Sermons

April 8, 2007
The Son of Man

THE SON OF MAN
a sermon by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From Matthew 8:18-20
Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side [of the Sea of Galilee]. A scribe then approached him and said, “Rabbi, I will follow wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”

2. From Mark 16:1-8
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you. So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (The oldest copies of Mark end here.)

3. From William Ellery Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” a sermon delivered May 5, 1819, at the First Independent Church of Baltimore, Maryland:
We do, then, with all earnestness, though without reproaching our brethren, protest against the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity. “To us,” as to the Apostle [Paul] and the primitive Christians, “there is one God, even the Father.” ... We are astonished that any man can read the New Testament and avoid the conviction that the Father alone is God... We challenge our opponents to adduce one passage in the New Testament where the word God means three persons, where it is not limited to one person, and where, unless turned from its usual sense by the connection, it does not mean the Father..

4. From Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, who was born a Jain:
I am a Muslim and a Hindu and a Christian and a Jew.

THE SERMON
Recently on the radio there was an author discussing how his book had been turned into a movie, and what he had learned about screen-writing, and how writing a screenplay is different from writing a novel. “When you write a screenplay,” he said, “you have to lay out the themes very succinctly, and make the action move along quickly. You drop the subplots. You take two or three characters and combine them into one. You may change scenes to make your point better. You may even have to change the ending.”
I was thinking about this as I was studying the Gospels in preparation for this sermon. For each of the Gospels, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, expresses a different point of view.
Mark is the shortest Gospel and was written first. It starts with the preaching of John the Baptist. It has the most miracles per square inch, but it has no birth story, no Sermon on the Mount, and the oldest copies of Mark end with no resurrection appearances.
Matthew and Luke tried to improve on Mark. They copied almost word-for-word from Mark, each adding a birth story – they contradict one another – each adding a version of the Sermon on the Mount, each adding differing resurrection appearances. Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ Jewishness and the fulfilment of the Law; Luke emphasizes Jesus’ concern for the poor.
John was the last Gospel to be written, and it is very different from the other three. John starts, not with the birth of Jesus, but with the creation of the world. In John, Jesus’ ministry is three years, but it was only one year long in Mark, Matthew and Luke. In Matthew, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world,” but in John he says, “I am the light of the world.” In John, and only in John, Jesus claims, “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the door,” “I am the gate,” and “I am the way, the truth and the life.” John’s Jesus does not speak in short pithy aphorisms, but in long philosophic monologues. John’s Jesus does not cure lepers. In Mark, Matthew and Luke, the “cleansing of the Temple” is at the end of Jesus’ ministry, and is the reason why he is arrested. In John it is at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and has nothing to do with his arrest. In the first three Gospels, the “Last Supper” is a Passover meal; but in John it is before Passover. In John, Jesus questions Pilate rather than the other way around. In John, Jesus does not seem to suffer on the cross; rather than crying out in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”, John’s Jesus says in a matter-of-fact way, “It is finished.” Jesus does not appear at the tomb in the first three Gospels (in Mark 16:6-7 the angel at the tomb says, “He is not here” and says to look for Jesus in Galilee), but in John, Jesus appears at the tomb to Mary Magdalene.
A fifth Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, appears to be as old as the other four, but it contains no nativity story, no resurrection, no miracles – only a collection of the sayings of Jesus (from the perspective of Gnostic or Docetic Christians).

The Gospels as “screenplays”:
Why are these Gospels so different from one another? I think that the Gospel writers, apparently none of whom were eyewitnesses, were writing “screenplays,” not biographies. They were each trying to be concise, and each Gospel writer had a somewhat different theological point to make. So the Gospel writers did what good writers do – they did their research and consulted the best sources they had (Luke 1:1-4). And then they took poetic license; they arranged scenes, created new scenes, created dialogue, conflated characters, changed the timing of events – in order to make certain points.
There’s nothing wrong with this. It is good writing. They were not writing history – they were writing theology in story form. The Gospels are not meant to be taken completely literally – that’s a purely modern way of looking at them. (Reading the Bible literally, considering it to be without error, was unknown before 1600 and rare before the 19th century.)
Consider Moby Dick. Herman Melville’s epic novel has been made into film four times – a 1926 silent movie (The Sea Beast) starring John Barrymore; a 1956 film with Gregory Peck; a 1978 film with Jack Aranson; and a 1998 TV movie starring Patrick Stewart. Each told the story somewhat differently. None of the screen adaptations were exactly the same as the original book.
In the same way, no Gospel about Jesus is exactly the same as the actual life of Jesus. Each Gospel is an adaptation with a point-of-view. Each gives a different perspective.
If we had only one Gospel, we would think that we knew the whole story. But since we have four somewhat contradictory Gospels in the Bible, plus a little from Paul, plus the traditions and doctrines of the various churches, plus a few extra-biblical sources like the Gospel of Thomas, we know that we do not have a complete picture. We have points-of-view. And we don’t have as much as a grocery list written by Jesus himself. We have some good sources, and some good scholarly insight, and the witness of faith, and a lot of debate. So we do the best we can, and we make our best judgments as individuals.

