There is a familiar greeting which I try to use at the beginning of each and every worship service. It comes from Paul’s Second Letter to the Church at Corinth: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (II Cor. 13:14) Now, that may sound simple and even trite, but I would suggest that that sentence contains the essence of the Christian Faith. It is through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ that we come to know the love of God, in the fellowship (or community) of the Holy Spirit: the Church. As I began this series of sermons on the Apostles’ Creed, I said that I really wish that the Creed had started with Jesus Christ and worked its way to God, rather than the other way around. For that is the way in which I came to faith. A small boy was busily making a sketch with his crayons and his parents asked him what it was that he was drawing. “I am making a picture of God,” he said. “But,” protested the parents, “nobody knows what God looks like.” The boy replied, “They will when I get through!” Well, the Christian Faith teaches us that because of Jesus Christ we may not know what God looks like, but we do know what God is like. . . and that is far more important. “(The one) who has seen me, has seen the Father,” said Jesus.
The second clause of the Apostles’ Creed says: “I believe...in Jesus Christ, (God’s) only Son, our Lord.” Now, when we say that we believe in Jesus Christ we are saying something more than merely that we believe that a man called Jesus of Nazareth once lived. At one time it was fashionable among skeptics to deny that Jesus ever lived. But today such a statement would be preposterous. We have more information about Jesus of Nazareth than almost any other person of antiquity. No, when we speak of Jesus Christ in the creed, we are saying something more than merely that a man of that name once lived. Actually, as most of you are aware, Jesus Christ is not a man’s name, like John Jones. Jesus is a name, alright—a very common name in Biblical times. It is the Greek form of the Hebrew word Joshua, and means Deliverer. Christ is a title—the Greek word which is used to express the Hebrew word Messiah. It means “the anointed one.” Christians are those who believe that Jesus is God’s anointed One, the One who came into the world for a specific purpose: to reveal the name and nature of God.
I sometimes like to substitute the word “clue” for the word Christ. I believe that Jesus is the best clue we have to the nature of that Ultimate Reality which we call God. The real question is not, “Is there a God?” Most people at most times in human history have believed in a god or gods of some kind. The real question is, “What is the nature of that Ultimate Reality we call God? Is that Reality benign, malign, or indifferent to us?” I will come back to that all-important question later. But for now, as I try to answer the question, Who is Jesus Christ? I would like to take you on a short journey—a journey up a Ladder of Understanding.
I. THE FIRST THING WE MUST SAY IS THAT JESUS WAS A MAN....A HUMAN BEING.
This must be said first, as obvious as it sounds. Interestingly enough, the very first heresies of the Church (a heresy is a misunderstanding of the faith), did not have to do with Jesus divinity; they had to do with His humanity. A large number of people were quite willing to believe that Jesus was divine, but had a hard time believing that he was, in any real sense, human. Many religions have stories about gods visiting the earth; but they visit it only as ghosts, appearing and disappearing at will. In fact, ancient Chinese philosophers once drew up a list of rules for recognizing a genuine god who visits the earth. He will not sweat, no matter how hot it is; he won’t cast a shadow, however bright the sun; and if you look closely, you will see that the soles of his feet do not touch the ground. Obviously, that is a far cry from the Jesus we meet in the Gospels! Still, there arose in the early Church certain teachings which claimed that Jesus never really became a human being. He never hungered, or thirsted, grew weary, tired, or suffered. Against these false teachings the early Church drew up its Creeds, its statements of faith. In fact, the words of the Creed Born of the Virgin Mary, were inserted not to emphasize the word virgin, but to emphasize the word born. The early Church had false teachers who believed that God would never dirty His hands, as it were, by becoming involved with sordid, sinful humanity, or by entering the world through the normal channel of human birth. But this is precisely what the New Testament says God did. And then there is that other phrase in the Creed: Suffered under Pontius Pilate. How did Pontius Pilate’s name get in there? Pontius Pilate was governor of an obscure outpost of the far-flung Roman empire from AD 26-36. But if it were not for the Christian Church and the Apostles’ Creed, there is a good chance that nobody would ever even have heard of him. It is only because his life became entangled with the life (and death) of Jesus of Nazareth that we even remember him after 2000 years! Why is Pilate’s name in the Creed? Because that anchors Jesus firmly in human history. . . our history. We know when Pilate was governor of Judea. We know (approximately) when Jesus lived and died and rose again.
Our faith is a historical faith, firmly rooted in historical events. Christianity, like its parent religion, Judaism, takes history seriously. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee said that Christianity is a historical religion because (1) it takes history seriously, and (2) it believes that God revealed Himself to the world in an historical incarnation. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14)
I also find it interesting that in the Apostles’ Creed there is only one word to describe the entire life of Jesus Christ. It is the word ‘suffered.’ He was born, and grew up as other human beings grow up; He was no stranger to hunger and thirst. In His final hours on the Cross He said, “I thirst.” He was truly human.
But was He more than human? If the early Church had its problems with those who wished to deny Jesus humanity, in recent years we have been more troubled with those who wish to deny His divinity. Sometimes we hear people say, “I believe that Jesus was a good man, but I cannot swallow this stuff about His being God!” Well, in the first place, Christianity does not say simply that Jesus IS God. Rather, it insists on calling Him the Son of God. What we must do here is think of the word Son in terms of function rather than form. What is the function of son in Biblical times? I have a friend who says that he grew up believing that God was left-handed. Why? Because the Creed says that Jesus is sitting on Gods right hand! But what is important here again is function, not form. What is the function of the king’s right-hand man? At the, king’s right hand was the Prime Minister, the one who represents the king; speaks with the king’s authority. Just so, Jesus as Son of God represents God, speaks with God’s authority. That is what the Creed intends to convey. But back to our Ladder of Understanding.
