Why is Jesus so Important?
Introduction
This pamphlet is about a man who lived over 2,000 years ago and has changed the way many of us see life in a radical way. A man whose vision of what it means to be a human being is so radical that we still haven’t managed to live as he suggests, even though we keep trying! And it’s a vision that’s more needed today than at almost any other time in human history. There are few individuals who have had such a long and profound influence on so many people. This man’s name is Jesus (or Jeshua, if you want to be perfectly accurate.) But a lot of people still wonder: what can we learn from someone who lived over 2000 years ago? What can he possibly teach us? And do we have to believe all the miraculous stuff as well?
– First we’ll set the context. We need to know why he chose to do what he did and teach what he did. So, we’ll talk a little about life in the first century of the Common Era in the occupied territory of Palestine, which is important to understand what this Jesus was proposing.
– What we know about him comes from what people have written about him. So, we’ll talk a little about what and how people wrote in those days, just so that we don’t expect critical writing like we do today.
– Then we’ll talk a bit about what we know with a reasonable degree of certainty about who he was and what he taught.
– We’ll try to address some of the more difficult questions about this material: why did some writers insist Jesus was born of a virgin? What do we do with all the miracle stories? What can we make of the resurrection?
– At the end, we’ll spend a bit of time wondering why this all matters today.
In the end, all I can give you is my best assessment of who Jesus was and why he matters. You’ll have to do the hard work of figuring it out for yourself. What matters and what doesn’t. Whatever you do, and however you do it, this is important stuff. Because what we think the human race is all about really matters.
Some context for our search for Jesus
Before we look for Jesus, we need to have a little bit of background on what was happening in that part of the world around the first century of the Common Era (CE). We focus our attention on what we know today as part of the Middle East – the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. We zoom in to what we now know as Israel, and we focus on a few key points: the long and rich tradition of the Jewish people; the Roman occupation of that whole territory; and the ways in which the Jewish religious authorities tried to accommodate to being occupied, and what all that must have meant to Jesus.
The rich Jewish tradition
There’s something unique about the history of the Jews, something that we need to cherish. When you compare their culture with the big civilizations around them over the centuries, there was always something different and special.
This is a culture which, early on, recognized a single god with whom they decided they had a Covenant1to which they had to be faithful. After spending a long time as a nomadic people escaping slavery under the Egyptians (which escape they attribute to Moses), they decided they needed clear rules of conduct to be a thriving culture. They created the Ten Commandments, which tell them what they shouldn’t do if they wanted to be a growing and healthy community. They attributed these to their God. They also thought of ways to prevent some people from getting too wealthy, by insisting that, every seven times seven years – a Jubilee Year – they had to return anything they had acquired back to their original owner. This was all part of their understanding of their obligations under the Covenant with their God. Can you imagine? That stops people from getting rich! (Were they faithful to that? Well, not really: that’s a real tough one! But prophets – social commentators of the time, many of whom had a deep relationship with their God – would remind them all the time of what their life as a people faithful to the Covenant should look like.) At the heart of their deeply held beliefs was the need to care for the marginalized – the sick, the poor, the stranger, the orphan, the widow.
They designed their daily life around their Covenant: they had “purity laws” which kept them apart from other people; they observed daily family rituals; they were also the only culture at the time which declared one day a week as a day of rest – they called it “Sabbath.” They created a myth around this to enshrine it: God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh; thus, they should rest on the seventh day as well. Sabbath was one of the ways to resist the temptation of greed, by getting people to refuse any work on the Sabbath.
They were always a small civilization, surrounded by giants – the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and, in the time of Jesus, the Romans. So they were often invaded and conquered. They always tried to see what happened to them in light of their Covenant with God. They believed that, when things were bad, it was God’s way of reminding them that they were not being faithful, and when things went in their favour – some victory or other – it was God’s way of rewarding them for their faithfulness to the Covenant.
Throughout most of the history of this people, however, they were occupied by one powerful foreign power or another. They wrote wonderful poetry about longing to be free and at peace. They dreamt of the day when God would be in charge of the world and bring about peace and prosperity. In particular, they spoke of a “Messiah,” someone, sent by God, who would deliver them from the hands of the oppressor, and restore them to a life of safety and delight. Much of Jewish Scripture tells the story of this deep desire for the day when God would reign and there would be abundance.
