WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?

Coming to know Jesus

In the church's great tradition, issues regarding Jesus are never just that--issues regarding Jesus. Issues regarding Jesus have always been wholly inseparable from faith in the One God, faithful and true. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, this God is utterly transcendent and holy, yet never remote, neutral, faceless, or equivalently absent. "I am who I am" (Exod. 3:14) means: "Never mind what I am, as long as I am with you." The living God is intimately present to every creature, especially to human beings. Augustine put it as follows: "You are higher above me than my highest height, and deeper in me than my deepest depth."

To Jews and Christians alike, God's intimate presence becomes a matter of common experience through witnesses. For the nations at large, these witnesses are the naturally discernible manifestations of God's provident care: sun, rain, seasons, plants for food and shelter, animals for company and food. For Israel, privileged to know the living God, the main witnesses are memorials, buildings, events, and persons: the child born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age; the cairn erected by Jacob at Bethel; the rescue of Joseph; the Tent of Encounter in the desert; the manna; the water from the rock; the person of the king; the Jerusalem Temple (read Yves Congar's The Mystery of the Temple). The most penetrating witness to God's presence became the Torah--God's Law. In it, Judaism believes, Divine Wisdom herself takes delight in dwelling among God's people. More dramatic witnesses are persons: Israel's prophets, singers, and sages, with Moses and Elijah, David, and Solomon as their respective prototypes. The Letter to the Hebrews features Jesus as the apex of a long line ("a cloud") of witnesses in Israel (11:1-12); the Fourth Gospel makes Jesus the witness par excellence: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." In the person of Jesus, Only-Begotten God, Temple and Torah Embodied, the Invisible God in person addresses the world (John 1:14; 18).

Issues regarding Jesus are never just issues regarding the Jesus of the past. At the heart of the Christian church stands Jesus present and alive on the ever-present strength ("in the Spirit") of the One True and Living God. "I am the first and the last, and the living One; I was dead, and behold, I am the One alive for ever and ever" (Rev. 1:18). Faith in Christ alive originates in what has been called, from the earliest tradition on, his Resurrection.

Christ's Resurrection is the origin of Christian worship and prayer, which inseparably links God and Jesus. For his part, Jesus is professed as Lord "to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:11); conversely, God is "blessed" as "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 1:3). And through Christ, "the Amen, the faithful and true witness" (Rev. 3:14), Christians say their "Amen," to the glory of God (2 Cor. 1:20). The source of all Christian speaking and thinking about the historical Jesus is faith in Jesus alive and present. A dead Jesus leaves behind only shame and disappointed hopes (Luke 24:2). Conclusion: Speaking about Jesus only in the past tense is essentially deficient.

History versus Nourishment

Remarkably, most New Testament writings, many of them older than the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke as we have them, say little about the life of the historical Jesus. They know that he lived in Palestine, lived for others, and was put to death by crucifixion and buried under Pontius Pilate. Still, they have much to say about the historic significance of the present life of Jesus, the crucified and risen Christ--the source and center of Christian faith in God. Now this historic significance of Jesus Christ is also what the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John as we have them are designed to proclaim. Accordingly, while the Gospel narratives (even John's) contain true recollections of what Jesus typically (and even actually) did and said, their point is not historical accuracy, but encouragement to Christian worship, conduct, and teaching. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Gospels contain events and sayings that the various faith communities attributed to Jesus by hindsight, inspired by faith. Christian faith, after all, is also creative. It creates history.

Now suppose I am an intelligent vegetarian in possession of an exceptionally fine cookbook entitled Vegetarian and Informed: The Profusion of Plants as Sound and Savory Nourishment. Needless to say, I am not only a happy eater, and a healthy one to boot; I have also picked up a whole body of information about nuts; lettuces; fruits with pips, stones, and countless tiny seeds; pods with seeds; the various grains; all kinds of cabbages; roots, tubers, bulbs, carrots, and beets; mushrooms of every shape; edible seaweeds; assorted spinaches, artichokes, peppers, and endives; edible flowers and even tree barks--you name it. The word profusion in the title is no exaggeration; neither are the words sound and savory nourishment. Not surprisingly, I have developed an interest in botany as well. But this is where the problem starts. My friend Kevin teaches plant physiology. Not only did he have little or no idea what I was talking about when I told him about what I know about plants; he did not seem to regard it as legitimate knowledge at all! He just smiled condescendingly when he noticed I had my Vegetarian and Informed in my study, even though, of course, my kitchen is its real home. What is worth knowing about plants, he told me, is found in botany books and related texts in physiology, period. He has a point, of course, but he is wrong. He forgets the nourishment part.

