Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
December 19, 2004

Reverend Barry Bloom

ll of my waking life, I have felt ambivalence toward Jesus Christ. Growing up in my safe, boring Protestant church, in which my great grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents had all taught Sunday School, I was assured over and over that Jesus Christ was the son of God who was born of a virgin, that as a part of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit he was God incarnate, God made flesh, and that he died on the cross to absolve our sins, even mine, and 3 days later he rose from the dead and, after talking with his disciples and family, ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, his father, there to rule for eternity.

I never bought it. I tried. If all those around me could believe the story, why couldn’t I?? I felt different, weird. I also became accustomed to a certain level of embarrassment when Jesus name was raised, a certain kind of discomfort that told me it WAS important to me, though I wanted to pretend it was not. To pay attention, even though I didn’t want to. Then I grew up and out of the Christian Church and into Unitarian-Universalism and it REALLY got confusing.

Today, I stand here and bring a new message of hope, glad tidings of great joy. The good news is….the story of Jesus Christ I grew up with is NOT TRUE. Therefore, today, I have a new capacity to see Jesus of Nazareth for who he really was, and therefore reclaim him for myself and for you. Given who he really was, a great spiritual teacher and social revolutionary, that is good news indeed.

Marcus Borg is a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who have, for over twenty years, been sifting through more and more newly available archaelogical and written evidence to draw a clearer, more accurate picture of Jesus and his world than was ever possible before. They are the ones who ascertained, for example, that the four Gospels (M,M,L,J) were written 60 to 125 years after Jesus’ death in order to serve the beliefs and experience of the communities to whom each of the writer’s belonged. The writers were not contemporaries of Jesus as had been assumed for hundreds of years. As an outcome of his work with that group, Borg wrote the book that I share highlights from today. In the book, he draws a picture of a Jesus that I would have followed joyfully, if I had only known he existed. So, who was he, really?

Jesus was a Jew in a Jewish world. We know nothing about him historically until he was 30 years old. His ministry lasted about 3 years. Though he grew up in Nazareth, a small town, he was not isolated from the rest of the world. The city of Sepphoris, the largest city in Gallillee, pop.40k, was 4 miles away. There were other cities nearby. Sepphoris was quite cosmopolitan, suggesting that Jesus had more of an opportunity to get a sophisticated world view than he is usually pictured.

He probably was born in Nazareth in the spring, not in Bethlehem in December. As we have discussed before, a 4th Century AD decision was made to place his birth time at the winter solstice for political reasons, and to fulfill the Jewish prophecies. His parents names were Mary and Joseph.

During his time as a teacher, Jesus did not see himself as, nor ask his followers to believe, that he was the Son of God. He was, certainly, what Borg calls, a spirit person who had a deep experiential awareness of God, but did not see himself as a special emissary from God. He went on a long vision quest and “journeyed in the spirit” much as Black Elk did.

As a social revolutionary he challenged the “purity system” of the Jewish world of that time, was often in conflict with the authorities, and advocated an alternative social vision. He was a “wisdom teacher”, using parables and aphorisms to teach a subversive, alternative wisdom.

Like many spiritual lights of many cultures, Jesus taught with “authority.” He had a presence which his followers experienced as being palpable. He was a Jewish mystic.

These general insights are interesting, but what of his teaching. What did he teach within the context of this present understanding?

His teaching was centered in “compassion.” “For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God.” In both Hebrew and Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, compassion is the plural of a noun that in its singular form means “womb” Compassion meant feeling the feelings of someone else in a visceral way and being moved by others suffering to do something about it. It also suggests that God is compassionate as a mother is compassionate.

For Jesus, compassion was also a political paradigm, the politics of compassion. Thus he was often in conflict with authorities in regard to the purity system.

The purity system may seem archaic and unimportant to us, but in 1st Century Palestine, it was absolutely central to life. It was organized around the polarities of what is clean and unclean, pure and unpure.

One’s purity depended, in part, on birth, but also on behavior. Much like the caste system in India. Priests and Levites were pure, tax collectors and shepherds were unpure. Lepers and outcasts were worse. Men were, by nature, pure, women, impure. Those who carefully followed the system were righteous, those who did not were sinners. Jesus turned the rating system upside down. The story of the Good Samaritan. (Remind and tell). Was a pointed criticism of the system. He taught that purity came from the inside out. Many other examples including, in the last week of his life, overturning the tables of the money changers.

