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The Secular Jesus Submitted by david b smith on 2010-09-02
related website http://www.fatherdave.org

One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, \"Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?\" But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, \"Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?\" And they could not reply to these things.\r\n\r\nIt\'s the Sabbath again and Jesus is doing what he does best - teaching, healing, and getting Himself into trouble!\r\n\r\nIt’s a marvelous story that contains all the elements that we love in the Gospel stories. Jesus is spreading joy and causing controversy while the fumbling Pharisees scurry about in the background, dumbfounded and exasperated. And yet I hear you say, \"didn’t we cover all this last week?\"\r\n\r\nOf course I don\'t hear all of you say that, as some of you weren\'t here last week, and some of you who were here last week aren\'t here this week, so you\'ll be forgiven for wondering what I\'m talking about, and yet the point is well made, for the Gospel story from Luke chapter 13, that we dealt with last week, has some very obvious points of similarity with this week’s story from Luke chapter 14 (the next chapter).\r\n\r\nBoth are stories of Jesus healing people and both healings took place on the Sabbath. In both cases the healings led to a confrontation with the religious authorities over whether it was legitimate to heal people on the Sabbath, and in both cases the religious folk ended up with egg on their faces (so to speak).\r\n\r\nOf course the stories are not identical. Last week’s story took place in a synagogue, and the confrontation was with the ruler of the synagogue, who I assumed to be a Pharisee. This week’s story takes place in the house of a Pharisee, who may or may not have been the ruler of a synagogue.\r\n\r\nIn the chapter 13 story, it was a crippled woman that Jesus healed - a woman who couldn\'t straighten up. In the chapter 14 story it is a man with \'dropsy\', which means that his limbs were swollen up. He may have looked something like the elephant man, in which case his problem may have been, in one sense, the opposite of the woman. She couldn\'t straighten up. The elephant man, if you remember, couldn\'t lie down.\r\n\r\nEither way, Jesus heals them both. The woman is straightened, the man\'s swollen limbs are somehow mysteriously deflated, and there is much rejoicing on the part of everybody, except these religious persons who just can\'t come to terms with the way Jesus - a supposedly righteous Rabbi and a popular teacher of religion amongst the people - could so radically flout the law of God by disobeying on the fundamental divine commandments as given to Moses on the stone tablets - ie. remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.\r\n\r\nAs I say, there are some differences between the two stories, in chapters 13 and 14 respectively, but the basic point of issue between Jesus and his antagonists is identical in both cases. It\'s an issue of law.\r\n\r\nJesus is disobeying the law of God. That\'s the charge, and it\'s a serious charge, and it\'s the sort of thing Jesus was charged with all the time, which is extraordinary when you stand back and think about it for a moment!\r\n\r\nWhatever people think of Jesus, they generally acknowledge him to be (at least one of) the greatest religious figures of all time. Yet the charge laid against him throughout his earthly life was that He was consistently irreligious! He was labeled as a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of society’s low-life - exactly the sort of characteristics we associate with irreligious persons. And He was seen as having scant concern for the law of God!\r\n\r\nOf course Jesus would say that He came \"not to abolish God\'s law but to fulfill it\" (Matthew 5:17) and yet that very statement is a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that Jesus did not deal with the divine law in the way in which religious folk normally did.\r\n\r\nThere was a divine law regarding what you could and could not do on a Sabbath and Jesus seemed to have very little regard for it. He seemed to be happy to re-interpret the law to suit Himself, and, significantly, He seemed to show little interest in giving any theological argument in support of His re-interpretation!\r\n\r\nIndeed, as I compare the two stories that lie (more or less) side-by-side in Luke\'s Gospel narrative, the thing that strikes me most in both instances is the complete lack of serious theological argument taking place between Jesus and the religious professionals!\r\n\r\nThis is what we religious people do: we argue theologically. And when a religious person re-interprets a divine law in some way such that they seem to be disregarding one of the ten commandments, the pattern we would expect is that they give some sort of theological justification for what they are doing.