II. MANY ARE WILLING TO GO A BIT FURTHER UP THE LADDER AND SAY THAT JESUS WAS THE GREATEST TEACHER OF ALL TIME.
After all, he was called rabbi, and rabbi means teacher. He was (and is) the greatest teacher of all time. Who would wish to argue with this? After 1900 years His teachings still stand out. And who is to doubt that if the world would only listen to what he had to say, it would not be so close to the brink of disaster? Jesus said that Love is the one and only way in which life will work. It will not work any other way. All other ways are blind alleys. And here we have a paradox: millions of people proclaim Jesus as the greatest Teacher who ever lived, but only a handful dare to take His teachings seriously. When it comes right down to it, most of us are inclined to dismiss Him as an impractical dreamer. The meek shall inherit the earth, He said. What nonsense! The powerful have inherited the earth—and they certainly aren’t meek. But wait a minute. In our day, as never before, we are coming to realize that unless we stop being belligerent and start being meek, there will be no earth left to inherit! Jesus said that they who take the sword will perish with the sword, and today the sword is a nuclear weapon, and His words are more true than ever!
Jesus is the worlds greatest Teacher. If only we would listen to Him and live by His teachings! IF! Aye, there’s the rub! That little word. . . IF. Remember that poem that Kipling wrote on that one little word?? A minister was once preaching to a bunch of down-and-outers in a skid row mission and quoted Kipling:
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the world, and all that’s in it; And what’s more, you’ll be a man, my son!” One of the derelicts in the back row shouted out to the preacher: “YES, BUT WHAT IF YOU CAN’T?” The truth of the matter is that we cannot follow Christ’s teachings. That is, all by ourselves, we cannot. It is not natural for us to love our enemies; sometimes it is hard enough simply to love our friends. (And they probably have just as hard a time loving us, don’t you think?) We need something more than a Teacher. We need Someone who can reach down inside of us and change us, remold us, remake us into what God had in mind for us in the first place.
And then, let us not forget that a great deal of Jesus’ teaching had to do with Himself, and the special relationship which He claimed to have with God. His teaching had to do with the kind of God on whose behalf He claimed to speak. Death one day came into the home of Thomas Carlyle. A friend opened the New Testament for him and started to read the magnificent words of John 14: “Let not your heart be troubled. . . in my Father’s house are many rooms.” “Aye,” Carlyle said despondently, “If you were God, you had a right to say that; but if you were only a man. . . what do you know about it any more than the rest of us?”
III. AND SO, IT SEEMS TO ME, WE MUST GO ONE STEP FURTHER UP THE LADDER AND CONFESS WITH THOSE EARLY CHRISTIANS WHO WROTE THE CREED that Jesus Christ was not only a man, a good man, a great Teacher, but JESUS IS LORD.
In fact those three words were the first and original creed: JESUS IS LORD! The word Lord means simply, Boss. It means not only the One who is an authority, but the One who is in authority.
What, then, does it mean to say I believe in God—and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord? It means nothing less than betting your life on Jesus Christ. It means betting your life that He knew what He was talking about when He told us that God is Love; and betting your life that he stands by—even now—to strengthen and uphold those who put their trust in Him. For ultimately, that is what faith is all about. The Bible does not speak of belief. It speaks instead of faith. And both the Hebrew and Greek words for faith mean trust. Faith is not merely something you do with your mind. Faith, instead, is the direction your feet start going when you first come to understand, really understand, that God loves you with an everlasting and eternal love. Faith means betting your life on that love.
Note the tense in the sermon title: Who IS Jesus Christ? The question is not: Who WAS Jesus Christ, but Who IS He? For one of the strange enigmas of history is the fact that He is more alive to more people today than He ever was during His short sojourn on planet Earth. Napoleon once said to one of his generals: “I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.”
“No one comes to the Father but by me,” Jesus said. (John 14:6) Those words have given problems to Christians over the centuries. At first glance, they seem so terribly exclusive. They seem to imply that unless a person believes in Jesus Christ that person has no place in God’s presence. I would suggest, however, that by placing the emphasis on the word Father, we can find a new meaning. I believe that what Jesus is saying is that because of Him, one can come to know God as Father; that is, as infinite, unlimited, compassionate love. It is possible to come to other notions of God in other ways, but Jesus Christ is the one who revealed that God’s name and nature are love. In the words of my favorite Charles Wesley hymn: “Tis Love! Tis Love! Thou diedst for me, I hear thy whisper in my heart. The morning breaks, the shadows flee, pure, universal Love thou art. To me, to all, thy mercies move; thy nature and thy name is Love!” (No. 386, 1989 United Methodist Hymnal).
One of my favorite stories comes from the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In her days as Elizabeth Barrett she was known as the poor invalid of Wimpole Street, but then love broke through into her despondent life in the person of Robert Browning. Because of this love her life took on new bloom and purpose. She wrote to her husband, you remember, a group of love poems called Sonnets from the Portuguese, written in 1850, and probably given that title because of the influence of a 16th century Portuguese poet on her writing. The 43rd sonnet in Mrs. Brownings series begins with the well-known line, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. . .” But the line I would like to have us remember today is another one from the same set of love-poems written for her husband. Concerning her new-found love, she wrote: THE FACE OF ALL THE WORLD IS CHANGED, I THINK, SINCE FIRST I HEARD THE FOOTSTEPS OF THY SOUL.
I think it is that way with us and Jesus Christ. The face of all the world has been changed, since first we heard the footsteps of His great soul. Because of Him, we have a clue to that gracious Ultimate Reality which lies at the root of all existence. I think that these words express the authentic Christian testimony concerning Jesus Christ. The face of all the world is changed, I think, since first I heard the footsteps of Thy soul.
Amen.