WHO DO YOU SAY I AM? - for Sunday 28 June 2015 Jesus asked his disciples, Who do you say I am? This is the question I put to myself this morning and I d like to share with you my answer. In doing so, I want to be true to myself and I want to be honest before you as a people for whom I have a great love and in whom I can place my trust, even though you might not agree with all aspects of my answer. I stress that my answer to Jesus question simply comes from the point I have reached on my journey. You might be at a different point and I respect that and certainly don t assert that my answer is the right one. It was interesting to hear the children s answers to Jesus s question.. What has formed their pictures of Jesus? I guess they have listed to the gospel stories and picked up the emphasis given to Jesus in our church services. In attempting to put forward my answer to Jesus question, I see it as an opportunity to crystallise my thinking from a lot of reading I have done particularly over the past 20 years or so, reading which has not followed what we regard as the Church s traditional line of thinking and belief. This reading has been more directed towards trying to discover the historical Jesus, rather than the Jesus of the gospels. I must make clear that since Albert Schweitzer s book The Quest for the Historical Jesus 100 years ago, many scholars have pursued this theme and there is no complete agreement about the historical Jesus, just many likelys and probablys. Before I go any further, I d like to clarify that distinction between the historical Jesus and Jesus of the gospels. I can no longer believe that the gospels are divine writings. They were written in the last third of the first century and as such, they are really Christian communities memories of Jesus life rather than an historical account of his life. As Marcus Borg says, The gospels are not God s stories of Jesus, but early Christianity s story of Jesus. They tell us not what God says, but what our spiritual ancestors said. The gospels were written for a different purpose which I will explain later. Two scholars who have had a strong influence on my thinking are Marcus Borg and Reza Aslan. Marcus Borg, who died in January this year, was Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon University for 29 years and author of many books and Reza Aslan is an Iranian born American who is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, member of the American Academy of Religions and the Society of Biblical Literature. He is the author of the book Zealot which Evelyn drew to our attention a few weeks ago. In their different ways, they both draw a distinction between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the gospels. Borg talks of a pre- Easter Jesus and a post- Easter Jesus. Aslan talks of a pre- 70AD Jesus and a post- 70AD Jesus. Let me explain. During Jesus life, the Jewish homeland was ruled by the Romans and they had held that control since 63 BC. Prior to that time, there had been about 100 years of Jewish independence. It was Roman policy to appoint
local governors over lands they controlled and so it was that Herod the Great was made governor and King of the Jews in 37 BC. He was part Jewish and part Idumean and soon after taking over, he killed many of the traditional Jewish aristocracy and even members of his own family, including three sons and his wife. To maintain his position of power, he had to please Rome and eliminate his own enemies and part of pleasing Rome was to collect and pay to Rome a large sum of annual tribute. Another feature of the domination system under which Jews of Jesus day lived were the wealthy priestly class who controlled the worship of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Chief Priest was appointed by Rome and he too could only stay in office if he continued to please Rome which meant collecting and paying tribute to Rome also and keeping domestic order. Thus it was a two- fold domination system that operated during Jesus lifetime and many Jews didn t like seeing Jerusalem and its Temple collaborating with the foreign Roman masters. When Herod the Great died in 4BC, a revolt broke out in Galilee and Roman soldiers were sent to re- conquer the town of Sepphoris and they sold many survivors into slavery. Rome decided to divide Herod s kingdom into three parts, each to be governed by one of his sons and Herod Antipas became the governor of Galilee and ruled it in much the same way as his father had. He re- built the town of Sepphoris and built a new town on the western side of the Sea of Galilee which he called Tiberias in honour of the Roman emperor and in doing so changed the culture of Galilee somewhat. His activities also put a heavy financial burden on the people of Galilee who were largely peasant agricultural workers and they didn t like it. There was therefore a strong under- current of anti- Roman feeling in Galilee. Back in 5AD, Judas the Galilean had opposed a census called by Qurinius as a sign of what he regarded as the slavery of the Jews to Rome. He was capture and killed by the Romans. Jesus, as a man from Galilee, would have known the story of Judas the Galilean and the degree of hostility to Roman rule which existed in Galilee. The Jewish people reacted to the domination system in different ways. Some, especially the wealthy citizens, accepted it and made the best of it as they could. Some used violent resistance with the result that their sporadic revolts were always put down by the might of Roman military. Jesus was among those who advocated active non- violent resistance and he challenged the domination system. Consider his entry into Jerusalem on what we celebrate as Palm Sunday. This was a deliberately staged act of defiance against the ruling domination system and it actually coincided in Jerusalem with the lavish parade of the arrival of extra Roman soldiers ready to guard the city as the crowds gathered for Passover. This was followed by his cleansing of the Temple and in describing the Temple as a den of thieves. He was actually accusing the Temple authorities of being robbers. They were the people helping to keep the Jewish people under the tight control of Rome. It is in this context that I see the historical Jesus, the pre- Easter Jesus, as a revolutionary a political revolutionary seeking to stand against the injustice of the domination system. It