\r\n\r\nI want to focus on this today as I think it is really important, as I think it illustrates that Jesus not only had a different ideas about God from His religious contemporaries. He evidently thought about God in an entirely different way. It wasn\'t just Jesus\' conclusions that differentiated him from his religious contemporaries. It was the way He reached those conclusions. He not only spoke differently about God. He spoke an entirely different language!\r\n\r\nI was reading a report recently on a fascinating conference that took place in Melbourne recently - a theological conference on the subject of \"Trinity with tiers\" (that indeed I think some of our community may have attended).\r\n\r\nThe main subject under discussion was obviously the doctrine of the Trinity, but behind the discussion about the nature of God and the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit was a more clearly tangible debate about the nature and the role of women in the church!\r\n\r\nThose in the church who argue that women should always be placed in positions of subordination to men have been known to do so by appealing the way in which the pattern of eternal subordination is reflected in the nature of God, who is Father, Son and Spirit, where the three persons of God are equal and yet the Son is always subordinate to the Father. This then gives us a model (so the argument goes) that maintains both a nominal equality between persons while justifying a system that always gives the Son (or the woman) the lower place.\r\n\r\nThe key address in the Melbourne conference, I read, challenged this concept of eternal subordination which, it said was inconsistent with the Athanasian Creed, and suggested rather a concept of \'economic subordination\', wherein the subservience of the Son to the Father is seen as taking place only for a limited time and in a particular context.\r\n\r\nNow, if you don\'t understand a word of what I\'ve just said it really doesn\'t matter, for my whole point is that this type of esoteric theological debate is entirely absent from the Gospel narratives.\r\n\r\nWe take this for granted but we should not. If it had been any other Rabbi or religious teacher and not Jesus who went around doing what He did on the Sabbath this would surely have been exactly what we would have expected. We would have expected some sort of lengthy theological defense of his actions, such that He could show how healing people on the Sabbath was in fact consistent with the Sabbath law as written, or why the law as written needed to be re-interpreted or discarded.\r\n\r\nI\'m not saying that we should have expected dialogues about the eternally subordinate nature of any of the members of the Trinity, but we would have expected the citing of other pieces of Scripture, illustrations of the way in which Biblical authorities themselves had, at certain times, re-interpreted the Divine Law in ways that were consistent with Jesus\' actions. We would have expected some dialogue, perhaps, that took us back to the creation stories in Genesis and showed us how the basic concept of rest, as exhibited by God on the seventh day, was not inconsistent with creative acts of healing.\r\n\r\nWe might have expected some argument about the nature of God or the nature of rest or the nature of the commandments, showing that obedience to them should at certain points be made secondary to the immediate obligation placed on us by the needs of our neighbors’. We might have expected something clever and complex and worthy of a Rabbi of Jesus\' standing. Instead, all we get from Jesus is what seems more like an off-handed comment than any serious argument. \"If your ox falls into a well on the Sabbath, you pull it out, don\'t you?\" (14:5)\r\n\r\nThis was basically identical to the equally off-handed question He asked in the previous story, \"you give your donkey a drink on the Sabbath, don’t you\" (13:15). In neither of these cases is Jesus making any clever appeal to ways in which the Sabbath law can be extended to injured or thirsty animals under special circumstances. Rather, He is simply appealing to His hearers\' compassion. His attitude to their law is, in a word, dismissive!\r\n\r\nI remember we had a visitor to our worship service here once from a certain area of the United States, and he asked me how I justified allowing woman to speak during the service. I responded by pointing out that there were churches in the area where he was from where snake-handling was a key component of their worship life. It wasn\'t a particularly gracious response but I think it was consistent with the sort of response Jesus gave to so many of those who questioned Him. He just didn\'t get into a debate

