The Humanity of Jesus, Part 1: The Recovery of Jesus the Human Being

Matthew 5:6; John 14:12 a-c; Matthew 8:27 a&b; Ezekiel 1:26-2:2

What if we really haven’t taken the Bible, the “Sacred Scriptures”, the Gospels seriously enough, most especially and specifically the words Jesus used to refer to himself? Should we not pay very serious attention to the way Jesus referred to himself some 53 different times in the Gospels, even though it was never translated that way because translators thought it a grammatical error due to the article “the” twice in a five-word phrase? Should we not want to know what Jesus meant by the self-referring phrase, “the son of the man” (remembering that the Hebrew translation means “the human being”), with neither the s nor m capitalized, meaning it was not an honorific title, nor a title of power, position, or status, and was virtually the only phrase Jesus used to self-identify, with no one else in the Gospels ever using the phrase? If I asked any of you what your name is you would tell me your name—if someone had asked Jesus he would have said, “the son of the man” (“the human being”)—for that is the self-referring phrase he used, for he never used his name to refer to himself.

What if the Christian church much too quickly—and far too much—focused on the outside- the-experience-of-humans-divinity of Jesus, which essentially allowed humans like ourselves to escape responsibility by thinking and saying that, “We can’t be like Jesus because Jesus was divine and we are not and can’t be”, when Jesus was not the least bit focused on his “divinity”, but rather focused on his own God-incarnate humanity, teaching and demonstrating that every human has that God-incarnate humanity? Should we not be those who hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God incarnate within us in order to be filled to live as we are created and meant to live?

What if Jesus incarnated God to teach us how to incarnate God, not because Jesus was divine outside of the human experience, but because Jesus understood that is what we humans are to be and do as we live our lives?

What if what is authentically divine about Jesus is that he was authentically, fully human?

What if divinity is fully realized humanity?

What if Jesus really meant it when he said, “Greater things than I have done, you will do”, because he truly expected we humans to be able to be as authentically, fully human as he was?

These are not easily answered questions, yet they deserve our best effort to answer them, for I strongly believe and think that what is at stake is nothing less than the present and future understanding of what it means to be a person who believes in, and seeks to live like, Jesus. For in the reality of today’s world that daily increases its use of and reliance on science and technology we must understand and internalize the Jesus who can, and does, speak to that world in terms that make relevant sense to that world. William Stringfellow, the great Episcopal Church layman and lawyer who gave free legal service to the poor, may have said it appropriately best: “What it means to be a Christian is, wonderfully, just synonymous with what it means to be no more and no less than a human being.” What then becomes our task is to discover, discern, understand, and internalize what it means to be human!

The Christian church, even at its very beginning when it was a reform movement within Judaism, thus before it was actually the Christian church, understood Jesus to be a human being—for the disciples wonder, in Matthew 8:27, not what kind of divine being Jesus was but, “what kind of human being is this?” But by the Fourth Century, even though the creedal formulations affirmed the humanity of Jesus, the church had already so overwhelmingly focused on the “divinity” of Jesus, that the human essence of Jesus has been mostly ignored for nearly 1700 years since, or even longer. The time has come and now is for that to change. However, because of that over 17 centuries long over-emphasis, what I will be preaching in this sermon series on the humanity of Jesus may bother, upset, or perhaps even offend some of you—in terms of what you have learned from others you greatly appreciate, in terms of how you read and understand the Bible, in terms of what you state you believe, and/or in terms of what you believe to be sacred beliefs and/or theological principles of what it means to be a Christian. It is not my intention to bother, upset, or offend anyone. It is only my intention to speak the truth as I best now understand it, and let those who hear make up their own minds. No one has to believe and/or think the way I do. For some of you what I will be preaching may actually intrigue, convince, or even excite you, so I ask you to share that with others, while pointing to Walter Wink’s book The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man as the primary, essential source of the ideas, thoughts, concepts, perspectives, and powerfully poignant insights—for it is he and this book that deserve the credit for what I am sharing, much more than I. And I also ask that however you respond to these sermons that you be kindly tolerant with each other, whichever “side” you find yourself on, or even if in the middle somewhere. The very last thing we need anywhere these days is less tolerance.

