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John 1:1-5, 9-13, 16-18
Last week I watched the film of the Broadway musical, Into the Woods. It is a web of four fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, all woven together to present eternal lessons for life.
The phrase “into the woods” is a metaphor for living life. To go into the woods is to take on the risks of living. The song, No One Is Alone, tells us,
"Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood.
Do not let it grieve you, no one leaves for good.
You are not alone. No one is alone.
Though it's fearful, though it's deep, though it's dark and though you may lose the path,
though you may encounter wolves, you can't just act, you have to listen you have to think.
Into the woods - you have to grope, but that's the way you learn to cope.
Into the woods to find there's hope of getting through the journey."
We are going on a journey “into the words,” or rather into the Word from the Gospel of John.
In 1998 I became Executive Presbyter and Stated Clerk of Great Rivers Presbytery in Peoria IL. I was responsible to 20,000 Presbyterians in 120 congregations. It was a great position and honor for me. When the previous executive left, so did the associate executive and the administrative assistant. All that remained was the bookkeeper. A volunteer served as receptionist. I needed to hire an Administrative Assistant first thing. We interviewed six women and one man, and I was impressed with Barb Hartwig.
When I asked how she would plan for a presbytery meeting, she gave us a big smile and a rundown of the dozens of questions, tasks, and people that would be needed.
She wasn’t even a Presbyterian; she was hard-shell fundamentalist baptist. We would have disagreed about everything religious, but I saw in her what I wanted in an assistant. No one else did. She was extremely overweight and some on the search committee thought her unattractive. I had to argue with my search committee about our choice. I argued that like Samuel choosing David, it was a case of looking not at appearances but upon the heart. They gave in to me because I was the new leader.
She was a competent and creative assistant, who had a Swiss flag on her desk, which she declared to be neutral territory concerning religion and politics. I learned last week that Barb died last year.
This led me to remember an incident a year or so after we hired her.
The six of us who were by then working for the presbyery scheduled a staff retreat. To move the conversation to deeper level than day to day work, I used an exercise in guided imagery. I asked:
“If you entered an elevator in a tall building, and discovered that Jesus was in that elevator, and you knew that you would be with him there, alone, for several long minutes, what would you ask him or say to him?”
Several people wanted to know from Jesus what some of his teachings meant, or what he would think of current day issues. Barb was different. She said she would be overwhelmed by the glory of his divinity, and in tears, she told us that she would kneel before him and ask him for forgiveness, and what he wanted her to do.
The rest of us were stunned. This was not the way most Presbyterians would respond. We are called the “frozen chosen” sometimes, you know. So we talked about what Jesus meant to us and the effect he had on us in more personal and profound ways than we would have if Barb had not been there.
She moved the conversation from Jesus the teacher and leader to Jesus, the Son of God and Savior of the World. She moved us from the historical Jesus to the Christ.
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When I left Peoria in 2001, I left the churches and went to work for the Westar Institute, home of the Jesus Seminar, the world’s center for the study of the historical Jesus. When I went to Westar the scholars were engaged in a Paul Seminar and an Acts Seminar, Later there was a God Seminar, and a Christianity Seminar, which this year begins anew as the “Christ Seminar.” These studies focus on the third and fourth centuries, up to the time of Constantine when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 381 C.E.
So now Westar may take Barb seriously in asking when and how did Jesus as a human become “Christ?” Barb would have said that Jesus was always Christ, the Son of God, because that is what the Gospel of John says: He was in the beginning with God. So, what do we see in Jesus and what does he mean to us? What does it mean to call Jesus “Christ?”
We begin with a man, the historical Jesus, and the gospels tell stories that make claims about his mystical abilities to heal, to cast out demons, to bring the dead to life, to multiply loaves, and turn water into wine. The stories tell how he is chosen and called by God to bring in the rule of God on earth.
This gets at the basic meaning of naming him Messiah or Christ. In a recent sermon here about Leviticus I spoke of the Messiah as one who is chosen or appointed by God, liturgically anointed in a ceremony. A horn or cup of blessed, scented olive oil was poured over the head of the leader who would be a spokesperson or representative of God. It was a kind of ordination and installation service such as we have, but we “lay on hands” rather than pour oil. That would be too messy.
Ancient Israel had priests and prophets and kings, all of whom were anointed. They were the anointed ones, or messiahs. After the rule of Zedikiah, the last king of Judah, ended in 586 BC people hoped for a new king, a special Messiah to come and restore Israel to its presumed greatness. “Make Israel Great Again” could have been their slogan.
Messiah is a Hebrew word. In Greek the word is “Christ.” I used to discourage people from using the word Christ as if it were Jesus’ last name. In the Bible it is mostly used as a title, as in “Christ Jesus,” of “Jesus, the Christ.” After thinking about Barb, I am not so sure. The title Christ is a kind of name and so many people speak not of Jesus, but of Christ. Christ has become his name.