The religious life of the Israelites revolved around the Temple – a magnificent building in Jerusalem, which contained priceless religious objects which reminded them always of the presence of God (whom they knew as YHWH, which means something like “I am who I am” – a brilliant understanding of the magnitude of God – but whom they always addressed as the LORD, because God’s proper name was too sacred to pronounce.)
The Temple was staffed with priests and scholars who kept the religious practices alive. At the heart of these practices was the sacrifice. (Almost every early culture believed that the only way to appease the gods or obtain some favour from them was through some form of sacrifice – mostly animals, but in some cultures this included captives and even children. This must seem horribly cruel, but, in the minds of these people, to stay on the good side of these powerful gods required drastic means.) Jews stuck to sacrificing animals an farm produce. One offered sacrifice to the LORD in order to have Him forgive one’s sins. One offered sacrifice to obtain a favour, or out of gratitude for some good event in one’s life. There were sacrifices for every need. The priests conducted these sacrifices very devoutly. Of course, these animals had to be paid for. You bought them at the Temple. But you couldn’t pay for them with money from the Roman empire because of the purity rules of the Jewish faith. There was a special currency for religious activities. That required money-changers, who made their living off having both kinds of currency and charging a small percentage for the transaction. (Remember all this: it’s going to be important for our understanding of Jesus!)
When the Romans invaded, the whole of Jewish religious life was in turmoil, and violence, repression, and oppression happened again. Into this world, Jesus was born.
It was not easy living under Roman rule
I bet that, in school, you’re taught just how wonderful the Roman Empire was… You probably have seen maps of the vast extent of this empire – all the way from Britain in the north-west to Spain in the south-west, to North Africa to the south, and all the way almost to Asia in the east. All this linked with all-weather roads, bridges, aqueducts, forts, ports, fleets of ships, monuments… and soldiers.
Ah! and Rome, the City of Light with its magnificent coliseum, its temples, its monuments, shops everywhere! And a very enlightened form of government; great art and poetry; great teachers. Truly a great civilization…
But at what cost? Like some civilizations we know today, the wealthy 1% lived off the backs of the abject poor, who comprised the 99%. And this empire didn’t just stay together through love and friendship! The only way the empire could control this vast territory, with its vastly differing cultures, was through fear and repression. Vast swaths of conquered people were forced to migrate to where they were needed for physical labour. They lived under terrible circumstances and longed for home.
Palestine was a wonderful conquest for the Roman empire! The soil was rich and the climate mild. Exotic fruit and vegetables could grow there. Rich Romans saw an opportunity to buy up the land, set up lavish villas, develop commercial agriculture and fisheries, ship the stuff back to Rome, where the wealthy were willing to pay high prices for these goods. Meanwhile the original farmers were expropriated, forced to eke their living on modest pieces of land they retained, paying high taxes to the Romans and often indebting themselves to the new landowners. And fishermen saw their catch dwindle as the Romans had developed commercial fishing fleets.
It wasn’t only the military and the transportation network that united the empire. It was held together by a state religion. The emperor was the “son of God,” born of the union of the god Apollo with a vestal virgin. He was also the “saviour of world,” because of all his conquests: saving the world from “barbarism” – anything that appeared unruly by ordered Roman standards. As such, he was worshipped throughout the empire. These are important dogmas to remember! The motto of the empire was “peace through victory.” War was the way to peace. Remember this too! It’s important for our story of Jesus.
Needless to say, the conquered Judean population sought freedom through any means possible: they dreamt about it; they wrote sacred literature on it; they rebelled for it. Equally needless to say, the Roman army ruthlessly put down any sign of revolt.
(If you’re the least bit aware of what is happening in the world today, with exploitation, and the rich getting extremely rich and the poor getting poorer, people in poor countries migrating to developed countries seeking a better life, then you might begin to see parallels to the world in which Jesus was born.)
What writings do we have about Jesus?