Now this reminds me of something. I read the Bible regularly, especially the Gospels. They are just as nourishing as the cuisine I cherish, except that the nourishment is, well, spiritual. I use the Oxford Study Bible, with the Apocrypha. There is much of interest there. From the introductions to each book or collection of letters or what have you, I have learned a great deal about biblical history--nothing like what I know about plants, mind you, but a fair amount. It helps me put what I read in context. But context is not content. My best clues to the meaning of what I read I find in the literary introductions and the footnotes, and, of course, from what I hear in church (when the homily is decent), in my Bible study group, and from prayer, especially the psalms and some of the New Testament hymns, embedded in the text of some of the Letters and in the Gospel of Luke.

Now comes this young friend of mine, John, a former seminarian. He tells me that the Bible is full of imaginary stuff that never occurred. Conclusion: You are pretty much on your own when you want to decide what any passage really means. One thing, he says, is certain: You must read the Bible critically, and you have to go to the latest scholarship to know what the real story is. Basically, what matters are myth and meaning, John tells me; for faith purposes, what actually happened is no big deal. Jesus may well have been a totally fascinating teacher or a countryside philosopher or a prophet who came to a sorry end; what counts is whether his example and philosophy are still relevant today. So the myth of Jesus is the real truth, says John. But I say, if you can't count on any historical truth at all, why bother? And if the Bible's "real" meaning is a matter of scholarly opinion, why believe?

Now John has a friend, Joe. He, too, is a former Catholic seminarian, but he told me he got so fed up with the radical stuff they taught him about the Bible in the seminary that he became a fundamentalist for a while. He came back to the church, though, and he is now considering a real, old-fashioned Catholic seminary. He tells me that if the Bible is full of stuff that never happened you might as well forget it. If you can't count on historical accuracy, he says, why believe? If the Bible doesn't literally mean what it says, what's the point? But I say, that's the easy way out of an obvious problem. Besides, Joe is quite uptight, and he has an annoying habit of correcting everything I say about the faith. Some priest he'll be some day, that Joe. He's got lots to learn.

Which Is Home to Which?

The home of cookbooks is the kitchen, not the study or the lab (although you can profitably take them there). The home of the Gospels, along with the other New Testament writings and indeed the entire Jewish Bible, is the Christian community meeting, not the study (although you can profitably take them there, too).

Now remember, the Bible ("The Book") only looks like a book. In reality it is a library, written and edited in the course of about 1,400 years. Small wonder you have to learn how to read it, and every part of it, the way it is meant to be read. Now many of the biblical writings are prophetic--that is, they deliver messages about mystery and precepts for conduct in the context of historical narratives. (Remember, some of the Old Testament writings we Christians call "historical books"--Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, and 1-2 Kings--are called "the Former Prophets" by the Jews, to this day. Israel's history, in other words, is to be read as spiritually significant history, meant to enable Jews as well as Christians to make sense of their faith lives now.) Now there is plenty of historical stuff in the Bible, but none of it is in there just because it is historical. As a Christian, therefore, you have to learn how to interpret passages that look like history in the light of your present experience of the Spirit. To pick up that art, you must agree to be part of a living, faith-guided, authoritative tradition of Bible reading (especially in the liturgy) and of reliable biblical interpretation. There is no inside track to biblical truth, not even for biblical scholars.

