Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus ... Now none of the disciples dared ask him, "Who are you?" They knew it was the Lord.(John 21:4, 12b)

Now wait a minute! Either they knew it was Jesus or they didn't. Why would it even occur to them to ask who he was if they already knew who it was? The answer is that the editors of the gospel of John (and many scholars think that John went through at least three major revisions) are using this story to show once again that the full impact and meaning of the resurrection of Jesus dawned upon his followers progressively, in stages, over time. By saying that this was the third time Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead (v. 14), by combining it with an element of confusion over whether they recognized Jesus or not (vv. 4 and 12), and by setting the whole episode in the context of the dawning of a new day, the editors are driving home the point that the ressurection faith of the early Christian movement developed gradually.

There may be an element of suddenness to the resurrection of Jesus. After all, we do ultimately base our faith more on Jesus than on a group of editors! But the strong association of Easter with the symbolism of the dawn reminds us that the gradual unfolding of resurrection faith is an equally valid component of the equation. The arising of the real Jesus Christ has indeed already happened. But it also continues to happen in a variety of ways. The meaning of the resurrection of Jesus is by no means diminished when we make honest efforts to interpret the New Testament correctly and when we resist the temptation to read into it only what we wish to see there. To ask "Will the real Jesus Christ arise?" is a way of reminding ourselves continually to question our pet theories about the Christian faith, so that we will not lose touch with the true Gospel of the grace of God.

We have used the image of "colorizing Jesus" to make it clear that the real Jesus is a complex, multi-dimensional Jesus. It should no longer bother us to read an article like the one that appeared recently in a major church journal reporting on a "Jesus Seminar" at which New Testament scholars voted on the authenticity of sayings attributed to Jesus. We understand that the purpose of such a seminar is not to question the authority of the Bible, but to keep us aware of the distinction between the historical person of Jesus and the images or interpretations of Jesus created by the authors and editors of the New Testament. The question of the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus is basically just a question of the degree of poetic license employed by the early Christian writers. Sometimes they borrowed sayings from much earlier sources and put them on the lips of Jesus. Many literary conventions were used in the effort to present an authentic portrait of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We can also appreciate the goals for the above-mentioned seminar stated by its organizer, New Testament scholar Robert Funk. They were, he said, "to combat the 'pious platitudes' of television evangelists and the doomsday writings of modern apocalypticists ... and to report the assured results of historical-critical scholarship to a broader public." (By the way, one of the better recent books that explains contemporary biblical scholarship for the general public is Richard E. Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?, Summit Books.)

Nor should it bother us to recognize that there is a lot of symbolism in the Gospel of John and in our story for today. We know that the Gospel of John starts out by borrowing the rather abstract Greek concept of the Logos to explain the meaning of Jesus: Jesus is the ultimate expression of the divine principle of creation. Jesus is the ultimate Symbol of symbols! Our story in chapter 21 clearly symbolizes the missionary commission to be "fishers of men." While there are many possible explanations for the number of fish caught being 153, a most likely one refers to a common notion in those days that there were a total of 153 varieties of fish. The symbolism, therefore, is that, in the words of G.H.C. MacGregor, "the Gospel net is to embrace every conceivable variety of men" - and it will not tear in the process! The modern term is "inclusive ministry."

Yet, although John is a complex and symbolic Gospel, it is also for many people their favorite Gospel because of its warm, personal and "spiritual" tone. Jesus is indeed complex and multi-dimensional, but there is also a sense in which Jesus is a model of wonderful simplicity. Jesus has always been a symbol of personal faith. Paradoxically, Jesus has always symbolized resistance to the kind of religion that is a mere collection of abstract symbols. The Christmas message of "God made flesh" is a symbol of moving beyond mere symbolism to a personal relationship with the Creator. At Christmas we sing "Joy to the world ... let every heart prepare him room ... He rules the world with Truth and Grace." Jesus is the symbol of Living Truth that warms our hearts with the personal assurance of God's all-encompassing Grace and Love.

Many great thinkers, such as Spinoza, have thought of God as nothing more than an abstract, mathematical symbol of that system which is the universe. God becomes just another word for The Universe. But when John's Gospel has Jesus say "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," the personal nature of truth is being driven home. Truth is a person, not a set of ideas! To know God through Jesus Christ is to know God in a personal way.

Professor William Streng, who taught for many years at Wart-burg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, used to satirize folks who were doggedly learning the concepts taught by the Bethel Bible Series. He would describe them as unsympathetically pushing aside a person in need - "Get out of my way! I've got to get to the church to learn my Bible concepts!" Dr. Streng understood John's message that the Truth is personal, that Truth is a way of behaving, an attitude of mind and not just a set of ideas. Jesus does not answer Pilate's question, "What is truth?" because Pilate has already demonstrated his inability to perceive Truth embodied in the person standing before him. Jesus is a person of integrity, honesty, perception, love and innocence - and Pilate does not see it! No words or concepts will break through his spiritual blindness. We all know the saying "Actions speak louder than words." That is a large part of what John means when he says that Jesus is the living embodiment of Truth.

Another example of impersonal thinking getting in the way of personal truth would be the issue of ordaining gay people. The subject is usually discussed as if such ordinations would be something radically new, whereas, in fact, there have been and are countless gay clergy, many of them significant leaders in the church. Because gay religious professionals are understandably hesitant to let their sexual orientation be known due to the potential for discrimination, most church people do not realize that they actually know many gay people personally - and like them! They continue to think of homosexuals and lesbians in terms of some abstract idea of "perversion." The personal truth, I believe, is that once you get to know gay people personally, your prejudices about sexual orientation quickly begin to melt away. An encounter with a real person brings out the truth that dissolves inaccurate, unfair and stereotypical ideas.