Now that we understand a bit about the political and religious context in that part of the Middle East in the 1st century CE, let’s see what we can learn about this Jesus.
First, we have to acknowledge that written material is scant!
Sure, we have what are called the “Four Gospels.” Typically, they are called, in the order in which they appear in your Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Surely, it’s all spelled out there! Isn’t it? If only it were that simple!
In this section, we’ll look at the challenges Biblical scholars have had trying to take an objective look at our sources. As you will soon find out, it’s not easy…
How come we know so little?
I don’t particularly want to feed your skepticism! But I need to share with you the hard truth about what we know – and don’t know – about Jesus.
For any of the ancient figures, like Julius Caesar or Plato, we rely on texts. For people like Plato the philosopher, it’s easy! His disciples wrote down what he said, and we have a pretty certain record of that. For Caesar, there were always historians writing about his various military conquests.
For Jesus, it’s different. We have only four accounts of his life! We don’t know the names of the authors of any of them (the names Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were added much later.) We don’t know where they were written, although we do know that each was written in vary different parts of the Roman Empire for very different audiences. We also don’t know exactly when they were written, though the best scholars think that “Mark” was written around 70 CE, “Matthew” and “Luke” written perhaps ten years later, and “John” around 90 CE.
Now that poses a bunch of problems! The earliest Gospel would have been written 40 years after Jesus’ death. Working class males did not live long lives. It is highly likely that, by the 70s, all of those who accompanied Jesus would have been dead, so none of the four authors ever encountered Jesus. These Gospels are not eyewitness accounts! Matters are much worse still: there were no written records of Jesus’ life (only about 10% of working class Jews were literate!) All that existed were a bunch of oral traditions. And these varied! Now, just imagine trying to remember who said what 40 years ago, if you have no written records! We can’t be dealing with very accurate accounts, no matter how well-intentioned the authors were. Three of the four Gospels agree to a significant degree with each other (scholars actually think that Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily for Mark). But John’s Gospel is different in tone, in what is reported, and in how Jesus is portrayed! Which one does one believe?
Another problem: the four Gospels are written in Greek. Jesus most certainly spoke Aramaic. What we read as words of Jesus would, at best, be translations, at worst, interpretations.
It gets worse. While we estimate that the texts were written in the last few decades of the first century CE, the first actual manuscripts we have with these texts date to the third century! Remember: there were no printing presses or photocopy machines in those days! If you wanted a copy of a book, you had to copy it yourself, or pay someone to copy it for you. Line by line… page by page… Tedious business… People who copy make mistakes. Sometimes people who copy change a few words, or forget some, or add some, for whatever reason. Maybe they were sloppy or lazy; maybe they didn’t agree with the text and wanted to “improve” it. Early manuscripts differ in many places. Most often it’s a minor change, but sometimes, it’s significant. In some places, scholars have realized that whole bits have been added to the original! Try to find your way through that mess!
Worse still! In the early Church, people often wrote other “gospels” claiming to originate with some eyewitness, but these were entirely created by someone who just wanted to paint a different picture of this Jesus. So there’s a Gospel of Peter, a Gospel of Thomas, even a Gospel of Judas, and many others. How seriously should we take them? Most have been discarded by church scholars as being inconsistent with what was considered “authentic” accounts of Jesus. Remains that there existed a wild variety of understandings in the early days of who and what Jesus was.
Why am I sharing this with you? Out of the necessity of being honest and authentic. None of this means we know – and can know – nothing about Jesus. Scholars have spent lifetimes putting together the most coherent and consistent picture possible of this man Jesus.
We’ll get to that now.
What do we know with reasonable certainty about Jesus?
Can we still say anything about Jesus with relative certainty? For sure! Let’s see if we can pull together in a simple fashion what most scholars consider indisputable. As you read these, I invite you to look at the world we currently live in, with its income inequalities, its food insecurity, its wars, its inhumanity towards so many, and ponder whether the life and teachings of Jesus might not provide a fresh approach to living our lives…
Jesus actually did exist: Let’s get this out of the way. Despite several books written to show that “Jesus” never existed but was an invention of some people, most scholars agree there was such a person, and he did and said pretty much what the authors claim.