How about the historical Jesus? First of all, finding out all we can about the historical Jesus is completely legitimate and very important. What good would it be to believe in the Word made flesh if nothing historical were known or could be known about him? For all the noise the Jesus Seminar is making, it cannot be faulted for trying. There are problems, though. To some questions there simply are no satisfactory answers. Besides, even the fairest questions have agendas behind them, and often those agendas are hidden.

The search for the historical Jesus as separate from faith in the living Christ started well over two centuries ago, with an intellectual move made by the German thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81). Lessing was honest enough to state that he regarded the Christian faith as dead. In his view, it had gotten caught between the wrangling papists and Protestants to the point where it had died the death of a thousand senseless disputes. Accordingly, Lessing thought, the living Jesus Christ, once demonstrably present in the church by events and experiences of Spirit and Power, was a thing of the past; what remained of Christianity was only the historical record of Jesus' own religion. Lessing found this religion admirable; besides, it perfectly agreed with his own agenda: to develop a truly natural, reasonable religion. Many of Lessing's residually Christian and post-Christian contemporaries implicitly shared his agenda.

Lessing is only the first major representative of a modern tradition whose constant theme is: "Christianity becomes a superior religion once you understand it reasonably and biblically." In other words, this approach commends the Christian faith by encouraging radical reconstructions of it. In our day, such reconstructions are frequently offered as the fruit of the latest findings of biblical scholarship; they are usually touted as stimulating and original--which they often enough are. But what the reconstructionists invariably end up doing is projecting onto their "historical" Jesus their own (mostly unstated) prejudgments, agendas, and opinions. George Tyrrell (1861-1909) made this point by writing that the Christ they see, across centuries of Catholic darkness, is nothing but their own liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.

This "residually Christian" religiosity is the prevalent climate in North American Christianity. Fortunately, it values freedom of religion; more dubiously, it aims at being both "liberal" and "evangelical." There is one big difference, though, with Lessing's reasonable "superior" religion. For Lessing remembered there had been a normative Great Tradition. He still thought that calling yourself a Christian does not necessarily make you one. Flannery O'Connor made Lessing's point with characteristic candor: "Unfortunately," she wrote, "the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anybody with a golden heart."

The climate in which these radical reconstructions thrive is a surfeit of undiscerning dogmatism. Numerous modern Christians feel an acute need to emancipate themselves from the oppression of fundamentalism, biblical literalism, anti-intellectualism, and authoritarianism: "They told me what to believe, but I don't buy it any more."

This form of reasoning and self-justification is well over two centuries old. In Rousseau's Emile, the curate from Savoy explains that "having been born into a church which decides everything, which permits no doubt whatever, the rejection of one point caused me to reject everything else, and the impossibility of accepting so many absurd decisions also deprived me of those that were not. By telling me, believe everything, they prevented me from believing anything, and I did not know where to stop."

But surely this is untrue. There are other options. There always are. Yet the self-emancipators usually imply--not always consciously--that the only form of faith available in the Christian churches today is the mindless faith they themselves have rejected or at least qualified beyond recognition. But such residual dogmatism on their part makes these reconstructionists unreliable teachers.

How about the Jesus Seminar and Its Findings?

Seminar, schmeminar. It uses a cookbook in hopes of doing botany. Some interesting stuff has emerged, but the picture of Jesus it presents is long on fancy, short on taste, and shorter on nourishment. Interestingly, while the Jesus Seminar creates lots of discussion (though often curiously uninformed), it gives little or no rise to prayer or conversion. Maybe the Seminar is of interest to the religiously disenchanted--to the many who wish to give Christianity a quasi-informed good-by. But then again, the Seminar also appears to rely a lot on self-advertisement and free publicity, which I associate with entertainment. (Impertinent question: Who is putting up the money for the project?)

Now suppose I were asked to write a strictly factual piece about Jesus of Nazareth for Who Is Who in Religion in the First Century. I would decline. Why? While it is feasible to knock a concise essay together, it would certainly miss the person of Jesus. It would be boring as well, except, perhaps, for a few intriguing details. Jesus left no writings and we have no direct eyewitness accounts of his actions and speeches; all we can go by is what first-century people who believed in him have to say. And they worshiped him as the Son of God, in life, in death, in the New Life.

