The Risen Christ As a Trans-historical Protean Reality

5 Lent   B          March 25, 2012     

Jer. 31:31-34      Ps. 51:11-16        

Heb. 5:1-10        John 12:20-33     

 Lectionary Link

  The writer of the Gospel of John records an agriculture metaphor from the mouth of Jesus is our Gospel reading today.  “Unless a seed of wheat dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.”

  If I were to expand that metaphor to understand the various Christian social realities that have come into social expression during the last 2000 years, I might say that the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a seed has become an entire forest of trees.  The one acorn of the life of Jesus that developed within the community of Judaism has now become a great forest of community trees.

  We now live in an Anglican/Episcopal tree of Christianity with many branches that exists in a forest of other trees all claiming one acorn or seed person as the origin and inspiration of our corporate life together.  That there are different kinds of Christian trees in this great forest is seen as a scandal of division to some, but to others the diversity of trees has to do with the different kinds of success of the message of the Gospel in different times, different places with different people.  Should we be surprised that from one acorn an entire forest of trees can arise?  Should we be surprised that from one genius in human history, the genius of Jesus Christ, that an entire forest of Christian communities has developed?  For people who want a forced unity of a mono-lingual Christianity, a world-wide Christian Empire, the great forest of Christian diversity is scandalous division.  But for those who attribute the success of Christianity to the ability to become diverse expressions in different places, such people see this diversity as a major reason for the success of the Christian Gospel.

  The Gospel of John is written long after the life of Jesus of Nazareth but it uses narrative teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to teach the theological practice of an established Christian community.  The writer of the Gospel is trying to weave together the relationship of what had already happened within the community of beloved disciple with the oral tradition of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  The writer is trying to answer this question.  How did the fame of Jesus of Nazareth extend way beyond Jerusalem, Galilee and the Jewish Community?  The writer of John’s Gospel is also actually writing you and me into the Gospel.  How so?  The Gospel declares Jesus of Nazareth to be identified with the Word of God.  And so Word of God is a Person who speaks the oral words of language.  And yet the spoken words of Jesus had no infallible technology of memory; oral tradition is not very exact when compared with our recording technologies of today.  The writer of John’s Gospel used written words of language as a significant technology of memory. About the authors own words, the writer wrote: “These words are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”  This is where you and I enter into the Gospel of John because we are readers, and in reading the Gospel of John we help fulfill the Jeremian prediction of the laws of God being written or inscribed upon our hearts.

  The writer of John’s Gospel is tracing the fame or glory of Jesus.  How did this singular individual Jesus of Nazareth attain fame or glory beyond his time and place?  Why did this community of John continue to meet together in memory of Jesus even when Jerusalem had been sacked and leveled and when the followers of Jesus had scattered into many cities?  Ephesus is often believed to be the community of location for the writing of the Gospel of John, and it is far from Jerusalem.

  And so the Risen Christ was an always present oracle that spoke within the followers of Jesus, and the Risen Christ inspires a teaching in story form about the origins of his fame and glory.  The Greeks who came to Jerusalem saying, “We wish to see Jesus” are all of us who have come to manifest a curiosity about this person who is not really of our time and place.  We have been those who have said in various ways, “We wish to see Jesus…we wish to wonder about his relevance to our lives….we wish to share the relevance of his life to others.” 

  And so the writer of John’s Gospel is reflecting upon the origin of the fame and glory of Christ that was significant six to nine decades after Jesus was no longer present to see and touch.  How indeed can people have this trans historical experience and presume to know a person who is no longer present to sight and touch and face to face questioning?

  What we can say about Jesus of Nazareth in his appearances in the lives of people after he lived, is that Jesus is perhaps the most protean personality of all history.  Proteus was the Greek god who could morph into any form in order to avoid having to predict the future.  The word protean has come to mean, “becoming all things to all people.”  Jesus as the Risen Christ has truly become protean; he has become available in all of the forms that the words which are written on our hearts can become.

  Jesus as the Risen Christ has died to the limitations of being a historical person located in the body of Jesus of Nazareth so that his message and law of love can now be written upon the hearts of everyone who wants to partake of this protean presence of the Risen Christ.  Can any of us deny the protean reality and fame of Jesus of Nazareth?

  If we deny this protean reality of the glory and fame of Christ, you and I are to be most pitied for being at this altar today to find the Risen Christ in the bread and the wine.  And if we are finding the protean presence of Christ in bread and wine, where else are we finding the loving presence of God so lovingly communicated to us in such individual and personal ways that we are drawn to respond and worship and say, Thank you, O God in Christ?

  You and I may not hear audible angelic voices declare about Jesus, “I have glorified the name of God and will continue to do so for ever” but the proof of history as redounding to the glory and fame of the protean Risen Christ is more significant proof than angelic voices from heaven.

  The writer of the Gospel of John wrote his community’s experience of the protean Risen Christ as originating in the life of  Jesus of Nazareth and in so doing, he wrote your experience of Christ and mine, and everyone’s experience of Jesus into this Gospel too.  Viva la difference!  Viva the protean manifestations of the Risen Christ.  God’s glory has been achieved even as the law of Christ’s love and presence has been written upon our heart.  And to this we can only say, “Thanks be to God!”  Amen.

Collecting Seeds or Growing Plants?

5 Lent   B          March 25, 2012     

Jer. 31:31-34      Ps. 51:11-16        

Heb. 5:1-10        John 12:20-33     

 Lectionary Link

  Several times in the Gospels, it is written that Jesus did not have honor in his own home, in his own time and in his own country.  And that is usually true of great innovators; they encounter great resistance in their own time and place.

