What About Jesus?

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 3, 2010

 

^Reading

^{Luke 4:16-40, New Revised Standard Version}

4:16 When [Jesus] came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ¹⁸ "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." ²⁰ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹ Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." ²² All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" ²³ He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the [miracles] that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" ²⁴ And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. ²⁵ But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; ²⁶ yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷ There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." ²⁸ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹ They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. ³⁰ But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. ³¹ He went down to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and was teaching them on the sabbath….  ³⁸ After leaving the synagogue he entered Simon's house. Now Simon's mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked him about her. ³⁹ Then he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. Immediately she got up and began to serve them. ⁴⁰ As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

^Sermon

Here’s a new translation of a familiar Jesus story from the Gospel of John in a new translation by Willis Barnstone, a poet.  Notice that the names of people and places follow Hebrew rather than Greek conventions.

[John 5:1-10]  After this it was the Pesach of the Jews and Yeshua went up to Yerushalayim. In Yerushalayim by the Sheep Gate, there is a pool, whose name in Hebrew is Beit Zaita.  It has five porches.  By the porches lay a crowd of the sick, blind, lame, and paralyzed waiting for the water to move, for an angel of the lord came down into the pool, and whoever was first to go into the water after it was stirred was healed of affliction.

There was one man there who had been sick for thirty-eight years.

Seeing him lying there and knowing how long he had been there, Yeshua said to him,

Do you want to get well?

The sick man answered, "Sir, I have no one to put me down into the pool when the water is stirred up. And while I am going there, someone else gets there ahead of me."

Yeshua said to him, Stand, Take up your bed and walk.  And immediately the man was healthy and he took up his bed and walked around.

And that day was Shabbat.  The Jews said to the healed man, "It is Shabbat and it is unlawful for you to carry your bed."[i]

I wanted to reflect today on some of the kinds of meaning we here at Second Parish draw from the life and the story of Jesus.  To put it simply, I want to speak about who Jesus was, what he did, what he taught, and why he died.  Each of these inquiries is illustrated by the Barnstone translation of the story of the paralytic at the pool.

One aim of this translation is to return Jesus to his real context as a first century Jew.  Jesus was a Jew among Jews, and we sometimes lose sight of that fact because the original language in which the New Testament was written is Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, the lingua franca of that era in Israel.  You will have noticed the name Yeshua for Jesus in this translation – a name we also know from the Hebrew Bible, Joshua, leader of the Children of Israel after Moses died.  Moreover, Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi; this title is sometimes obscured in the original Greek in which the gospels were written, and then further obscured in our English translations by the use of words like “master,” “lord,” or teacher” instead of “Rabbi.”  It seems likely that the Greek was changed in some places to dissociate Jesus from the Jews during the earliest age of Christianity.  One other result of the fact that the New Testament was written in Greek is that virtually all of the names of disciples and all the others who appear in the story have been represented in their Greek versions – John for Johann, Simon for Shimon, Andrew for Andreas, and so on.  The one exception, Judas the betrayer, reminds us almost automatically that it was Judas the Jew who betrayed Jesus to his enemies.

These might seem to be minor points, except for the fact that within living memory priests and ministers have created a hateful distinction between Christians and Jews with evil consequences; and have based their teachings on the depiction of Jesus being opposed to “the Jews,” as if Jesus and his followers were not Jews at all.  We see this in the story of the paralytic at the pool.  It was “the Jews” who criticized the man who had been healed, when in fact it could only have been some particular group of people, perhaps Pharisees or lawyers or scholars – but sure not all of “the Jews!”  As Jesus reminded those who questioned his healing on the Sabbath on another occasion, the Law of Moses makes an exception to the absolute prohibition of work on that day if an animal has fallen into a pit; he turns their arguments around on them and asks if it is not equally reasonable to rescue a suffering human being on the Sabbath.

Of course, there is also the “blood libel” found in the gospels; when Jesus was condemned to death, the Jewish mob was reported to cry, “Let his blood be us and upon our children.”  The sometimes exaggerated and Westernized language of the gospels makes it possible to imagine Jesus as Nordic rather than Semitic, Western rather than Middle Eastern, capable of being domesticated rather than serving as a constant challenge to our comfortable assumptions about living and about dying.

Jesus was a successor to the ancient prophets of Israel, and the miracle is that his message was carried not only to the Jews but literally all around the world. His teaching has touched everywhere and it has changed the way lives are lived and the way living is understood in places far beyond the imagining of his followers two millennia ago.

Second, we ask, “What did Jesus do?”  The two examples I read from the gospel – the beginning of his ministry and the empowerment of the paralytic by the pool – show that what he did was to intervene in lives in concrete and critical ways – healing the sick and exorcising demons.  We can put different interpretive lenses on what this means.  For example, we know that expectations have a significant role in health and recovery; we know that elders live longer when surrounded by family and friends than when left all alone; we know that mental illnesses can be affected by the attentions of others.  We also know that physicians today have means far superior to those available in the times of Jesus for healing and sustaining our lives. 

Jesus cared for those who were sick and needy, but an important dimension of his care was that it was directed toward those who were outcasts from society because of their condition; people who were blind, halt, lame or possessed of evil spirits suffered not only from their illness but also from the revulsion and shunning they suffered from their neighbors; Jesus was willing to show compassion to those shut out by the conditions of their lives.