He was probably born in Nazareth: Both Matthew and Luke go to great pains to have him born in Bethlehem, because they wanted to show conclusively that he came from the line of the beloved King David, but neither story survives critical study. (Moreover, Jesus is never called “Jesus of Bethlehem,” but always “Jesus of Nazareth.”)
We know nothing about Jesus’ childhood, but it is highly probable that he was raised in a religious home, that he knew his Jewish Scripture, and that he was well aware of the precarious situation of being Jewish in occupied Palestine. (Nazareth is a mere few kilometres away from Sephoris, which was razed by the Roman Legions a few years before Jesus’ birth to punish the Jews for a rebellion.) He was probably an itinerant preacher.
He was certainly Spirit-filled, and felt called to show his fellow Jews how to thrive under an oppressive regime. He knew his Scriptures well, and he knew that they contained important clues as to how to live faithful and rewarding lives under occupation.
There is no doubt that he was a charismatic teacher who attracted crowds of peasants, anxious about their tenuous condition. He used a technique called the “parable,” which was a way to force people out of their regular ways of thinking and to re-examine their popular beliefs. It was an oral technique that invited debate and questions and opinion-sharing (none of which ever gets captured in the Gospels themselves, of course.)
He intentionally gathered people around him to learn from him and to carry on his mission. Some were called “disciples” (students), and a few were called “apostles” (those called and sent out to carry on). Tradition has it that there were twelve apostles – all men. Research shows that there were also many women who were sent out to preach, and that women were an essential part of Jesus’ entourage.
He was very clear on how humans should live together in order to thrive. He noted that dominant cultures operated on three values: wealth, status, and power. He would replace wealth with distributive justice; status with humility, and power with compassion.
He was very critical of Temple Judaism. He thought that the religious authorities were doing too little for the disadvantaged, insisted on regulations that did not serve the people, and were too cozy with the Roman occupiers. He made this clear in his teaching and in his actions. Temple authorities soon wished to discredit or eliminate him.
He believed that peace came, not from victory, but from justice (distributive justice, to be specific: ensuring that everyone has what they need to thrive.) The Roman ideology states that peace was achievable only through victory (Julius Caesar is said to have said: “si vis pacem, para bellum” = if you want peace, prepare for war).
Jesus maintained a deep relationship with God, whom he considered unconditionally loving. So much so that he called God his “Abba,” his daddy. Traditional Jewish thinking was that God was just and merciful, but also wrathful when the people disobeyed the Covenant. Many sacred texts purport to show this wrathful God. Through his actions and his stories, Jesus, on the other hand, shows a God who is always loving.
Jesus’ view of illness was very different from that of his contemporaries. For them, illness was a sign of God’s displeasure, either with the ill person or one of their ancestors. People who were ill were often shunned by their communities because of the moral stain that they believed lay behind the illness. Jesus did not “cure,” but he “healed.” He let the ill person’s community know that the illness was not a moral punishment, and encouraged the community to surround the ill one with love and care. This did not please the Temple authorities, who held the traditional view, and believed that only they, through an appropriate sacrifice, could cure.
Through his own regular practice, Jesus showed us how to relate to God: retire to a quiet place; be still; listen; and align yourself with what you hear from that “still small Voice” within – which is God. Jesus believed everyone can have a direct relationship with God. This is in contrast to Temple religion which located God in the Holy of Holies within the Temple, accessible only by the High Priest. People accessed God through sacrifices performed by the Temple priests.
Jesus believed that we should live as if there was abundance, not scarcity. The world of commerce and industry always wants us to believe that we never have enough and that things we need are scarce, and we need to compete with each other for them. Through word, parable, and deed, Jesus constantly tried to show that, when we limit ourselves to what we need, and we share, there is always plenty for everyone.
Through many of his parables, Jesus showed us that God’s logic is not human logic. Humans think transactionally: I do this for you, what will you do for me? God treats people out of a logic of love: you are always welcomed the moment you come home, no questions asked.