  I have tried to use that same argument with my wife and children in the past—brilliant but misunderstood—and they tend to cite my cantankerousness rather than my brilliance.

  Another truth of history is that when we die, we become something other than what we were in our own time.  Why?  Because context changes everything.

  In their own contexts, Jesus and Paul did not get that exorcised over the common practice of slavery.  For many, many years, Americans did not get too exorcised over slavery or women’s rights; there was no context for a message of equal justice to be heard.  So contexts can indeed change drastically the meaning a person’s life and the meaning of their values.

  I believe that the New Testament books are proof of how contexts changed the meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  In short, after Jesus was gone, he became much better known than he ever was when he actually lived.  So, the fame of Jesus after he was gone superseded the fame that he had in his own time.  And the Gospel writings involve the attempt to connect his post-resurrection fame with the oral traditions of his actual life.   And we never really know how much of his actual life we are reading about or how much of the lives of his interpreters.  It is all mixed together and it is very hard or impossible to sort out.

  What we can observe historically is that a major shift in understanding Jesus occurred when Gentile followers of Jesus began to outnumber vastly the Jewish followers of Jesus.

  Since Jesus was a Jew with a message for Jews in his own time, how can the future Gentile context for Christianity be interpreted and seen in the life of Jesus?  If we understand this, we understand a major motivation for all of the New Testament writings.  If this were not the case, then Rabbis in synagogues today might be reading some of the New Testament writings as commentaries upon a particular messianic interpretation of Jesus.

  So the Gentile context changed the understanding of the significance of the life of Jesus Christ.  And we see that the writer of the Gospel of John understands this in writing close to the end of the first century and into the early second century about 6 -9 decades after Jesus.

    In John’s Gospel we have read about Greeks who came and wanted to see Jesus.  This occurs right after the account of the resurrection of Lazarus.  It is not surprising that Gentiles or that anyone would be interested in resurrection.  Resurrection is the El Dorado, the secret to eternal life.  Resurrection was the founding event of Christianity.  When the Greeks came to seek Jesus, the writer of the Gospel of John pens the discourse of Jesus about his glory or his ultimate fame.   And of course the ultimate fame of Jesus happened after he was gone.  The Gospel writer is trying to explain how the potentially famous Jesus became the actually famous risen Christ.

  And when one talks about potentiality one can use the metaphor of the seed.

  When someone invites you to their home to show you their gardening ability, they don’t take you into the garage and show you a massive supply of seeds that they have been keeping on the shelf.  They show you the results of the seeds; they show you the plants, the flowers and the trees.  They show you the plants that can reproduce many more seeds out of the one seed that was planted in the ground and died.    When one seed dies, it provides the next generation of life and many, many future generations of life.

  Why didn’t Jesus get left in the forgotten museum of history?  The purpose of Roman crucifixion was to make a person forgotten forever to the life of people.

  Jesus was lifted up on the Cross.  The Romans thought that by lifting Jesus up on the Cross, they could create a spectacle and so discourage any devotion to him.   On the cross the Romans lifted Jesus up to public ridicule; but when the seed of his body was planted in the ground, his resurrection gave birth to the Christ-life within the hearts of countless millions of people who came after him.

  The Roman and Gentile context that killed him, eventually was totally converted by him.   When we read the Gospel passion story, the writers seem to blame the Jews more for the death of Jesus, when it really was the Roman authorities who had all of the power.  This is an indication that by the time the Gospels were written, the Roman citizenry were the ones who were filling the ranks of the Christian communities.

  We come into an understanding of the phrase: Losing our lives to save them.   If a seed remains a seed forever, it has effectively lost its life.  So conserving is dynamically opposed to the nature of life.  We never make our potential actual, if we try to conserve a static state.  It is only through that continual loss of former states to gain future states that we can activate the dynamic gift and purpose of our lives.

  The message Jesus is very much in opposition to museum religion, where we try to hold things as static artifacts of the past, and we end up making our lives museum pieces that are alienated from the realities of our actual lives.

  So context changes everything.  Jesus, the Christ, became something else in the Gentile world than he was in his original Jewish context.  The New Testament writings, focus their interpretation on a suffering messiah in contrast to other interpreations of the messiah in the Jewish community and so the writings exist as a result of the split between Judaism and Christianity.  The New Testament chronicles the gradual shift of seeing Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew amongst Jews, to seeing the risen Christ as a Son of humanity and Son of God amongst all of the people of the known world.

  In the history of Christianity, we have seen many changes in the last two thousand years.  Historical contexts change the application of Christian meaning and yet still claim the original Jesus as the chief source of inspiration.

  In the history of my own life, the changing context of my life means that I understand Christ differently now than I understood him when I was sixteen, yet I am the same person who encompasses the diversity.

  I have become different in my later states than what I was in my former states.  So I have lost a lot; I have died to former states of how the understanding of my life has been constituted; but I have gained new states of understanding.

  The seed dying in the ground and giving rise to new generations of life is a metaphor for the life of Jesus becoming the life of the risen Christ.

  It is also a metaphor for the process of life itself.  Life is moving; pretending that we can remain static is but a state of denial.  Another word for this process of renewal is called repentance.  We are constantly being challenged to give up former states of how we constituted the understanding of our lives and take on new understandings and new purpose.

  The witness of Jesus Christ invites us to a realistic view about change in life; it invites us to expect the losses caused by change.  But the witness of Christ also offers us the hope of great gain in what we will yet become.  And this hope is anchored on the resurrection of Christ.

  Let us embrace the hope of great gain; the seeds of the past has split their sheathes and become surpassing life.  This kind of self-surpassing life is the life of repentance to which we are invited by the witness of Jesus Christ.  Amen.