What I would rather do is write a piece on what people around Jesus thought of him. Jesus plainly provoked vigorous responses. From the Gospels we know that some Pharisees thought he was in cahoots with the Prince of Evil. Some of his own people tried to lock him up because he was thought to be out of his mind (Mark 3:21). He was made out to be a wine-bibber, an eater, a friend of the wrong kind of people. Some considered him a potential troublemaker--a "king of the Jews." Herod, who had reason to worry, imagined he might be John the Baptist come back to life; others thought the same, or figured he was Elijah, Jeremiah, or some other prophet. When Jesus asked his question, "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered he was the Messiah (Mark 8:29). Take your pick.

What would also be an interesting piece to write is an account of what people have made of Jesus over the past nineteen or twenty centuries. Over time, Jesus has continued to invite a torrent of interpretations and projections. In Jesus through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan has shown the range of what Christians have made of him. Ever so many people (including great souls like Mahatma Gandhi and Dag Hammarskjold) have found him humanly and religiously appealing; some have declared him a fraud. Then there is the whole in-between range. Jesus has been called a man so full of the Spirit that he was equivalently God's Son; he has been depicted as God dressed up in what appeared to be a human person; he has been called a magician trained in Egypt; some have maintained that in Jesus, the Word was indwelling a soulless human body (implying, of course, that Jesus had holiness in the bag and did not have any human choices to make). He has been called the Son of God not really affected by suffering; the scapegoat on whom God the Father, miserably caught between love and justice, had to take out his righteous wrath at sinful humanity. He has been depicted as the personification of true natural religion, as the embodiment of human God-consciousness at its best, as the romantic idealist who demonstrated that humanity at its springtime best is already united with God; as the teacher of that most noble morality: the primacy of love over justice and the infinite value of each individual human soul. He has been cast in the role of the prophet of the imminent end of the world, of the healer whose misguided zeal cut short his own noble efforts at offering compassion to the needy and the marginal, of the true leader of German Christians, of the true existentialist who acted freely out of authentic humanity alone and inspired others to do likewise, of a first-century cynic in the Palestinian mode, of a social zealot consistently taking the side of the poor and oppressed, of a revolutionary, of a universalistic Jewish teacher. Take your pick. Choose your own Jesus (otherwise he just might choose you).

A Brief Life of Jesus

Now suppose I was asked to write a brief life of Jesus that was both historically responsible and nourishment for faith. Here it is:

Jesus was a Galilean Jew from Nazareth, known as the son of Joseph and Mary, and a general mechanic by trade. When the Baptist began his preaching and baptizing ministry about A.D. 29, Jesus joined the crowd and sought baptism in the Jordan, showing a solidarity with sinners that was to startle early Christians, who firmly believed he was sinless. He began to go about from place to place, picking up followers as he went. His central theme was the actuality of God's Kingship in Israel, conveyed by his choice of the Twelve. He not only taught a new, unprecedented, urgent offer of salvation, but also embodied it (largely implicitly) in his very person. With everything he had and was, he called for total abandon to the living God and to God's new, mighty presence now; in so doing, he often defeated powers of evil. Not surprisingly, he was regarded as a wonderworker as well. He encountered people of every kind, in word and deed, in a bold, prophetic, at times even spectacular ministry of confrontation as well as compassion; in doing so, he was willing to set aside accepted forms of socio-religious discrimination. He assured known sinners of God's forgiveness and mercy, and did not avoid table fellowship with them as well as many others. He forcefully showed his disapproval of some less worshipful Temple practices. He challenged the definitive authority of the Law. All of this he did with an astonishing, authoritative freedom--suggestive of an original sense of mission.