Jesus’ key message was the “Kingdom of God” (or the Sovereignty of God, to avoid comparisons with Kings and their Kingdoms). He preached that the Sovereignty of God was within reach, if we showed compassion, humility, and justice. This would have upset the Roman authorities, for whom there was only one ruler – Caesar.
Jesus’ understanding of “leadership” was different from anyone else’s: it was “servant leadership.” When you lead, you serve others, not the other way around. This is a direct consequence of humility – one of the three characteristics of the Sovereignty of God.
Jesus constantly warns of the dangers of wealth and greed. One cannot serve two masters – money and God – he would say. We need to learn when we have “enough.”
While the details differ among the accounts, Jesus was executed by the Roman occupiers, goaded on by the Temple authorities, because he represented a clear threat to the status quo, which everyone wanted to preserve at all costs.
Something happened after Jesus’ death that is very hard to explain: his disciples and apostles, who were holed up in a safe house in Jerusalem because they were afraid for their lives, suddenly found the courage to start preaching, despite all the dangers. They spread Jesus’ message far and wide through the Roman empire, and all eventually were captured and executed by the state. The best word people found for what happened was to say that Jesus was “resurrected,” a new term which suggested a new state of being after death, in which he is, somehow, always present to everyone.
Difficult questions:
I hear you saying at this point: “This is all very good, but you’ve ignored all the troubling bits – Jesus’ birth of a virgin, miracles like walking on water or healing the blind, the ‘son of God,’ the resurrection, and the wonderful expression everyone’s heard: ‘Jesus died for our sins’! Aren’t these important? You can’t just sweep them under the carpet!”
You’re right. Let’s see what we can do with a few of these: we’ll look at the birth narrative, especially Luke’s; we’ll talk about the “son of God” claim; we’ll talk about miracles. Finally, we’ll deal with “resurrection,” and we’ll tackle the ‘Jesus died for our sins” bit.
The birth narratives
If you were raised in almost any kind of church, you would be familiar with the notorious Christmas pageants and the mandatory manger scene. You’ll remember the stable, the angels, the magi, the shepherds. It was all very cute and touching… and wrong!
There are two birth narratives – Matthew’s and Luke’s – and they are different. And they can’t be conflated.
Let’s call these stories what they are: theological fiction. Remember, just because they’re not factual doesn’t mean they’re not true! It means that the truth lies somewhere else than in the events presented! Both Luke and Matthew are trying to convince their respective readers of something.
For Matthew, who is writing for a Jewish community somewhere, what is important is that Jesus be seen as following in the footsteps of known heroes – Moses and King David. So Jesus must be born in Bethlehem because that was the home of the dynasty of David, and he had to escape from Egypt to return from it, because Moses came out of Egypt. The Magi, from the pagan east, add a fine touch and reminded the readers that the Queen of Sheba, a pagan, had travelled to Jerusalem to pay homage to King Solomon, another great Jewish hero. Thus, Jesus is to be known throughout the world, and not just to the Jews.
Luke was a Gentile, and his audience was primarily comprised of Gentiles. Their concerns were quite different and were more focused on the Roman empire. Luke’s main point – and it’s a courageous one! – was to point out that Jesus was the “son of God” through God’s Spirit impregnating Mary, rather than Caesar, who, it was claimed, was the son of the god Apollo. Moreover, contrary to the Roman religious myth, God does not appear to the wealthy in the temple, but to the poor in a stable. And the news is not shared through noble quarters, but given to the lowliest of lowly occupations – dirty shepherds! Luke’s story makes the point that God cares more about the poor and the marginalized than God does the wealthy.
You can see how it’s simply not possible to conflate the two stories: the angel appears to Mary in Luke, but to Joseph in Matthew; Luke has never heard of the Magi or the flight to Egypt, and Matthew never mentions angels appearing to shepherds. And on it goes.
Is Jesus the “son of God”?
Depends what you mean by that. If you mean it quite literally, i.e., that God somehow impregnated a woman with God’s “semen” to create a foetus which became Jesus, I think we can safely say that the answer is “no.”
If we speak metaphorically, then, not only is Jesus the son of God, but all of us are the sons and daughters of God!