Of what can we be certain?
Human knowledge is fallible; it is limited. No Scripture, no book, no pope, no church, no ecclesiastical bureaucracy, no scholar, no preacher has the whole truth. Even if the Bible was infallible or “inerrant”, as some say, our interpretation would not be infallible.
So here is what I believe: First, I am certain that Jesus existed. Some try to deny his existence. But Jesus is not the kind of person you would invent if you were trying to fabricate a religion. If you were trying to make something up, you would pick a better hero. Jesus was a nobody from a nowhere town in an insignificant part of the Roman Empire. He didn’t slay wild beasts like Mithras; he didn’t perform heroic feats like Hercules or Achilles.
No, he was just a carpenter who preached for a short time in an obscure place and was put to death as a common criminal. That’s not the kind of person you invent. If you are going to invent someone you invent a hero on a white horse. So I believe he was real.
Of course there are miracle stories about Jesus, just as there were miracle stories about other real people like Pythagoras (who had a magic arrow he could fly around the world on), Alexander the Great (the son of a god), Julius Caesar (who became a god), Augustus (the son of the god Caesar) and Laozi (whose mother was made pregnant by a shooting star).
People invented miracle stories back then. That’s the way they thought.
So I believe that Jesus of history is different than the Christ of Church dogma. It seems clear that Jesus grew up in Nazareth in Galilee, although we must be less certain about where he was born – the stories in Matthew and Luke that put his birth in Bethlehem are contradictory, and seem to have been invented in order to make it appear that prophecy was fulfilled.
He was a Jew, a Jewish reformer, and he critiqued Judaism as an insider, just as the prophets of old had done. He was called “rabbi.” He never heard of Christianity and he never met any Christians. Christianity is a religion about Jesus; the religion of Jesus is Judaism.
He was a “holy man,” or a “spirit person,” one of those people in history who had an experiential relationship with the divine, an experience of God. He had a reputation as a healer.
He was a persuasive preacher, a teacher of wisdom. He taught in parables and memorable short sayings we call aphorisms. His language was metaphorical and poetic. He often answered a question with another question. He was clearly exceptionally intelligent.
He was a social prophet, like the prophets of ancient Israel. He criticized the elites of his time. He believed that God blesses the poor, the gentle, and the peacemakers. He believed that in the kingdom of God the poor and the outcasts will have a special place of honor, that the first will be last and the last will be first. He believed that a rich person had as much chance of getting into God’s kingdom as a camel has going through the eye of a needle.
His wisdom was subversive of the accepted wisdom, and subversive of the established order. He was accused of being a drunkard and a glutton and a friend of sinners. He violated the purity laws of his time and place, hanging out with impure people such as women, lepers, the chronically ill, eunuchs, the poor, and worst of all, tax collectors. He challenged the dominant paradigm of his day, and preached instead the politics of compassion.
Jesus was not a fundamentalist Christian (and not a Christian at all). Look, for instance, at Jesus’ “family values.” He never preached against homosexuality, but he said, “Judge not and you will not be judged.”. What then, to Jesus, was a “traditional family” with “traditional family values”? His friends Mary and Martha were sisters who lived together with their brother Lazarus. Peter lived in an extended family that included his mother-in-law (Matt. 8:14). Jesus healed the daughter of a single mother in Matthew 15. Jesus didn’t denounce the Samaritan woman who had five husbands, and was living with another man who was not her husband (John 4). And he didn’t condemn the Roman centurion in Matthew 8:5-13 who lived with his special male servant. So where is the “Leave it to Beaver” family, that icon of the Religious Right, in all this? When Jesus’ mother and brothers wanted to speak with Jesus he turned his back on his family, and told his followers, “You are my mother and brothers” (Matthew 12:46-50). When he encountered a woman who was about to be stoned for adultery, he told the crowd, “He who is without sin may cast the first stone.”
The fundamentalists are biblical literalists, but Jesus was not. He broke the Bible’s Sabbath laws. And he often would quote from the Bible saying, “You have heard it said,” and then he would give a new interpretation saying, “But I say to you...”