Article No is 5387 Category is Religion

The Wounds Of Jesus A sermon on John 20:19-29 Submitted by rev. david b. smith on 2010-05-28
related website http://www.fatherdave.org

Welcome to the first Sunday after Easter - a day often referred to in ecclesiastical circles as ‘low Sunday’, for reasons that are surely too obvious to require explanation.  \r\nToday shares the title of ‘low Sunday’ with the first Sunday after Christmas - again for reasons too obvious to bear repeating. \r\nAnd this year at this time we do as we do every year on this low Sunday - we hear the story of Doubting Thomas again.  \r\nMost stories in the Bible are read every three years in accordance with the cycle of readings spelt out in our lectionary.  This story though is scheduled to be read every year, and again for reasons that I presume are obvious.\r\nWe love this story. The church universal loves this story. The church throughout history has always loved this story, and we can understand why.  We identify with Thomas in his doubting.  We understand his scepticism, we stand with him in his struggle, we see ourselves in his tornness and in his confusion.  \r\nAll this makes perfect sense to me, as the need to have a low Sunday makes perfect sense to me, and yet there is one aspect to this story that, to my mind, does not fit with all the obvious good sense of the first Sunday after Easter but which stands out like a sore thumb for me every year when I hear this story repeated, and it is this: why did the resurrected body of Jesus have holes it?!\r\nI’m assuming that you know the story as well as I do.  Forgive me if you don’t.  The date was Easter Sunday evening.  The doors were locked where the disciples were out of fear that the authorities who had destroyed Jesus might come looking for them next, and yet somehow it was not the authorities that came crashing in on their private gathering but Jesus Himself - previously dead but now very much alive, and He showed them, we’re told, “his hands and his side“.\r\nThomas apparently wasn’t with them at that fateful meeting but only heard about Jesus’ bizarre appearance to them second hand.  He was understandably sceptical and wanted to see Jesus for himself - expressing a particular interest in seeing the wounded hands and side:  \"Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger into them, and put my hand into his side, I will never believe!\" \r\nA week passed, and it must have been a long and tense week between Thomas and the rest of the disciples, yet happily Thomas was with the others when Jesus repeated exactly the same stunt again - somehow appearing in the room despite all the doors and latches that should have kept Him out.  And the first thing He does after saying ’G’day’ to the group was to show Thomas His hands and His side. \"Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Take your hand, and put it into my side. Stop doubting, but believe.\" \r\nAnd I don’t know if Thomas stuck his fingers into the nail marks in Jesus’ hands, and I don’t know whether Thomas thrust his hand in Jesus’ side as invited, but what I do know and what is quite clear at every step of the narrative is that Jesus was, in some sense or another, still carrying the wounds of Good Friday in His Easter Sunday body or at least the marks of those wounds, and that bothers me!\r\nJesus was in His resurrection body.  The body of Jesus had been changed through the experience of death and resurrection.  There is no doubt about that.  As this Gospel passage itself makes clear, the resurrection body of Jesus was not bound by the same earthly limitations as his previous body had been.  The resurrected body of Jesus seemed to be able to come in and out of locked rooms as Jesus appeared and disappeared, and that body evidently looked different, such that Jesus’ disciples sometimes at first failed to recognise Him.\r\nThat, in itself, is sort of what we might have expected - that the resurrection body would be something of an upgrade to the normal earthly version. \r\nWe look for the coming of a better world and Jesus, the Bible tells us, is the ‘first fruits’ (a sign) of what is to come (1 Corinthians 15).   As Christ has been raised, so shall we be raised.  As Christ was given a new body, so shall we be given new bodies.  And in that better world, where ‘the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ and where sorrow and pain give way to joy, our new resurrection bodies find an eternal home, which leads me to wonder though whether, if Jesus is truly our model here, all these resurrection bodies will still carry with them the disfigurements that came to them during their earthly lives?\r\nMaybe that’s how we recognise each other in Heaven?  Maybe one day one of you will come up to me and say, “Dave, I’d recognise that broken nose anywhere!”  