If we speak politically, we have seen that the followers of Jesus deliberately chose the title “son of God” to counter the official Roman religious story which is that Caesar is the son of God. True followers of Jesus often refused to pay homage to Caesar at any of his monuments because they only paid homage to the real son of God, Jesus. (Many paid the price of that refusal with their lives.)
But the question is even more complex than that, and the early Christian writers wrestled with the nature of the relationship between Jesus and God. The earliest writer who spoke about Jesus was Paul, a Jew who converted to Jesus and became one of the most prolific preachers and creators of small communities of believers throughout the Roman world. He thought that Jesus became “son of God” at his resurrection. This did not appeal to the first Gospel writer, whom we call “Mark.” Mark thought that Jesus became “son of God” when he was baptized. Mark states that Jesus heard God’s voice say to him “You are my son, in whom I am well pleased.” This wasn’t good enough for the next two Gospel writers, whom we know as “Matthew” and “Luke”: they decided that Jesus was “son of God” from conception. Finally, ten years later, when “John” wrote his Gospel, he had Jesus be the son of God at the moment of creation. (This is what theological reflection does: we ponder a mystery, and we go deeper and deeper into it…)
At least we know this: God was in Jesus in a way that was probably unique: Jesus spent so much time in prayer that he thought he truly knew what God desired; he was able to speak with confidence about what he had learned from his prayer life with God. He felt close enough to God that he himself called God “Abba,” which in Aramaic means “daddy.”
There’s much more we could say about this topic, including the rich theology of the Trinity. I could go on! I won’t… That’s the subject of another book, for sure!
What do we do with the miracle stories?
Some people like to make the point that “God can do anything! So what’s wrong with miracles?”
There’s a lot wrong with miracles, if you take them literally. In the first instance, it assumes that God intervenes in the physical order of things. I know there are a lot of people for whom this is very important. Why else would people pray to God to heal this, fix that, solve this?
The truth is that science has shown us incontrovertibly that this universe is a closed energy system: no new source of energy can come in. And any intervention by God would imply new energy. It would also mean breaking the laws of physics. Arbitrarily and randomly. We believe that, somehow, God is responsible for this universe, but there are processes in this universe that are self-governing, and it would be a totally inappropriate move for God to intervene. (Does that mean that God is uninterested in, and incapable of affecting, this universe? Not at all. But there are very limited ways in which God can affect the course of evolution of this universe, the most significant one being “whispering” to us what our next best move might be. That’s already a lot! I spend some time on this matter in my pamphlet on “Providence.”))
So what do we do with the miracles? Well, in the first instance, we recognize that, in those days, a lot of people believed in miraculous things. In fact, it was seen as a sign of divine activity. People understood very little about how the universe worked, believed there were divine forces at work – for good and for evil – all over the place, and were prepared to accept any number of miraculous deeds.
Something does not need to be factual to be true. The question for us, each time we encounter a miracle story, is to ask ourselves: what is the truth that the author is trying to communicate with this miracle story?
What’s with the resurrection?
The Gospel writers all try to convince us of the reality of resurrection by talking about two things: the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus to his disciples. To our contemporary understanding, neither of these is very convincing.
Before we get to another explanation, let’s set a bit of background.
“Resurrection” is not a concept anywhere else in the Jewish Scriptures. For most of the sacred texts, the best that happens to humans when they die is that they go to sheol, a land of shadows where nothing really happens. The notion of an existence after death starts to appear when people start wondering how martyrs for the faith are rewarded: why would anyone die defending their faith if there is no reward after death? There began to appear the idea that God somehow rewarded those who died for their faith with some form of existence after death. (See the Book of Daniel in the Jewish Bible)
This divine reward became all the more important because it was believed that if you were condemned to death by the state, that was the end of any hope of an afterlife.
So, now to the concept of “resurrection.” In the Gospels, Jesus resuscitates a few human beings, but that is simply bringing them back to life. That’s not resurrection.