I began to come to this understanding of the humanity of Jesus starting in 2003. I was given a book by a parishioner, who wanted my response to it, titled The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel, who emphasizes that he began his career as an investigative journalist. As I began to read it I found myself thinking, “He’s asking the wrong questions, and he’s going to people he knows will give him the answers he already believes are the right answers.” That is not a true investigative approach. So I thought I needed to find some other book that would address the issues. I already had Wink’s book in my library, but had not started reading it as yet, but I then began to do so. It was published in 2002 and won the award from the Biblical Archaeological Society for the Best Book Related to the New Testament for 2003. Within the first few pages I began to experience an excitement of learning, and the more I read and learned the more I found amazing, astonishing, and astounding. It is the most thorough, deep, compelling, and challenging book I have ever read about Jesus, and it has taught me more about Jesus than anything else I have ever read. And every time I read in it I find even more that amazingly, astonishingly, and astoundingly teaches me about Jesus. Wink spent most of his adult life studying the New Testament, and was Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. He was as authentic a person as you could ever meet, truly living and exemplifying what he taught and believed, and I know Sharon and I were greatly privileged and blessed to spend most of a weekend with him and June, and I was blessed to speak to him a few times on the phone, and exchange emails with him. Sadly for me, and the world of biblical scholarship, he died last year from a degenerative neurological disease.

Wink had 6 questions that prompted him to write this book. They are on the insert in your bulletin, so I want you to open that insert now and read them along with me.

• Before he was worshipped as God incarnate, how did Jesus struggle to incarnate God?

• Before Jesus became identified as the source of all healing, how did he relate to, and how did he teach his disciples to relate to, the healing Source?

• Before forgiveness became a function solely of his cross, how did Jesus understand people to have been forgiven?

• Before the kingdom of God became a compensatory afterlife or a future utopia adorned with all the political trappings that Jesus resolutely rejected, what did he mean by “the kingdom”?

• Before Jesus became identified as Messiah, how did he relate to the profound meaning in the messianic image?

• Before he himself was made the sole mediator between God and humanity, how did Jesus experience and communicate the presence of God?

We will seek to answer these questions as best we possibly can during this sermon series. The best biblical scholars have long known that there are essentially two understandings of Jesus in the Gospels—the early Jesus—the fully human Jesus, or as some have stated, the historical Jesus—and the post-Easter Jesus, with all the aspects of divinity and resurrection theological perspective added to the early stories of who Jesus was and what Jesus did as he traveled the Galilean countryside as a teacher, preacher, and healer. The scholars know this because of the differences in the earliest manuscripts and fragments of sources that the Gospel writers used some 40-90 years after Jesus had been crucified. There has long been a quest to rediscover that human, historical Jesus, and it became a more focused, and perhaps even urgent, quest after Albert Schweitzer published his The Quest of the Historical Jesus. That quest has now culminated in Wink’s book, as I see it, in which he notes that, “the quest for the historical Jesus all along has been the quest for the human Jesus.” (p. 10) “…we seek a Jesus who is not the omnipotent God in a man-suit, but someone like us, who looked for God at the center of his life and called the world to join him.” (p. 11) To understand who Jesus understood himself to be Wink starts biblically with what he understands as the “original impulse of Jesus”. Jesus condemned all forms of domination:

• Patriarchy and the oppression of women and children

• The economic exploitation and the impoverishment of entire classes of people

• The family as chief instrument for the socialization of children into oppressive roles and values

• Hierarchical power arrangements that disadvantage the week while benefitting the strong

• The subversion of the law by the defenders of privilege

• Rules of purity that keep people separated

• Racial superiority and ethnocentrism

• The entire sacrificial system with its belief in sacral violence” (p. 14)

Jesus proclaimed the ‘Reign of God’, or ‘God’s Domination-Free Order’ not only as coming in the future, but as having already dawned in his healings and exorcisms and his preaching the good news to the poor. He created a new family, based not on bloodlines, but on doing the will of God. He espoused nonviolence as a means for breaking the spiral of violence without creating new forms of violence. He called people to repent of their collusion in the Domination System and sought to heal them from the various ways the system had dehumanized them.” (p. 14) Wink seeks to encounter, and help us encounter, the Jesus to whom we can listen in order to be transformed, to whom we can respond, in our better moments, in order to change, and states, both assertively and challengingly, “Truth is, had Jesus never lived, we could not have invented him.” (p. 16)