One of the problems with conceiving of truth merely in terms of ideas and concepts is that truth is too dynamic and paradoxical to be nailed down. Truth is alive and moving. Someone has said, "Our highest truths are but half truths. Think not to settle down forever in any truth. Make use of it as a tent in which to pass a summer's night. But build no house of it, or it will be your tomb. When you first have an inkling of its insufficiency and begin to decry a dim counter-truth looming up beyond, then weep not, but give thanks: It is the Lord's voice whispering 'Take Up Thy Bed and Walk.' " Living in the Truth means not being afraid of growth and change.

In spite of its multi-dimensional complexity, however, personal truth remains fundamentally simple. Jesus as the Living Truth is a symbol for absolute, simple trust in God's grace. As John Koenig, who teaches New Testament at General Episcopal Seminary in New York, wrote in a 1987 article, "Christ must be named so people can trust God through him." And this is not the kind of trust that makes Jesus into a lucky charm. It is simply childlike trust in the grace of God.

One of the most touching expressions of this trust is the wonderful gospel song, "His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me." More than once Jesus is pictured as using the birds of the air to illustrate the experience of warm, personal trust in God. Oscar Hammerstein also captured this ethos of personal faith and trust in his lyrics relating to birds. In South Pacific he countered pessimism with the observation that "every whippoorwill is selling me a bill, and telling me it just ain't so." In his song "It's A Grand Night for Singing" he came up with this lovely line: "And somewhere a bird who is bound to be heard is throwing his heart at the sky!" What an absolutely marvelous way to describe the song of a bird, or any song for that matter - to "throw your heart at the sky"! What a marvelous way to personalize the universe which can sometimes appear to be cold and uncaring. To have simple faith and trust in God's grace is to throw our heart at the sky and know that it will be caught!

In his book about the dangers of fanatical cults, Howard J. Clinebell Jr. lists twelve tests for mentally healthy religion. The second item on his list reads, "Does a particular form of religious thought and practice strengthen or weaken a basic sense of trust and relatedness to the universe?" Healthy religion gives us a sense of personal belonging, of being at home in the world!

There is a bothersome contradiction in the attitude of some Christians who make an issue out of the necessity of believing literally in the physical resurrection of Jesus. The physical body of the historical Jesus and the physical reality of the empty tomb are treated like ultimate objects of veneration, and yet these same Christians often exhibit an overly spiritualized, otherworldly and "sex-negative" attitude in which physical bodies are denigrated. Such thinking affirms the physical world only in principle but not in reality and is, hence, disturbingly inconsistent. If we are going to affirm the personal and physical nature of the real, risen Jesus Christ, let us do it in a way that takes our own physical and personal experience seriously.

One way to do that is to care more about understanding each others' personalities than we do about winning theological arguments. If we really care about the down-to-earth personal nature of the Gospel of Jesus, we will take the time to read a book like Please Understand Me by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, in which we can learn how different personality types interact with one another. We might begin learning to get along much better with one another if we become aware of the fact that, for example, the personality type of most clergy is quite different from the personality type found among most parishoners. Most clergy are Intuitives (focusing on hunches, speculation, inspiration, fantasy, ingenuity and imagination), while most parishioners are Sensates (focusing on guidance from past experiences, realism, and down-to-earth practicality.) I know of a mother and son whose relationship was greatly improved when they learned to see many of their conflicts as resulting from differences in their personality types rather than from deliberate attempts to get one another's goat.

The personal nature of Christian faith is also being promoted when a church journal publishes helpful articles like one in The Lutheran, June 3, 1987, which identified specific "storm signals for spouses." The article described weak points that can lead to big trouble unless the destructive patterns are altered.

So, faith in Jesus is personal and down-to-earth. It is a matter of the heart. But once again, finally, we must warn ourselves against believing too loudly. To speak of relating to God in a personal way is not the same thing as saying that God is "a person." When John's Gospel tells us that "God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth," we are not really being told definitively what God is. To call God "a spirit" is simply to say that God is more than a mere physical being. Describing God as "spirit" tells us much more about what God is not than about what God is. Who knows really what we mean by "spirit"? In the same way, when we speak of God as if God were a person, we really don't mean that God is a flesh and blood person with arms and legs like ours. To make such a claim would be to believe too loudly, would be to think more highly of our own notions than we ought. What we mean simply is that God "relates to us in a personal way!"

We can never truly comprehend God-language. I often refer to theology or "God-talk" as "the attempt to talk about the 'un-talk-about-able.' " (And most of us immediately recognize the wisdom of the aphorism which states that "a completely understood God is no God at all.") Whether we refer to God as He, She or It, is immaterial as long as we recognize the thrust of the Christian Gospel to be that a purely impersonal, mechanistic notion of God misses the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is a matter of the heart. The real Jesus Christ symbolizes the Truth that "you've gotta have heart!"

Oscar Hammerstein personalized the image of the singing bird as "throwing his heart at the sky." Felix Mendelssohn wrote a wonderful Aria in his Oratorio Elijah, "Then Shall the Righteous Shine Forth Like the Sun In Their Heavenly Father's Realm." I have on occasion tried to restate the truth of this affirmation in somewhat less anthropomorphic terms by saying that it expresses "an upbeat attitude toward the mystery of existence." Ultimately, of course, whether we use more or less anthropomorphic language is not all that important. The important thing is that we open our hearts and minds to the reality of personal purpose and meaning in the world and in our lives - even if, as yet, we do not completely understand all the dimensions of that meaning and purpose. It is enough to know that life's meaning has to do with caring interpersonal relationships. It is enough to be able to throw our heart at the sky and say, "Smile! God loves you!"