Mark 2:23-28; Matthew 12:1-8; Luke 6:1-5
I will seek to summarize the week before in this sermon series as little as possible, but with copies of each sermon at the back of the church after worship, you will be able to stay current, if you should choose to do so. Each sermon does build on the one before, at least to some extent, so some summarizing is necessary. I say again at this point that no one has to believe as I believe—I’m simply stating the truth as I now understand it, and each person can make up her or his own mind. So, last week we learned from Walter Wink’s The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man (all quotes are from this book) that in the earliest manuscripts Jesus used the phrase “the son of the man” (meaning “the human being”) 53 different times in the Gospels, as virtually his only self-referring phrase, and that he never once called himself Jesus, or “Son of God”, or Christ, or Messiah. We learned that this phrase is understood from the vision of Ezekiel to refer to a vision of God who appeared in the form that appeared to be human, and that if God is to reveal God’s self to humans it virtually must be in some form humans can recognize, and to whom humans can relate. We also learned that Jesus understood himself to be incarnating God to teach us how to incarnate God. And we learned that since God is uniquely connected and related to humans, and humans are uniquely connected and related to God, then “God is in some sense true humanness, thus divinity is fully realized humanity. The goal of life, then, is not to become what we are not—divine—but to become what we truly are—human. [And this human we are to become] 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 giving up pretending to be good, and instead, becoming real.” (p. 29) And it means living as the real humans we were created to be.
Recovering the humanity of Jesus also leads to recovering our own humanity. As I also stated last week, for over 1700 years we have been so focused on the divinity of Jesus that we have lost far too much of the essence of his humanity—and in the process we have lost too much of the essence of our own humanity. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated, “God is not God at the price of emptying [any person] of his or her humanity…” God does not need to take away what makes us human in order for us to relate to God, because God made us the way we are as humans—only a little below God, as the Psalmist tells us. “God does not exploit [our] weakness, but is present precisely in weakness, and gives us strength in our weakness. Authentic Christianity should leave people stronger, not dehumanized. Hence we may say that God is the measure of all things. And God is engaged in an eons-long project of drawing humanity forward toward its true potential and destiny (or pushing us from behind, or prompting us from within) [or all three at once]….If there is no God there is no humanity, for God alone is human.” (p. 37)
Yet we humans do indeed project onto God what we think are the perfect, ideal attributes of being human, thus we seek to make God in our image, which was Ludwig Feuerbach’s great criticism of and challenge to Christianity. But because being human is all we can be, even as limited as we more often than not seem to wish to accept ourselves, we cannot speak of God in any other way than through what is human generated language and image. What Feuerbach recognized was the limitations of our efforts to speak of God, but he did not recognize the essence of those efforts. For “it is impossible to say anything about God that is not also a statement about oneself….Every statement about God is simultaneously a statement about ourselves. This means that we are [in some sense] projections of God, functions of God, and that God is [in some sense] a function, a projection of us….But we can become conscious to some extent of our projections, work with them, and learn something new both about ourselves and about God. God is in transformation with us.” (p 39)
And that transformation includes our understanding and internalizing so much more of the humanity of Jesus so that our own humanity is the humanity it is created to be.