was this stance that led to his death. His death was not for the sin of the world which has been a major tenet of the Church for too long. His death was the result of his defiance against the injustice of the domination system under which he lived. He was also a social and moral revolutionary whose mission was to show his people a new way of love which he referred to as the Kingdom of God. A way which would change people s behaviour towards one another. To appreciate how deeply this defiance of Roman rule ran, following Jesus death, the unrest continued and flared from time to time. A man called The Samaritan gathered his followers on top of Mt. Gerizim. Pontius Pilate sent soldiers to wipe them out for which he was recalled to Rome and subsequently sent into exile in Gaul. Then came a group of rebels known as the Sicarii (which means dagger carriers. They were led by Menahem, the grandson of Judas the Galilean, who opposed the wealthy priestly class as well as Roman rule. They murdered the High Priest and went on a reign of terror with their slogan No Lord but God. Menahem declared himself to be the Messiah and King of the Jews and in 73 AD, after retreating to Masada for seven years, the Sicarii were faced with an onslaught of Roman soldiers and decided to kill themselves as well as their women and children. Before that grizzly event, another rebel group of about 10,000 had gathered in Jerusalem under Simon of Girra who had also declared himself to be the Messiah and the King of the Jews. They were defeated by four Roman legions and the city of Jerusalem, along with the Temple, was totally destroyed in 70 AD. 70 AD then becomes the turning point for how the life of Jesus is depicted, bearing in mind that the bulk of the gospels were written after this date. The gospel writers, realising that outright opposition to Rome was to no avail, now had to present a Jesus who was not openly described as part of the underlying feeling of revolt against Rome but a Jesus who was more palatable to Rome. As an example, the first part of the 19 th chapter of John s gospel states that it was the Jews, not Rome who killed Jesus. It was Caiaphas who duped Pontius Pilate into it. Pontius Pilate is depicted as a rather weak- willed man who washes his hands of the decisions and yet a reading of historians around that time such as Josephus, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger all show him as a man who had no hesitation in putting Jews to death. Eventually the process of presenting a more palatable form of Christianity to Rome succeeded. This is when the idea of Jesus being the son of God and coming down to earth from heaven developed to mirror the birth stories of the great legendary rulers of the past. The Q document on which Mark s gospel is based and which is closer to Jesus time, has no Jesus Christ as the son of God, nor does the Gospel of Thomas which was presented as a collection of secret sayings of Jesus. Paul gives higher theological significance to Jesus and sees the divine in him. The three Synoptic gospels extended Paul s view and then John topped it off by seeing Jesus as the eternal Word in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.
Eventually, in the early fourth century AD, Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome, in my view the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity. Why? Firstly, because it forced people into a religious faith that was Christianity and secondly because Constantine then convened the Council of Nicaea in 323AD by calling together all the bishops to decide on the official tenets of the Church. Unfortunately, in my view, the outcomes of that meeting still guide our belief system in the 21 st century, 1800 years later. Look at the Nicene Creed, which to my horror we were invited to recite in our Easter Day service this year: it describes Jesus as very God of very God, being of the one substance with the Father At this Council meeting, there was disagreement about calling Jesus the son of God. One of the bishops named Arius, argued that Jesus was not divine, but simply a man and that if you believed in the full deity of Jesus, you would be implying that there are two Gods. What happened to Arius? He and his supporters were banished by Constantine and their teachings suppressed; in fact, Constantine had their writings burnt. This was an early indication that the Bishops were in control and would not tolerate views that were contrary to theirs. This still exists in the wider Church. So, to conclude, I come back to Jesus question to me Who do you say I am? My response is that he was a man who had had a very deep experience of God which was very apparent to those who came into contact with him. There was something extraordinary about his manner and his teaching; he brought new understanding and a new way of life. He was a man who had a social mission to bring in a new way of living, based on love a way which he described as the Kingdom of God. He was not only a social revolutionary; he was a political revolutionary who set himself against the injustice of the dominant system controlled by local governors and the wealthy priestly class who were all in the pockets of the Romans. That is the Jesus I am following, when I describe myself as a Jesus follower rather than a Christian, a term which in my view now carries too much of the flavour of the Church which has refused to be open to new thinking and ways of worship and keeps a strong hold on outworn thinking from a past age. I m finding it frustrating that so often words which reflect such out- dated thinking (e.g God and Jesus up there in heaven or Jesus as the Son of God) keep coming through in various ways in church services across the land. No wonder the Church is declining. Finally, a quote from Reza Aslan, The modern church has completely subsumed the Jesus of history because of the Christ of Paul s creation. The message of the revolutionary zealot, the magnetic preacher who denied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist, who challenged Roman occupation, has been completely lost to history. That is a shame, because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth Jesus the man- is every bit as compelling, charismatic and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.