Son of God or “son of man”?
We do not know for certain whether he considered himself to be the Messiah, the human being anointed by God to restore Israel and bring about the end of history. The claims of his messiahship were certainly made by his followers in the decades after his death, but did Jesus himself make such claims? I don’t know. I prefer to call him “rabbi,” teacher.
Still, even if he claimed to be the Messiah – a man anointed by God – that is a big difference than claiming to be God. I am absolutely convinced that Jesus did not consider himself to be God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. The word “Trinity” does not appear anywhere in the Bible, and that doctrine isn’t explained anywhere in the Bible. Jesus did not pray, “Dear Me, who art both here and in heaven, hallowed be my name; my kingdom come, my will be done,” but he prayed to God. And if you try to put the Doctrine of the Trinity on his lips it just doesn’t work. He did not say, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of the Holy Trinity.” He never spoke of “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit,” and that Trinitarian phrase is not found anywhere in the Bible. The Trinity is fourth and fifth century dogma. Jesus never heard of it.
Although the New Testament sometimes calls him “Son of God,” that is different than “God the Son.” “Son of God” says he has a relationship to God. But the Trinitarian term, “God the Son,” which claims that Jesus is God, is not found anywhere in the Bible.
And Jesus seems to have preferred to call himself “the son of man,” which literally means, “a human being”or “a member of the human race.” It is used in the Psalms (8:4) in just that way – to refer to human beings: “What is man, that you are mindful of him, and the son of man, that you visit him?” In Ezekiel, “son of man” is used by God to refer to the prophet, to point out the greatness of God and the humble position of the prophet. So the fact that Jesus calls himself “the son of man” seems to be a statement that he is a mere mortal.

Jesus climbed the walls:
Of course, others will have their opinions, but the evidence that I see suggests that the followers of Jesus elevated him after his death, and when the Gospels were written forty to eighty years after Jesus died, they had already begun to turn him into a semi-divine figure. In later centuries the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon invented the Doctrine of the Trinity and turned Jesus into a fully divine “God the Son.”
The Rev. John Buehrens once preached a sermon called, “Jesus Climbed the Walls.” He recounted that in some of the earliest pictures we have of Jesus, in the catacombs under Rome, Jesus is painted with his feet on the floor. Later, at the end of the Western Roman Empire, Jesus was painted on the wall with his feet just above the altar. In the “Middle Ages” he was painted high on the wall. And finally, in the Renaissance, he was painted on the ceiling.
Why did Jesus climb the wall? It is because the further away we got in time from Jesus, the more the church turned him into a divine being. But when you turn him into a god, we can’t emulate him. We can’t be like him, because we can’t be like a god. When you turn him into a god you remove him from the human race, you take him away from us.

Why did Jesus die as he did?
Why did Jesus die on the cross? He was killed because he rocked the boat and upset the political powers of the Roman Empire and the religious views of the wealthy collaborators. He was crucified on the political charge that he was “king of the Jews.” I don’t think that he set out to die for the sins of the world, but I do believe that he died because he believed he had a calling from God, and it was more important to live in the way God expected of him, than it was to live in safety and security. He risked his life for his love of God and truth, and he paid the price.
Yes, I am certain that on that first Easter, Jesus’ followers experienced his continuing presence among them. His followers said that he “had been raised,” (Matt. 28:6, Mark 16:6, Luke 24:6, Romans 1:4) not that he raised himself. Only God could raise him – another suggestion that Jesus’ followers had not yet turned him into a god.
The first account of Easter, from Paul (1 Cor. 15:3-8, written around 55 C.E.), does not mention the empty tomb. Mark, writing next, adds the story of the empty tomb, but the oldest copies of Mark have no resurrection appearances (Mark 16:9-20 was not part of the original). Matthew and Luke, writing later, add resurrection appearances. And John, the last, has Jesus appear at the tomb and walk through walls. Like a “fish story,” the stories grow more fantastic the farther they get from the time of Jesus. Yet they are based, I believe, on a real experience.
As I have related before, my mother experienced my father’s continuing experience after he was dead. I don’t know exactly what that vision was, but I don’t dismiss it. As my mother said, “Don’t think I’m crazy, because this really happened to me. I saw your father and I wasn’t dreaming.” What do such experiences mean? I don’t know, but they are the stuff of faith.
Just the same, I am more inspired by the life of Jesus than by his death. I believe that if we lived as he taught, the world would be a better place. And so I call myself a Christian, some-one who tries to follow Jesus. In the Unitarian tradition, I see Jesus as a spirit-filled human being. I do not deny the divinity of Jesus, because I do not deny the divinity in any person. I do not limit myself to a narrow doctrine, but I appreciate what Mahatma Gandhi said: “I am a Muslim and a Hindu and a Christian and a Jew.” What a world this could be if we could all come to a similar outlook! What a world it could be if we lived like Jesus, like Francis of Assisi, like the Buddha, like Gandhi, like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, and the Dalai Lama. There have been many Christs, all human. They give us something to aspire to. They show us the way, the truth and the life.