It’s possible.  \r\nIf you’re familiar with Homer’s Odyssey, you may remember how Ulysses, after he returned from the Trojan war, was unrecognisable even to his own family but how, as the story goes, he was given a bath by the aging nurse, Eurycleia, who recognised him through a scar that he had on his leg.\r\nIn truth, it is our scars that identity us to those who know and love us best and, conversely, I suspect that the most significant part of getting to know someone intimately is in getting to know their wounds.  Even so, it is remarkable how the woundedness of Jesus has divided people religiously across space and time.\r\nOne of the earliest Christian heresies was ‘Docetism’ (from the Latin ‘doceo’ meaning ‘to seem’).  Docestists believed that Jesus only seemed to be human and that He only appeared to be suffering on the cross.  Jesus, the Son of God, could not really suffer of course.  He could not experience real pain.\r\nIslam, of course, followed in the path of the Docetists (in a sense) by denying that Jesus really suffered and died on the cross.  While Christians claimed that Jesus had suffered in their place, Mohammed claimed that someone else had suffered in Jesus’ place, for it just could not be that a prophet like Jesus could suffer and be wounded and die in such a terrible way!  \r\nSt Paul reflected very similarly, that while the Greeks might have considered the concept of resurrection to be silly, for his fellow Jews the very idea that God’s Messiah could suffer and die in such a humiliating fashion was not so much foolish as downright offensive!  \r\nEvidently the religious mind struggles with the idea that any Son of God could suffer and be wounded and die such a terrible  death, for it just rails against our entire concept of justice, and yet we know that the Gospels entirely embrace this.\r\nRather than trying to skirt around the death of Jesus, the Gospel writers assert it boldly.  Rather than deny the brokenness of Jesus, the Apostle Peter goes as far as to say to his congregation “by His wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). And even in these sketchy post-resurrection stories where so much is mysterious - where we can’t be sure exactly what Jesus looked like or how His body behaved the way it did, one thing is abundantly clear, and that is that the scars of Jesus were still there, and that indeed they were a key point through which His friends were reconciled to Him!\r\nIn truth, I do not know why Jesus continued to carry His scars in His resurrection body and I do not know whether this means that all of us will somehow carry our scars into eternity, but what I do know is that there is no way of sanitizing the story of Jesus if we are going to remain true to the Gospels, any more than we can rationalise pain out of the Christian life. We cannot remove the scars of Jesus for there is no Jesus apart from the suffering Jesus, just as there is no resurrection without the cross!\r\nWhen I was a younger believe I figured that if your life was touched by Jesus you would be instantly and completely healed from head to toe and that all your pains and ailments would be a thing of the past - whether they be physical complaints or addiction problems or a history of emotional abuse - all would be healed.  And I still believe in the healing power of Jesus, though we find, don’t we, that even when healing takes place, scars remain - old fears, struggles, memories that won‘t go away - they remain a part of who we are.  \r\nCan we be the people we are without those scars?  I don’t know. What I do know is that we are broken people.  And even when we have experienced the healing touch of Jesus in our lives we remain broken people.  And it is in our brokenness that we find ourselves reaching out to Jesus, knowing that He has been broken too.\r\nAnd maybe that’s the biggest reason of all as to why we love this story of Thomas so much, even if it might not be so obvious at first.  Perhaps it’s not only that we identify with Thomas in his doubts, but even moreso that deep down we, like him, are wounded people yearning to make contact with the wounds of Jesus?\r\nAnd so on this low Sunday when everything seems so straightforward, let us take a moment to reflect on what is perhaps the greatest miracle of Easter, even if it is not so obvious at first - that He who is risen is the one who was crucified, and (thanks be to God) that the one who was crucified is risen!\r\n\r\nRev. David B. Smith\r\n\r\n(The \'Fighting Father\')\r\n\r\nParish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four \r\n\r\nwww.fatherdave.org\r\n\r\nGet a free preview copy of Dave\'s book, Sex, the Ring & the Eucharist when you sign up for his free newsletter at www.fatherdave.org.

Article No is 2381 Category is Religion

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