Thus we can say, “In our better moments, we may perhaps not only create God in our own image and likeness (which we undoubtedly do), but we may allow ourselves to be created in the image and likeness of the Ultimate in moments of peak insight, mystical visions, sexual or spiritual ecstasy, deep theological reflection, or struggles for social justice. Rather than emptying ourselves into transcendence, then, we may now discover God at the core of our inmost being, as the power of Being itself. Whereas many theologians localized the power of spiritual healing in Jesus or God, we may now experience that same healing power working through us. Whereas we once believed that prophecy was dead in the modern world, we may now recognize God speaking an authentic word to us through us today. Whereas we once regarded the mystics as rare and solitary athletes of the Spirit, we may now acknowledge everyone’s capacity to become mystics. Whereas we once waited for God to bring peace to the world, we may now accept the power of God in our depths to make peace through active nonviolence. Instead of imagining God as the capstone of a pyramid of political, military, and economic Powers that maintain the status quo for the benefit of the few, we may now see God empowering the poor and the powerless to take history into their own hands in the struggle for justice.” (p 39)
“Are we then, in the final analysis, simply creating God in our own image? Are we deluding ourselves by means of imagination? We are not deluding ourselves, but it is ‘all our imagination’. That is the [primary and essential] way the experience of God happens. Imagination does not [always] construct something unreal, but [sometimes] unveils the hidden reality’. (pp 39-40) “We do not simply create God with our images; rather, our images are precipitated not only from deep within us, but from beyond our personal unconscious. Medieval Jewish mystics called that place ‘the roots of the soul’—a deep, underground world of archetypes that has encoded the experience of the species from the beginning. It is the recovery of the imaginal that makes possible both the reenchantment of nature and the recovery of the soul, in ourselves and in things.” (p 41) As Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian and writer of I and Thou, pointed out, “human beings cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; they can only approach it by being human. To become human is why individual persons have been created.” (p 45)
And Nicholas Berdyayev, the great Russian philosopher, who lived through the Russian Revolution and was exiled because he opposed the Communist regime, takes this to the next incredibly perceived point, “The final human mystery is the birth of God in humanity. But there is a final mystery of God as well: the birth of humanity in God. Not only does humanity have need of God, but God has need of humanity. There is a summons, a call in the human self, for God to be born in it. But there is also God’s call to the self to be born in God. In God is hidden the mystery of humanity and in humanity the mystery of God….The creative revelation of humanity is a continuing and completing revelation of Jesus, the Truly Human Being….‘God reveals [Godself] as Humanity. Humanity is indeed the chief property of God, not almightiness, not omniscience and the rest, but humanity, freedom, love, sacrifice….God is humane and demands humanity. Humanity is the image of God in [human beings]….’ Christianity has never revealed in its fullness what one might dare call a Christology of humanity, that is, the secret of humanity’s divine nature….The Christology of humanity, the reverse side of the anthropology of Christ, reveals in humanity the genuine likeness of God, the Creator.” (pp 47-48) Or, as Karl Barth, the great German theologian put it, is his book somewhat audaciously but fascinatingly titled, The Humanity of God, “It is precisely God’s deity which, rightly understood, includes [God’s] humanity….It is when we look at Jesus that we know decisively that God’s deity does not exclude but includes [God’s] humanity….God is human….genuine deity includes in itself genuine humanity….” (p 49)
Thus for Jesus to use the phrase “the son of the man”, that is “the human being” as a self-referring phrase, is to speak of that reality of the humanity in God and God in humanity, and his use of it in the Gospels is enlightening for what it means for us to be human within the context of living out our divine essence through our human experience. Thus, when we look deeply into today’s Gospel story we begin to see this essence Jesus lived and proclaimed—not just for himself, but for his disciples and followers, and for all of us. So in this story the Pharisees are complaining that the disciples are breaking the law of the sabbath. Jesus declares, in response, that “the son of the man” (that is “the human being”) is “lord of the sabbath”, so what does that mean? “The earliest Christians, [who were Jews], kept the sabbath; [so] any controversy would be over the proper interpretation of the law.” (p68) So this story assumes that keeping the sabbath is normative. The question is not whether to keep the sabbath but when and how. Jesus presses behind the issue of obedience and examines the origin of the sabbath itself. The origin was “to give former slaves, who had never known rest, a day of rest each week”, for “even God enjoys a day of rest”, so sabbath can be said to be “part of the rhythm of the cosmos. Therefore it is not an onerous obligation but a blessed gift, one that Judaism has now given to the world. Jesus honors its purpose, but reminds his hearers that the sabbath was itself created to serve the needs of human beings, not human beings to serve the sabbath.” (p 70)
The “human being” knows [how to keep the sabbath], because the “human being” in us can know what God wants. Laws structure freedom. If we are serving that which the law serves, then we have freedom of choice, even if it means breaking the law (or, as here, interpreting for oneself what constitutes violation of the law). Thus what Jesus is doing here is continuing his creative impulse of freeing people to become more fully human, and not mere servants of the law, in the context that the law (and thus every institution) is made to serve humans, not humans the law. It is “the human being” in Jesus, and in us, that is to be “lord of the sabbath”, not the sabbath lord of human beings. For Jesus in not making claims just for himself in this story, but for “the human being”, who includes those disciples and everyone else—and yes, that means us!