No wonder he awakened long-cherished Jewish hopes. Could he be the prophet Elijah? The promised Son of David? The Messiah? Quite confusingly, however, his style implied an incomparable intimacy with God, in which he invited his followers to share (Matt. 11:25-27; 5:43-48). His person and ministry elicited faith, but not generally or for long. Miserably, he turned out to be altogether too much to take; he offended and scandalized many; he met with misinterpretation and rebuff. The fact that he ventured to do all this in a socio-economic environment made unstable by factionalism and political unrest made him politically suspect. That he insisted on taking his message to Jerusalem did not help him either, especially after entering the city in ragtag prophetic style. A few days later, he gently as well as prophetically accepted an extravagant gesture of love from a woman friend (she washed his feet with expensive perfume and dried them with her hair), interpreting it as an anticipation of his burial. In the end, he met with his disciples for a last supper, at which he showed them in prophetic sign and symbol that he was still holding out for God's kingship and was willing to give himself over--the servant of God and their servant. That same night, he was betrayed by one of the Twelve; at his arrest in Gethsemane, where he endured great anguish at the prospect of the inevitable, the others fled. Some women friends, who had followed him and taken care of some of his needs, followed his sufferings at a distance. Sentenced by Jewish authorities as a blasphemer, abandoned by almost all, desolate, and crucified by Roman soldiers as a traitor, he accepted the shame inflicted on him, and entrusted himself and his work to his dear Father's saving will. At the request of influential friends (and astonishingly for a crucified criminal), he got a decent, if hasty, burial, just before sundown on the eve of the Jewish Passover, most probably on April 7 in the year A.D. 30.

In retrospect, the treatment meted out to Jesus, who had "done nothing wrong" (Luke 23:41), reveals what human beings have intuited across all cultures, namely, that our world is estranged from God's original purpose: "He came into his own, yet those who were his own did not welcome him" (John 1:11). We yearn for a lost innocence, yet we are misguided in the pursuit of it. Enslaved by "the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 3:5), and prepared to kill to save our lives, we human beings are hell-bent on judgment, and resolved to champion what we consider right by overpowering those weaker than ourselves, by discriminating against those we consider outsiders, and by justifying ourselves by claims to moral autonomy. Both the just and the unjust will repay evil with evil, and let the Holy and Just One be traded for a murderer (Acts 3:14).

Put to this test (Matt. 4:1-11), Jesus clung to God, whom he called Abba--"Father dear"(Mark 14:36). He did not make common cause with sin, nor even did he "resist the evil one" (Matt. 5:39) or turn against anyone in judgment (John 3:17; 12:47). Instead, he deliberately took on, absorbed, and outsuffered the sinful violence inflicted on him and the shame of the cross--a form of execution reserved for foreign invaders, traitors, and slaves. Willingly taking responsibility for our sins, "he carried them in his body to the tree" (1 Pet. 2:24). Treating his enemies as neighbors even while suffering rejection and death at their hands, he remained faithful to his mission as God's agent of salvation, determined to let nothing get lost, but rather to bring it home, alive forever, to God (see John 6:37-40).

In this way, Jesus revealed a God who is "for us" (Rom. 8:31), "reconciling the world to himself, not holding their sins against them" (2 Cor. 5:19)--a God who "shows his love for us by having Christ die for us while we were still sinners" (Rom. 5:8). In the risen Christ, therefore, "we have an advocate with the Father .... and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world" (1 John 2:1-2). Consequently, Christians live "with their eyes fixed on Jesus, who sums up faith from start to finish" (Heb. 12:2), and who leads them on the path of long suffering he trod himself, to where he lives now and forever--"to the throne of mercy" (Heb. 4:6).

A Piece of Advice

We live in a world of religious and theological distrust. When you have read this essay, you may find yourself wondering why the author has left out this or that point you consider essential or included one you consider debatable. Please do not think from such omissions and inclusions that the author thinks the point you would have liked to see (or not to see) in print is unimportant (or indubitable), or (worse) that he completely disagrees with you, or, for that matter, with the Great Christian Tradition or the magisterium. After all, this piece is only a start. Besides, authors are only authors; they have their own limited "take" on the things they discuss. There is so much to Our Lord Jesus Christ that this little essay couldn't possibly contain everything--not even all the essentials. Nor could it possibly resolve every doubt.

Frans Jozef van Beeck, S.J., is the John Cardinal Cody Professor of Theology at Loyola University Chicago.