(Based on
Mark 15:33-37 and Mark 10:17-22)
What if someone from the great beyond were to appear
before us this day to tell us that Jesus of Nazareth was not divine? What if
that heavenly being were to tell us that Jesus was a human in every sense of
that word? If that message turned out to be true, what would that do to your
faith? What would it do to your relationship with Jesus? What would it do to
your life and how you lived it?
Most Christians, assuming we were born sometime after the
Council at Nicaea in 325 AD, were taught to believe that Jesus and God are one
and the same, two forms of the same essential Reality. The great council of
Bishops that gathered in Nicaea, 300 years after Jesus left the planet, tried
to articulate and systemize the tricky matter of who Jesus was and how,
exactly, he was related to and connected to God. Let’s give a listen to just
how “clear” they made it:
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of
heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord,
Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all
worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten not made,
being of one substance with the Father…who for us men and our salvation, came
down from heaven…and was made man.”
Are you with me? You tracking with all this? Any
questions, or does the Nicaean Creed pretty much clear it all up for you?
The whole reason these bishops decided to get together
was because of this outside-the-box thinker, a disciple named Arius, who
running around the Middle East between the years 250 and 336. (Remember Nicaea
was in 325.) And Arius was teaching that while Jesus was the messiah, he wasn’t God. Arias saw Jesus as separate
from God, a distinct being who was created by God but was not God. Arius didn’t
really like the way John’s Gospel had put Jesus with God from the beginning of
time. In the very first chapter of John, we find, “In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God. He was with God from the
very beginning.” It goes onto say that “The Word became flesh and dwelled among
us…” Jesus, as the Nicaean bishops took it, was “the Word.”
Well, like so many human arguments about God, things got
ugly between the bishops at Nicaea and our independently-minded disciple Arius.
These theological opinions seemed incompatible, and something had to give. So
right after the Nicaean Council in 325, Arius was arrested and condemned as a
heretic, all because he didn’t like the idea of Jesus being divine. He was
thrown in jail in 325 and there he remained for ten years, until another
council, that met in Tyre, exonerated him. But then, shortly after that Arias
died, another council met and condemned Arius all over again, and this time
they anathemised him – I LOVE that word! Anathemised! It means to declare
something “dedicated to evil and thus accursed!”
So, I ask you again, if someone trustworthy and reliable
came to us right here and now and told us definitively that Jesus was not
divine but was fully and totally human, would it make any difference to you?
Would you want to kill someone, start a war, or perhaps anathemise the
messenger? The question of whether Jesus was divine certainly seemed to make a
huge difference to some people back in third and fourth centuries after Jesus.
And in many ways, people have been arguing about this since the time Jesus walked
the earth, and we’re still arguing about it today.
A lot ill-informed Christians think that if you are going
to call yourself a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, then you have no choice but
to believe he was divine. I can tell you that that isn’t true; it never has
been true. There have been flavors of dedicated Christians going all the way
back to the Ebionites in the first century after Jesus, who were fervent about
following Jesus, adamant about living out his teachings, but they did not
believe he was divine. And even today, there are many large and legitimate
groups of Christians, like Christian Scientists, who follow Jesus intensely - without
believing he was divine.
Let me tell you why some of these fervent and admirable
groups of Christians don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. Let’s imagine that
I wasn’t able to be here next Sunday and I asked you to preach in my place. How
many of you would do it…show of hands? Those of you who wouldn’t, why not? (Out
loud; this isn’t a rhetorical question.)
Ok, so some of you don’t feel qualified. Some of you
don’t think you have the necessary training or background or gifts. Some
others, it’s more the Austin Powers excuse… “Preaching’s just not my bag,
baby!” I understand that, because if a doctor at the hospital couldn’t be in
the OR tomorrow and asked me to fill in for her, just to do a little, light brain
procedure and a heart valve replacement, I wouldn’t do it either, for the same
reason some of you wouldn’t fill in for me here.
Now do you think I’m divine? Of course not, any more I
think that the doctor who called me is divine. But there is still a perceived
gap between us. Sometimes it’s a gap in training or education; sometimes it’s a
perceived gap in ability or experience, right. But the bigger the perceived
gap, the less likely it is that someone will step up to try to do what the
master did, right.
So with that in mind, let’s jump back into Jesus’ day.