But Christ is not only a title or a name. What has happened is that the stories, the words of the stories about him have turned the man Jesus into the Son of God – not a son of a god, but the Son of the One God. The writer of the gospel of John has transformed these words into “the Word,” so that Jesus is like a word spoken by God, and becomes the Word of God. Jesus is now the message of God, the revelation or revealing of God, so that we finally can know God, in knowing Jesus.
But we “know” Jesus not merely by following him as in the first three Gospels, or through historical or linguistic study as scholars do, but through a new way of seeing and thinking about Jesus, so that now we have a present, mystical relationship with him. Jesus has become a man who embodies the divine or supernatural, who continues to exist as a spirit, who can still speak to us, walk among us, and act among us.
In this alchemical process of using mere words to turn a man into God, Jesus became and becomes a symbol as “the Christ.” A symbol is an image containing meanings beyond the actual thing or person depicted or named. A symbol may be a person, an act, a place, a thing, a fictional story, or an historical event. When we invest any of these images with profound and intense meaning, they become symbols, pointing beyond themselves. Because it is we who endow them or clothe them with meaning, we can say that we participate in those symbols and have a relationship with them. That is what gives them power and strengthens it.
Symbols, metaphors, and myths are the language of faith. The metaphor is our naming of one thing as if it is another thing. The bread as the body of Christ; the congregation as the body of Christ. Flowing water as life. The cross as the form of human life and death. These are powerful metaphors.
Myth is a fiction that carries a truth. That Jesus was baptized was an historical event. That the HS appeared as a dove makes the event a myth. It is an enhancement of the story that makes it a Christ event, not merely about Jesus the man.
Today we would say Christ is a “meme,” an idea or image with its own meanings, which is imitated and repeated. The meme is understood instantly and spread from person to person within the culture. In many ways all our memes together make up the totality of our culture.
In the gospel of John, and in the faith of Barb, Jesus is spiritualized and is more God than human. To spiritualize something or someone is to make them less material or physical but transcendent, or above and beyond what is real as we normally understand it. I used to think that was a bad thing, because it undermines the human, historical Jesus, but because of Barb I willing to reconsider it.
As the mystical, eternal Christ, he becomes God personified, the Spirit of God in flesh among us, not only to glorify him, but to help us share in his divinity. To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. This is not a claim made by John, it is a description of how symbols and myths work. By believing, by entering the symbol and story, we experience the power that it carries.
There are other ways to describe the revealing of God in Jesus. The gospel of Mark tells how this happened in the baptism of the adult Jesus, so that it is as if he was adopted by God. The gospels of Luke and Matthew tell of how the Spirit of God enters Mary and fathers Jesus literally. The gospel of Matthew goes further and tells of the visit of the wise men to the infant Jesus on the twelfth day of Christmas. The wise men symbolize the “Epiphany,” or “manifestation,” or “making known” of God’s new work in the world, because representatives of the world outside the stable and beyond Israel give him recognition as they would a king. Paul comes right out and says that Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power... by resurrection from the dead. (Romans 1:3-4). This made the human, historical Jesus nearly irrelevant to him.
What I have said about symbols is mostly from Paul Tillich. Tillich [in Dynamics of Faith] says another important thing about the symbols of faith. A sentence in one of his books has propelled my life in the church: A myth which is understood as a myth..., can be called a "broken myth.” In other words, once we understand what myth is and that a story is a myth, that story no longer works naturally or easily. The symbols are drained of their power.
Philosophers have called this feature of the last two centuries “the disenchantment of the world.” We used to see the world easily as magical or enchanted, a spirit world. Our world is disenchanted because reason and science are the new faith, the current myth of the age. Science seeks to understand the natural world. Those who believe that everything is ultimately understandable, live wholly within the myth of science and with the symbols of a scientific world.
The scientific world has eclipsed the ancient Biblical worldview. One great problem for the churches today is that day by day the Bible is becomes an older and more difficult to understand book. But the old words and stories can still invoke God, as they did for Barb. Life with God grows within the language of God, which are symbols myths, and not literal things or events. Life is best when it is rich in symbolism, rich in metaphor, rich in poetry, and even rich in the myth of the faith. Metaphor, not money, makes the world go 'round.
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A cartoon shows a Mom putting her child to bed. She holds a book and says, “I can’t protect you from everything, but I can read you stories that make you believe I can protect you from everything.” This is the function both of fairy tales and many Biblical stories.
*I conclude that we have to tell ourselves that our stories will end “happily ever after” because if we did not, we would despair. Yet we know that all stories don’t end happily. But because all stories don’t end unhappily, we do not despair, but we go on, into the woods, on our journeys, with hope that our story will end well. In Christian terms, life is symbolized by the cross, but not only the cross. Life ends in death, but life is not only death, it is life and all the joy and pain that it gives and requires.
Amen.