“The Human Being is not the offspring of the Domination System, or of this old and fading order. It is something [special and unique] of God within us, ‘that aspect of the Self which has about it the moral quality of being able to function through the ego in concrete everyday decisions’ (Howes). The Human Being seems to be encoded with the specificity of the imago Dei in each person, in a non-standardized form capable of infinite variation within fixed patterning. ‘To be oneself means to realize God’s idea of one’s self.’ The religious task of the ego is to encourage the growth and nurturance of this inner element of discernment. Jesus responded to what God was doing in the outer reality, but he was able to do so only because he was responding out of something deep inside himself as well.” (p 72) “Perhaps the Human Being is most especially lord of the sabbath—of the centering, renewing spaces in which our lives get restored and related to the Source.” (pp 72-73) That Source being the essence of God within us, between us, and beyond us—what we often call the Spirit of God—that essence of God within us of what it means to be really human.
Because keeping the sabbath was the most revered practice in Israel, Jesus proclaiming “the human being” as the lord of the sabbath means that “the human being” is in principle lord of every law touching the lives of humanity. As Jose Cardenas Pallares stated in A Poor Man Called Jesus, “For Jesus nothing, not even the most sacred law, may be allowed to obstruct the liberation of the human being.” Thus, it means this is the way we are to live our lives—like Jesus lived his life—for that is what Jesus was teaching and expecting us to do. That is, to claim the powerful essence of God that is within us and live out that powerful essence of God in relationship with each other and all others. To realize and internalize that Jesus lived and did what Jesus did in and through his humanity—his God-incarnate humanity—and that is the same God-incarnate humanity that is in us and that we are to live out in what we do. It is a radical freedom of what it is to be a human person that rejects all attempts of those who would seek to control, rule, oppress, or repress us—whether religious or political institutions—and it is threatening to all authorities because it gives too much moral discretion to common people like us. But remember that Jesus opposed the priests, and even the chief priest of the Temple, because they were asserting that only they could say what was the appropriate sacrifice for anyone’s sins, and claimed as their authority alone to approach God on behalf of common folk. And after the fall of the temple in 70 ce, there was never again a priestly class in Judaism. Jesus understood that any person has within her or him the authority as “human being” to approach God, connect with and relate to God, and even stand on their feet and converse with God.
Last week I wondered if we had not taken the Gospels seriously enough in terms of how Jesus referred to himself and what it meant. This week I wonder whether we realize that we have not taken ourselves seriously enough—in terms of our created-in-God’s-image humanity—in terms of God’s deity including God’s humanity, thus God’s divinity being within our humanity, and our humanity being within God’s divinity. We sell ourselves way too short because we want to claim we are so limited as some kind of excuse for avoidance of our responsibility to live out the divinity of God’s humanity in and through our humanity. The challenge for us is the recovery of the full essence of our humanity as persons created with God’s humanity within us—created in God’s image—and to live that full essence in everyday decisions in all the ordinary ways that are possible to do so. To do anything else, or less, is to ignore, if not deny, that essence of God’s divine humanity that God created in us. Yes, we are to live as if it is God’s divine humanity within us everyday in everyway we possibly can! And as we do we recover the humanity Jesus lived and taught—and recover the humanity we have always had from the dawn of creation, but too seldom lived as we are capable of living. The time has come and now is for that to change. Amen. Let’s make it so.
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