SERMON SERIES: MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME

SERMON SIX: Jesus as seen through the three great stories of the Hebrew scriptures

RESOURCE: Borg, Marcus J., Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & The Heart of Contemporary Faith: New York: HarperCollins Paperback, 1994, 119-133.

Preached by the Rev. Caroline B. Edge at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church, Needham, MA, October 29, 2006.

Everyone loves a good story. That is just what the Judeo-Christian faith is – a wonderful story of humanity and the divine. In this marvelous story there are some major stories that make up the big story and those are told by even smaller stories. Ours is a story-telling faith. God’s story; your story; my story and how they all intertwine.

Marcus Borg in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time talks about how the major story line of the Jewish tradition effected Jesus’ understanding of himself and how those stories plus the story of Jesus effects not only our image of Jesus but also how we live our lives as Christians.

The Bible is our source for most of these stories. Although we talk about the Bible as a library of many books – we know that these many books weave together one story – a story of God creating a good earth and humanity, how humanity has contaminated that earth through sin, and how God has again and again delivered humanity from what it (we) has done to itself until that final paradise is restored in the heavenly City of God.

The Jewish faith began as stories told over and over again, generation after generation until the time of writing emerged and they were written down and then faithfully preserved and reread year after year generation after generation. A high point in the worship services of our Jewish brothers and sisters here in Needham is when the Torah is taken out of its special place and paraded around among the congregation and then carefully opened and read.

In the Jewish scriptures which were the holy stories Jesus grew up with, there are three major stories. The first is so important that it is marked annually with a time of remembrance and celebration called the Passover. Every Jewish family in their home about their Seder table retells the story of God hearing the cries of the children of Israel when they were slaves in Egypt and sending Moses to liberate them and lead them back to their homeland. This Exodus story is a formational story of the Jewish faith. There is a whole book in the Bible that tells this story and it is repeated in psalms and by the prophets over and over again.

The second great story of the Hebrew Bible is another deliverance story. This time in remembered history 587 B. C. to be exact, the Israelites were conquered and their leaders were taken captive to Babylon. There they remained far from their homeland for 46 years – more than the 40 years in the Wilderness after the exodus from Egypt – before the political climate changed and they were allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. What they learned during this exile was that they could worship God in a strange land without the temple. Although rebuilding the temple was a symbol of their restoration, they had learned that God was with them in exile. Even when they were powerless and marginalized, God was with them, and God came with them in their journey home.

The third great story in the Jewish tradition that Borg talks about is not so much as narrative as it is an institution. Borg calls it "the priestly story." "Within this story, the priest is the one who makes us right with God by offering sacrifice on our behalf….It is not primarily a story of bondage, exile, and journey, but a story of sin, guilt, sacrifice, and forgiveness. Central to it are notions of impurity, defilement, and uncleanness…." In this story instead of bad things like slavery or exile happening to us, we are "primarily sinners who have broken God’s laws, and who therefore stand guilty before God, the lawgiver and judge."

All three of these great stories in the Jewish tradition shape the message of Jesus. The New Testament writers – the Christian storytellers – talk about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection in the context of liberation, restoration, and completed sacrifice. Borg quotes a Swedish Theologian Gustaf Aulen, whose systematic theology was a primary text in my systematics class in seminary 39 years ago, to explain how Christian theologians used these three great Hebrew stories to understand Jesus. To quote Borg, "Aulen argues that the oldest of these [understandings of Jesus] is one he calls Christus Victor, a Latin phrase that means "Christ victorious." It is an image that understands the central work of Christ to be a triumphing over "the powers" that hold humans in bondage, including sin, death, and the devil. Like the exodus story, this image sees the human predicament as bondage and the work of Christ as liberation. "The powers" holding us in bondage are Pharaoh and Egypt on a cosmic scale.

Aulen calls the second major understanding of the death and resurrection of Christ the "substitutionary" or "objective" image. This image pictures the death of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin that makes God’s forgiveness possible. Though sacrificial language is used to speak of the death of Jesus in the New Testament itself, Aulen argues that this understanding of Jesus’ death did not become dominant in the church until the early Middle Ages. This image clearly sees the death of Jesus through the lens of the priestly story.

A third understanding of Christ’s death and resurrection can, with some modification, be correlated with the exile story. This third understanding portrays Jesus neither as the one who triumphs over the powers nor as a sacrifice for sin, but as "revelation" or "disclosure." The emphasis is not upon Jesus accomplishing something that objectively changes the relationship between God and us, but upon Jesus revealing something that is true. What is revealed is more than one thing. Sometimes the emphasis is upon Jesus revealing what God is like (for example, love or compassion). Sometimes the emphasis is upon Jesus as "the light" who beckons us home from the darkness of exile. Sometimes the emphasis is upon Jesus’ death and resurrection as the embodiment of the way of return, a disclosure of the internal spiritual process that brings us into an experiential relationship with the Spirit of God. Within this way of seeing Jesus, he is the incarnation of the path of return from exile."