It would appear that, after Jesus’ death, something quite remarkable occurred. You may remember: no men accompanied Jesus to his execution. They were hiding in a safe house – the “upper room” – with the doors locked. They were terrified that the same fate would await them if they were found. Then, very little time later, they are out in the streets preaching; they travel the length and breadth of the Roman empire and they establish small groups of followers of Jesus. Within just a few decades, “Christianity” had spread far and wide. How was that even possible? What gave these men courage? What overcame their cowardice? What made them fearless? It certainly can’t be simply a memory of Jesus. Memories typically don’t have that kind of conversion power. By 70 CE, when the first Gospel was written, the conviction had formed that this reversal could be explained only if, somehow, Jesus was really present in each of their lives. They coined the term “resurrection” to point to this new state of being after death – an actual presence in all believers. And the only way the writers knew how to convey this unusual conclusion was to write in terms they thought the readers could relate to: the tomb in which Jesus was buried is empty, and Jesus is said to have appeared to a number of disciples.
Of course, theological reflection has grown since then in all sorts of interesting directions – we could spend a great deal of time on this as well! Suffice it to say that, from my personal point of view, I can understand the need for a new term to describe a new phenomenon: this unexpected courage and energy, deriving from the real presence of the resurrected Jesus in the lives of his followers.
What do we do with the notorious expression “Jesus died for our sins”?
Notorious indeed! In what ways could Jesus, back then, have died for my sins, today? And why would my sins be such that they would get a person killed?
We have to go back to the tenth century to figure out where this idea even came from. A wonderful preacher, St Anselm, had the idea of using elements of daily life which feudal peasants could grasp to explain why Jesus had to die. They understood only too well that kings had power over everyone. They also knew that to offend a king meant death. The common image of God in those days was that of an all-powerful heavenly king. To offend such a king meant certain death. The Bible tells us that Adam and Eve did just that, by disobeying God’s orders to not eat the fruit of a certain tree. God chased them out of the Garden of Eden, and humans began a life of brokenness, symbolized by the killing of Abel by his brother Cain. That disobedience streak, so the story goes, is in each one of us, and is called “original sin.” So we all deserve death, because we all sin.
But God is not only just. He is merciful. So, he decides to send his son to be the perfect sacrifice in our place. Jesus’ death in our place satisfies the need for divine justice, and Jesus is our “saviour.”
It’s hard to not caricature this theology: it’s wrong on so many counts. There is no factual Garden of Eden; there never was a first pair of humans, let alone a pair called Adam and Eve; there never was a single act of disobedience called eating the forbidden fruit; thus there is not such a thing as “original sin.” (I spend some time on this in a pamphlet entitled “Original Sin.”) God is not a King sitting on a throne, meting our reward and punishment; and God certainly does not need our murder to repay some affront. (Let me quickly add: while the stories around original sin are not factual, they have much to teach us. They certainly are profound reflections on our greatest gift – self-awareness, which is also our greatest liability – self-centredness. It makes sense to create stories to get us to pay attention to how easily we succumb to the temptation to look after ourselves at the expense of others: this is the history of the human race, isn’t it?)
So why did Jesus die? Some like to say “Jesus didn’t die for our sins; he died because of our sins.” In a way that’s true: he was executed because he was seen as a threat to the delicate balance of power between state and Temple, the result of humanity’s sinful inability to live in peace with compassion. Then, we’ve had two thousand years of pious reflection of the awfulness of this event, and its cosmic and historical implications. None of that reflection is wrong-headed: it’s just that it must remain grounded on the reality of a state execution for dissidence.
In closing…
I believe that Jesus remains relevant to us today. We live in a time when the commercial/industrial/military complex dominates our world, consumption is seen as the way to happiness, and the world sells us the myth that we live in scarcity and we need to compete to get what we need, and we always need more. Jesus shows us the lie of this view, and invites us to live a very different kind of life, where leaders serve, where compassion drives care for those less fortunate, and where there is more than enough for everyone if we are satisfied with “enough.” Yes, this is a difficult vision, but I continue to believe that it represents a more realistic way to live together than what the culture around us suggests. Maybe it’s high time we take Jesus’ vision seriously…
1 A Covenant is a contractual agreement, usually between someone with power and someone without.