You have been following him around for two or three years. You’ve eaten with
him, you’ve camped out under the stars with him, you’ve prayed and worshipped
with him, been there when he’s fed huge crowds and healed people who were sick
and lame. And then one day he says, “I can’t go to Ceasarea Philippi today. So
I need you to go. Tell them the stories you’ve heard me tell; feed those that
are hungry, heal those who are sick, and do all that you’ve seen me do.” So are
you going to go?
We’d all be scared and nervous, to say the least. But
would you be more apt to go or more reluctant to go if you were convinced that
Jesus was divine? If you were sure that Jesus were simply a human – just like
you - with no special powers abilities, wouldn’t that make you more apt to
believe that you could – with time and practice and a little help from your
friends – come to do what he did?
You see, the Ebionites, the Christian Scientists, and the
millions of other flavors of Christians world-wide who choose not to believe in
a divine Jesus have good reason for doing so. They take seriously – very
seriously – Jesus teaching in John 14:12, where he said, “Are you amazed by
these things I do? Truly I tell you, you will be able to do all that I have
been doing and even greater things than I have done.”
The argument of those who don’t see Jesus as divine is as
follows: if Jesus is divine, I have no chance of doing any of what he did. If
he is divine instead of human, there is no point in me even trying to follow
his example, for in my humanness, I am doomed to fail. If Jesus is divine, then
there is no way God could ever expect me to do the stuff Jesus did. I’m off the
hook. However, if Jesus is human and only does the things he does because God’s
spirit is in him in the same way that God’s spirit is in me, then maybe I
actually CAN do the things he did. If Jesus is human, then God can expect me to imitate the works of
Jesus. I think this is why Buddha and Muhammad and Gandhi refused to allow
their followers to call them divine. They didn’t want to let them off the hook.
So I’m hoping you can see that the historical and
theological argument that took place between Arius and the Nicaean Bishops was
a pretty darned important one. There was a lot at stake there. And I’m not sure
the Nicaeans got it right, but I am pretty sure that if they’d been able to see
the kind of Christianity that resulted from their decision to declare Jesus
fully divine, they might have wanted to reconsider their declaration.
Look around. Jesus said over and over again that
following him involved giving away much if not all of what we have, financially
and materially. Do you see many Christians doing that? Jesus told us over and
over again that violence and taking up arms is not what God wants us to do. I
heard a report this week that showed that the most heavily armed nations, the
ones with the biggest stockpiles of weaponry of every size and kind, are the
ones with the highest percentages of Christians in their populations and in
their leadership. Jesus told us that God didn’t dwell in temples made by human
hands. So why is it that Christian churches spend an average of 85-95% of our
annual budgets on maintaining our own buildings and less than 5% feeding the
poor and hungry?
The trouble with a divine Jesus is that his followers don’t
even bother trying to follow him. The problem with a divine Jesus is that those
who bear his name focus more on worshipping him in his divinity than on
following him on his human path. Take a look at the front of your bulletin
today. You’ll see a picture of people actually following Jesus back in the day,
doing the very things he did. Beneath the picture is the following quotation
from Richard Rohr, which says much better than I have the trouble with a divine
Jesus:
“We worshipped Jesus instead of following him on his same path.
We made Jesus into a mere religion
instead of a journey toward union with God and everything else. This shift made us into a religion of belonging and believing instead of a
religion of transformation.”
And the second quotation
comes from Robin Meyers:
“Consider
this: there is not a single word in Jesus’ Sermon on the
Mount about what to believe; only words about what we should do.
Yet just three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the
official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about
what Christians should do, only words about what to believe.”
Mount about what to believe; only words about what we should do.
Yet just three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the
official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about
what Christians should do, only words about what to believe.”
Folks, I don’t know if Jesus is merely human, divine, or
some mysterious combination of both. But I do what has happened to the vast
majority of his followers since the Council of Nicaea almost 1700 years ago.
Little by little, we’ve done less and less of the things Jesus did, and more
and more of very things he warned against. And I can’t help but wonder if at
least part of the reason for this huge gap between the actions of Jesus and the
actions of his followers is that we’ve become mere admirers of his divinity instead
of genuine followers of his path.
I’m guessing that if Jesus were
given the choice between us worshipping him or following his teachings, he’d
probably prefer that we follow his teachings.
“Good teacher,” the man asked him…Jesus replied, ‘Why
do you call me good…God alone is good.” Amen.
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