Though all three of these stories were important for Jesus and those who came afterward and shaped Christian theology, the priestly story has dominated the thinking about Jesus to the present day. It is the core image of Jesus on the cross dying for our sin. The fact that the prayer of confession is important in worship is a sign of this priestly image being central. Instead of expressing the sense of bondage and needing to be liberated or the sense of alienation and exile and needing restoring, we focus on the idea that we are sinful people who need forgiving. This is the kind of theology most of us grew up with.

Borg identifies many problems with having the priestly story as the central story of Christianity. It leads to a static cycle of sin, guilt and forgiveness. Every week we sin; every week we have guilt; every week we are forgiven. Then the cycle starts over again. We do not hear Jesus’ words to the woman caught in adultery, "Go and sin no more."

This sacrificial emphasis of Jesus does not lead us to understanding the Christian life as a process of growing spirituality. It emphasizes that God has done all that needs doing, we just have to believe and confess. It stagnates our view of culture that is evil and needs redeeming rather than seeing folk in bondage needing freeing or in exile needing restoring. To acknowledge there are people in our culture who are "slaves in Egypt" moves us to social action rather than to emphasizing "repent and be saved."

The priestly understanding of Christianity also focuses more on the afterlife. "The crucial issue is becoming right with God before we die." All of the focus is on me, myself and I, not our brothers and sisters who are in bondage or exile.

The priestly story images God as lawgiver and judge. Though God is seen as gracious – sending God’s own son to save us – it comes with a system of requirements. We must believe to receive that salvation.

For 21^st century people this priestly story is just incredible – impossible to believe. It does not fit into our understanding of cosmology. "Taken metaphorically, this story can be very powerful. But taken literally, it is a profound obstacle to accepting the Christian message." It simply does not make sense. A lot of people describe themselves these days as spiritual but not religious. I think this is the reason.

And there are people who simply do not feel guilty. If that is not their human condition, then a sacrificial Christ does not speak to them. Maybe they feel more in bondage or have strong feelings of alienation and estrangement.

These are all reasons that we need to use all the stories of our great Judeo-Christian tradition – not just the priestly story. The spirituals that come out of black slavery in our country focus on liberation, not guilt. The song that came out of the United Methodist clergywomen’s movement was a hymn of exile – "Zion’s songs are meant for Babylon", not a hymn of confession.

If we look at these three great stories – the Exodus, the Exile and return, and the priestly story together – we have powerful symbols for ministry. Borg eloquently summarizes, "All of them are stories of suffering and of being an experiential distance from God. According to the exodus story, we live a life of hard labor in Egypt, in bondage to an alien lord. According to the exile story, we live in Babylon, estranged from the center of our being and yearning. According to the priestly story, our lives are marked by guilt, shame, negative self-worth, and the experiential distance from God generated by those feelings.

Second, all of them make powerful affirmations not just about the human condition but also about God. They are stories about God, not just about us, and they portray God as intimately involved with human life. There is a power that wills our liberation, a light shining in the darkness that invites us home from exile, a compassionate presence that accepts us just as we are, though we may not yet know that.

Third, all of them are stories of hope. Their consistent message is that God does not will our present condition, but wills something very different for us. All of them speak about new beginnings brought about by God. The exodus story speaks of liberation from victimization and bondage, the exile story speaks the good news of ‘coming home,’ and the priestly story affirms that our own past is not the final word about us.

Fourth and finally, all are stories of a journey. This is self-evidently the case in the exodus and exile stories. …So also the priestly story, properly understood, is a journey story. In the bible itself, the regulations governing priesthood and sacrifice…are sent in the context of the journey from Egypt to the promised land. In the context of a journey story, the priestly story means that God accepts us just as we are, wherever we are on our journey. Moreover, the internalization of the new identity conferred by the priestly story - that I am accepted by God, beloved by God – is a process that can take years. That process is itself a journey….

Thus we have three macro-stories for imaging the religious life. One might think of them as constituting a pastoral ‘tool kit," each addressing a different dimension of the human condition. For some, the need is liberation; for others, the need is homecoming; and for still others, the need is acceptance. But beneath their differences the stories all image the Christian life as a journey whose central quality is a deepening and transforming relationship with God."

That is where we will end this series next Sunday as we celebrate Jesus and the Christian life as journey as we name those saints who have completed their journeys this past year. Amen.