He didn’t limit his compassion and his welcome only to those who were sick or suffering; he also deliberately broke down walls of separation between teachers, rabbis like himself and those who were abhorred by the “righteous” people around him.  He ate with and taught tax collectors, sinners and even – the audacity! – women.  He refused to be bound by the conventions of his society, the banding together of the right sort of people against the wrong sort of people; he insisted upon inclusion for everyone.  In our reading this morning, he reminded the congregation in the synagogue in Nazareth that foreigners were favored by the prophet Elijah when he was sent to help a foreign widow survive a great famine, and Elisha his successor when he cleansed a Syrian leper but not the many lepers in Israel.  Not too surprisingly, the people in his home town were insulted and even wanted to kill him.  His teaching from the beginning of his ministry was one of radical inclusion, breaking down barriers between enemies.  The Apostle Paul spoke of the effect of this inclusion in his letter to the Galatians this way:  “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  (NRS Galatians 3:28)

Then, what did Jesus teach?  He taught the need for people to change their lives, to focus on the really important things on getting rich or being important; as he put it, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (NKJ Mark 8:36)  He taught that we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves for our prosperity or our success, because a great reversal was coming in which the rich would be poor, the mighty would be weak, and the high would be made low.  As he put it in our reading this morning, quoting from the prophet Isaiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (NRS Luke 4:18-20)  Focus on the real riches of life, he taught, not what you have or how important you think you are.  He taught peace and forgiveness, even toward enemies.

Above all, Jesus taught about the Kingdom of Heaven (in other places referred to as the Kingdom of God), which Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as the Beloved Community.  He said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is among you,” that is, together we have the potential to create a world more in line with justice and righteous and mutual love.  As he put it in the prayer which he taught his disciples, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  The heart of what Jesus conveyed to his disciples about this new kind of kingdom is in the Gospel of John:  “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (NRS John 13:34)

Don Robinson, minister of this congregation from 1957 to 1977, speaks of the parables about the kingdom of heaven in his book Jesus the Son of Joseph:

In all of [the parables about the kingdom of God, the basic idea seems to be growth, a growth, moreover, which is a natural process inherent in the thing that grows. Also in every instance there is a human agent, though this latter point may be irrelevant to the meaning of the parables. None of them suggests the arbitrary intervention of God in human affairs which is a fundamental feature of the more familiar eschatology [theology about what happens at the end of time]….  Is it not possible, or even probable, that these parables were intended by their originator to describe the age to come as the culmination of a slow development of potentialities already present in humanity?  …. [When he was asked about when and where kingdom would appear, he said,] “the kingdom of God is within you." 

These parables of the kingdom, the answer to the Pharisee and the petition in the Lord's Praye, are not only consistent with on another; they are consistent also with the ethical philosophy which we have reason to believe was Jesus' own teaching. To do the will of God is but another and terser way of saying to love one's fellowman as God loves mankind, who sends his sun and rain on just and unjust alike. The kingdom of God then would be that condition of human society in which every man loves his fellow as God loves him; a state of affairs that can come about only gradually, as each individual becomes capable of unjudging and compassionate goodwill toward all mankind.[ii]

Finally, why did Jesus die?  A great deal of theology hinges on this event, and in many churches the death of Jesus and its effects on the world and on atonement for sin are the focal point of the religion about Jesus, to the point of sometimes excluding his life and teachings altogether.  The Nicene Creed, the first great creed of the church, formulated in 325 A.D., holds that Jesus “was incarnate[d] by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man;  He suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven….”  As one of my professors in seminary put it, the entire life and all the teachings of Jesus on earth are contained in the semi-colon between those two clauses about his birth and his death.  Jesus died, it seems clear from the Gospels, because he promoted a different kind of kingdom than the one managed by the Roman Empire and the local leaders of the Jewish people.  People opposed to the existing order of things are often killed under oppressive regimes, as for example during the past century in Russia or Germany or China or Latin America and in many other parts of the world.  Like so many other rebels under the rule of the Roman Empire whether violent or non-violent, Jesus was crucified.  But his disciples carried on his teachings and set themselves toward the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus had taught them about, and in this way the teachings and influence of Jesus spread throughout the world and have survived for two millennia.

What does this mean to us here at Second Parish?  When we say in our covenant that we gather “in the spirit of Jesus,” and when we pray the Prayer of Jesus where we say, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we are committing ourselves to follow his teachings, to strive for the Kingdom of Heaven, the Beloved Community about which he taught so much.  We commit ourselves to visiting and offering a healing inclusion to those who are sick, or dying, or suffering from mental illness.  We commit ourselves to including those who are ostracized, hated, reviled, be they Jews or Muslims, male or female, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor.  We commit ourselves to opposing exclusion of all sorts. 

These are only a few of the meanings we can take from the life and teachings of Jesus.  As the Gospel of John puts it in the very last verse, “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”  (NRS John 21:25)  But these meanings are, I believe, the heart of what matters most about the Spirit of Jesus.  And here in this congregation that life and those teachings are among the many which inform our own lives; certainly not the only source, but the one to which we trace our roots and which we continue to honor.

May we order our lives and the life of our congregation in this spirit.

Amen

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Benediction (Forrest Church)

And now, in our going, may God bless and keep us.

May the light of God shine upon us, and out from within us,

And be gracious unto us, and bring us peace.

For this is the day we are given.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.     Amen