
I got captured by this picture of Jesus while sitting in a seminary class years ago. There was no painting on the wall, but rather we looked at a picture of Jesus using the canvas of the whole Bible. Before that, I had always read the Scripture in a truncated way—a few Old Testament stories in VBS, memorizing a few verses in Romans, John 3:16 of course. But when I was exposed to this picture of Jesus, which, like his self-portrait on the Emmaus Road, covered everything from Moses to the prophets—the whole story—I could not turn away. I could not go back to the continuum. I’ve been preaching this vision for years—you’ve been hearing bits and pieces of it— and when I came here I discovered that my colleague, Joe, had been seeing that picture as well.
So we want to share with you this portrait of Jesus over the next several weeks. I wish I could say I was a complete expert on Jesus, but that would imply that I had it all figured out, and that would put me right back on the continuum. This portrait of Jesus is like a great piece of art–you don’t get it all at once. It takes time, it takes study, and every time you look at it you see something new.
We want to show you this picture in a couple of ways. We’ll be preaching this series on Sunday mornings, where we’ll look at aspects of the portrait in a systematic way. Next week we’ll look at the kaleidoscope of Jesus’ first century world and the setting of the story. As he rides in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, two great waves come crashing together—the power of Rome and the hope of Israel, and yet Jesus transcends them both. We’ll talk about the relationship between Jesus and God, Jesus as the King, Jesus’ mission, the Temple, his battle with evil, and what the cross really means. Then, during Lent, we’ll open a fresh canvas on the future as we look at heaven, the second coming of Jesus, and the promise of resurrection.
This sermon series is an important one because if we can begin to embrace this fully biblical and vision of Jesus, I believe we will begin to transcend the gridlock that characterizes so many of our churches and culture and engage in a fresh and renewed energy to join Jesus in his kingdom mission. Jesus changes everything—and that change starts with us.
I also want to invite you to go deeper in this study. There are two classes starting this week that will help you as you study this portrait of Jesus. Our Bible survey class, which begins tonight at 6:30PM, will give you the grand sweep of the story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. You don’t have to be a Bible student or scholar (in fact, preferably not!). Understanding how the story fits together is foundational to understanding Jesus. And then Wednesdays at 6:30, also beginning this week, Joe and I will be teaching the course “Simply Jesus,” where we’ll expand on the themes we’re preaching in the series and have a chance to wrestle together with questions. Books and signups are available in the Great Room.
I love my old memories of that little church in Tunnelton, and that painting of Jesus knocking. Now I know that when you let him in, nothing will ever be the same. I hope you’ll get that picture, too.
Sources:
Long, Thomas. Preaching from Memory to Hope. Westminster John Knox, 2009.
McClaren, Brian. A Generous Orthodoxy. Zondervan, 2006.
Wright, N.T. Simply Jesus. HarperOne, 2011.