This leads us to the phrase “the son of the man”, and that leads us to the vision of Ezekiel, for to understand the use of that phrase by Jesus to self-refer to who he was comes from that vision. You may have noticed when Ezekiel’s vision was read this morning the phrases “something like a throne”—“in appearance like sapphire”—“something that seemed like a human form”—“from what appeared like loins”—“something like gleaming amber”—“something that looked like fire”. Wink rightly and wisely declares: “A fictionalized account would have been full of certainty and precision: Ezekiel qualifies virtually every word of his report.” (p. 24) In this vision God seems to be, as it were, human. For if God is going to reveal God’s self to humans then God will need to use some form humans can understand, and speak in some language humans can understand. God is not going to come to humans speaking Klingon, or Martian, or Jupiterian (and yes, I just made that word up). Obviously God is not just human, and in this vision there are nature symbols that speak to all of creation. While some have consistently criticized any theology that is anthropomorphic—which is imaging God as human—we must admit that in one sense we can do nothing else because being human is what we are, and in our attempts to speak of the essence of God we use human language and human understanding, and imagery that humans experience one way or another on this planet. But rather than being only focused on the limitations of anthropomorphism we should now begin to seek to become focused on anthropocosmism—that is, human relatedness to the cosmos, for it is the cosmos of God that God seeks us to relate to since, “Every particle of matter in us was produced in the process that led to the creation of the universe. We are cosmic by our nature, children of the universe.” (p. 47) Or as Max Ehrmann put it in “Desiderata”, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

When Ezekiel falls on his face after seeing the vision of God who appears, as it were, in the likeness of human form, God speaks to him, saying, “O mortal (that is, the son of the man), stand on your feet, and I will speak to you.” This suggests that, “God, apparently, will not converse with human beings who are prostrated. That [essence of God] which addresses us insists that we stand our ground. God [the God who created us only a little below God] will not speak as to an inferior or tolerate a servile mentality. The Spirit enters Ezekiel to embolden him to face this awesome Reality.” (p. 30) Some of you may remember the sermon “Maybe We Shall Dance With God”, within which I quoted a Jesuit priest character saying that the Jewish sages, in the Talmudic commentary on the Torah, stated that “God dances when God’s children defeat God in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds.” It is this very similar image that we are seeing in Ezekiel’s vision. God wants we humans to use with wisdom all God gave us in the creation of us and all of the universe—and that means most especially our minds—and to use them standing up as those created only a little below God, not prostrating ourselves, but being the fully human persons God created us to be, and Jesus proclaimed we are to be.

The fully human beings we are to be also completely includes the masculine and feminine essence of humanity, for so astoundingly surprising, right here in the male-dominant Hebrew Scriptures, “Throughout the vision of Ezekiel there are feminine plurals of verbs, and feminine pronouns are used of the ‘living creatures’ where one would have expected masculine forms exclusively.” (p. 29) Twelve out of forty-five verbs and pronouns are feminine, meaning both male and female are in God. Thus Jesus understood and used “the son of the man” phrase from Ezekiel to mean that humans relate with and connect to God as human persons able to converse with God while standing in God’s presence, and to do so equally as males and females, or, even more completely, as males who know their feminine aspects of being fully human, and as females who understand their male aspects of being fully human—after all, we have the genetics of both a father and a mother. This means that Jesus understood the phrase he used to self-identify as descriptive of humanity’s unique relationship with and connection to God, and that God is uniquely in relationship with and connected to humanity—that the true essence of God is in humanity, and the true essence of humanity is in God—after all, we were created in the image of God! And here is the actual tricky part—Jesus didn’t use “the son of the man”, that is, “the human being” phrase just for himself, he used it for us—each one of us—for it is we who are to be “the human being” as well, and we will explore what this means more in depth during this sermon series. Wink asserts, “If God is in some sense true humanness, then divinity inverts itself. Divinity is not a qualitatively different reality; quite the reverse, divinity is fully realized humanity. Only God is, as it were, Human. The goal of life, then, is not to become something we are not—divine—but to become what we truly are—human. We are not required to become divine: flawless, perfect, without blemish. We are invited simply to become human, which means growing through our sins and mistakes, learning by trial and error, being redeemed over and over from compulsive behavior—becoming ourselves, scars and all. It means embracing and transforming those elements in us that we find unacceptable. It means giving up pretending to be good, and instead, becoming real.”

Becoming fully, realized human is precisely what Jesus did, and precisely what he was calling us to become as well. This is the essence of his self-identifying phrase “the son of the man”—that is “the human being”—for being that human being is who he really understood himself to be, and who he understood each of us is to be as well. We are to become real—not some image of our self, not some image of some other self, not some false approximation of our self—but our real self. For each of us is the only you we can ever be, or will ever be—there is no other who can be any one of us, and no other who we can be—for each one of us is the unique person we are created by God to be. You are the only you there is. So be the real you—the you who is a real human being! May we begin this very day to be the fully realized human being Jesus taught us to be, called us to be, and expected us to be because he knew we could be—for the fully realized humanity of Jesus is the essence of what each of us is to be. With the Spirit of God within us, between us, and beyond us enabling and empowering us, it can indeed be the essence we live! Amen. Let’s make it so!