His most pervasive critique however, was implicit in who he invited to the fellowship of his table. In private and public Jesus daily shared meals with those high on the unclean list, tax collectors, women, outcasts, sinners. Since meals were rigidly regulated by the purity rules, the meals were both a conscious criticism of the system, and a provocative new model of an inclusive spiritual community. All were welcome, all were equal. His relationships with women were particularly remarkable for the time. They were his friends, they traveled with him. He sought their counsel. He presented Mary Magdalene, a woman who his enemies described as a “prostitute”, but who may have actually been Jesus wife, as one of his disciples.

(Before we leave the world of defined purity, Borg suggests that some Christians homophobic view of homosexuality is left over from this time. To them there seems something impure, dirty, about homosexuality, and AIDS. Borg makes the observation that Jesus, and later Paul’s attack on the purity system makes for a legitimate re-statement of a famous quote from Paul as, “In Christ there is neither straight nor gay.”)

Jesus was a teacher of alternative wisdom. Borg terms Jesus a subversive sage, along with Lao-Tze, Buddha, and Socrates. Teachers of the “road less traveled”, they taught of following a “way” that defied convention. Here, Jesus used parables and aphorisms “You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” or “Can a blind person lead a blind person. Will they not both fall into a pit?”

So, what was Jesus subverting in these aphorisms and many stories? Conventional wisdom. All the integrated values and shoulds of the culture. The purity system, the patriarichal family, wealth, religiosity. An example, the Prodigal Son. (son becomes impure by his behavior, returns, father, like God, is compassionate, banquet, oldest son complains ... representative of conventional wisdom)` Follow the narrow, not the broad, easy way.

What is the narrow way? The experience of God as gracious and womblike, not a judge. He/she does not judge you. And to follow the path that leads into a deepening relationship with God. True life is not about requirements and reward.

Besides being a teacher of Wisdom, Jesus was related to the wisdom of God. The other figure so deeply related in this way in the Bible is Sophia, the personification of the feminine in God. Sophia speaks with the voice of God at times in the Bible. Sophia was with God from before the beginning and helped to establish the cosmos. She is everywhere present. Jesus is quoted as presenting the “Sophia of God”, speaking her words as an emissary. This is how his followers saw him. He speaks of himself as a “child of Sophia.” Going back to the meaning of compassion as from the womb, it suggests Jesus was a spokesperson for a God who was like a woman, a spokesperson for God/Sophia.

READ the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer. Hear the softness, the feminine nature of the language.

So, let me summarize what we have learned about Jesus through Borg. Jesus self-understanding did not include thinking and speaking of himself as the Son of God whose historical intention or purpose was to die for the sins of the world, and his message was not about believing in HIM. Rather he was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and emissary of Sophia who invited his followers and hearers into a transforming relationship with the same Spirit that he himself knew, and into a community whose social vision was shaped by the core value of compassion. In short, a teacher who is relevant and inspiring to many Unitarian-Universalists. It was not he who created the trinity that Unitarians spent hundreds of years in conflict with. It was not he who created the image of a God who judges sins and must sacrifice his son for us all. Jesus, like the Universalists, believed in a loving, compassionate God like the father in the story of the prodigal son. He inspired us to celebrate life together in a spiritual community that was all inclusive, that rejected no one as being un-worthy.

One last question, maybe another sermon ...

What about the post-Easter Jesus? Did he in fact die and come back to life? That is for your faith to guide you. If he did, it is an act so profound that we can hardly grasp it. If he did not, it still makes for a powerful myth, a teaching story that Jesus the teacher would gladly tell were he still alive.

In the meantime, we have a Jesus we can believe in.

Amen.

The Lord’s Prayer.
(Translated directly from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.)

Oh Cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration.

Soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us where your Presence can abide.

Fill us with your creativity so that we may be empowered to bear the fruit of your mission.

Let each of our actions bear fruit in accordance with Your desire.

Endow us with the wisdom to produce and share what each being needs to grow. And flourish.

Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us, as we release others from the entanglement of past mistakes.

Do no let us be seduced by that which would divert us from our true purpose.

But illuminate the opportunities of the present moment.

For you are the ground and the fruitful vision, the birth-power and fulfillment, as all is gathered and made whole again.