Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
Jesus: the Message or the Messenger?
February 11, 2015
“If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true” (John 5:31).“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6)
I think many of
us are struck by the contrast between these two statements on the lips of Jesus
as portrayed in John’s Gospel: did Jesus teach about himself or didn’t he? The contradiction is all the more sharp when
we realize that the earliest Gospel, Mark, says that the message of Jesus was
not about himself or his role, but about something else: “ Now
after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of
God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the reign of God
has come near; change your way of thinking, and trust in the good news!’” (Mark
1:14-15). And when Jesus calls people,
he asks them to “follow” him rather than sign on to a set of claims about
Jesus.
Buddhism makes
a distinction between devotional practice and transformational practice,
between affirming allegiance to a teacher and agreement on the teachings on the
one side, and pursuing those values and principles in acts and exercises on the
other. The distinction, I think,
applies also to Christianity and helps us understand the dynamic interplay
between what scholars call the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.
The historical
Jesus’s primary message was about experiencing God and letting that experience
help us have compassion for others.
Such love of God and love of neighbor, when pursued consistently, is
revolutionary in many ways, and challenged the powers of Jesus’s religion and
occupied homeland. It got him crucified
by the Roman Imperium.
The experience
of his followers after his death—what they called his bodily reappearance and
coming forth from the dead—brought them to rephrase how they understood his
teachings and what he had accomplished.
The person of Christ became much more central in these formulations
than in his original teachings, and many of these were placed back onto his lips
by third or fourth generation disciples. By the Fourth Century, the discussion was all about Christology, and we get the Creeds.
Marshall
McCluhan famously said that the medium is the message. In the formation of Christian faith, in the
growth of understanding and reflective meditation on what Marcus Borg called
the “Post-Easter Jesus,” Jesus the messenger and medium of teaching becomes
Christ the Message and Mediator. Devotional
attachment to the person of Christ as portrayed in preaching and the scripture
replaced the transformational practice of following his original teachings,
particularly as they applied to society, as the center of experience of the
Christian community.
One of the
reasons we recite the Creed and also read and preach the original stories about
Jesus in Scripture each week is to remind us that it takes both devotion and transformative
practice to connect us with Jesus. It takes both to bring us—as individuals
and in our common life—into closer communion with God.
Grace and
Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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