JESUS, THE RADICAL

I grew up in a Protestant Christian home and attended church and Sunday school regularly. This is what I learned there:

Jesus loved little children (like me) and wanted them to come to him, even if there were adults in the way.
Jesus worked many miracles curing sicknesses, raising the dead, etc., proving he was supernatural.
Jesus wanted the world to be at peace.
Jesus told us to love God and our fellow human beings, even our enemies.
All we needed to do to have everlasting life in Heaven was to "believe in Jesus", which I learned meant to believe he was the unique son of God, that all the miracles were literally true, and that he was resurrected after he died.

As I grew up I, began having questions about what I learned, like:

After a loved one suddenly died, I asked: If there is a God, why do tragedies happen?
After taking many math and science classes, I asked: How did the miracles square with these facts I was learning?
After taking history classes, I asked: How could loving evil people be justified? What about Hitler?
After I experienced "godly" acts by other people, I questioned whether Jesus' divinity was unique?

In other words, as I learned that the world was a more complex, sometimes sad and, for many, an unjust place, my beliefs were modified. I eventually found a spiritual home with Unitarian Universalists where questioning was welcome, even encouraged. In fact, we say, "We live the questions." "We live the questions." In seminary and since, I had the opportunity to study the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. I'll share some of what I learned today, and I'll ask you to reflect on these questions that it unfolds:

What is history?
What is the place of prophecy in history?
Whose story gets told?
Why does this matter?

The Jews in Palestine

At the time that Jesus lived, Palestine was a back-water province of the Roman Empire. After being settled by the Jews in about 1200 BCE, it had been invaded and occupied repeatedly. The Babylonians destroyed the Temple built by Solomon and sent the Jews into exile in Babylon for 50 years, whereupon the Persians invaded and allowed the Jews to return to their homeland from Babylon. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great invaded. Two centuries after that, the Jewish Maccabees reclaimed a portion of the land of Israel, but were driven out by the Romans. The Romans remained another three centuries.

The Temple

The constant desire of the Jewish people during these centuries of exile and occupation was to reestablish their homeland and rebuild their Temple. This yearning, which remains to this day, is a continual theme in Jewish history. They await a messiah, an anointed one, who would restore the glory of David and Solomon, the Temple, and reestablish the nation of Israel. This was the meaning of "messiah" to the Jewish people.

The role of the Temple in Jewish life was primary. It had a number of increasingly holy courts. The innermost court was called the Holy of Holies. It was a gold-plated sanctuary which Jews believed that the Holy of Holies was the most sacred space in the entire world.

Nazareth

Nazareth, Jesus' home town, was a very small village of illiterate peasants, farmers and day laborers. It was so small that it wasn't on any contemporary maps. The birth stories in the gospels of Luke and Matthew explain that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. However, they are not in the earliest Christian documents.

Some speculate why these stories were written. They don't square with the historical record. Dr. Reza Aslan, wrote Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He explains that the definition of "history" has changed from those times to our factual understanding of the term. He says that writers then were less interested in what actually happened, and more in what it meant.

Jesus, after all, was a simple almost certainly illiterate peasant who died without restoring the nation of Israel, which was what a messiah was supposed to do. Aslan and other scholars assert the links to the Old Testament prophesies were added afterward to make him a credible messiah.

This kind of bending the facts challenges our understanding of what "history" is, but I contend that it isn't all that far from what we sometimes practice. Sometimes we are less interested in what actually happened, and more in what it meant, too. Let me give a couple of contemporary examples of how this alternate kind of "history" might work.

A contemporary example: Private Jessica Lynch was a soldier in Iraq when her convoy was ambushed and she was seriously injured and captured. Her subsequent rescue received considerable media attention and was the first successful rescue of an American prisoner of war since Vietnam. It was reported that she had combat experience and heroically fought back against her captors. In an interview months later, Lynch claimed, concerning the media and the Pentagon, "They used me to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things." We can speculate that we were all hungry for positive, heroic stories, so we created one to fit our need. The story was about what it meant to the hearers, rather than what was literally true.
Here is a hypothetical example: Suppose a wealthy but somewhat abrasive individual joined our congregation. He wasn't unkind or disruptive, just occasionally unpleasant, and sometimes the minister received complaints from someone whose feelings he hurt. (I assure you this is hypothetical. I have no one in mind.) Then, suppose he dies and leaves several million dollars to the congregation, enough so that we can afford to build our own building. My guess is that in the future, we would refer to him more as a benefactor than as someone who was sometimes difficult.

Revolutionary Acts of Jesus

There were a number of Jewish rebellions against Roman rule and failed messiahs who led them. Some of these failed messiahs exhibited what they called zeal. To them, zeal meant:

Strict adherence to the Torah and the Laws of Judaism
The refusal to serve a foreign master, i.e., Rome
The devotion to the sovereignty of the Jewish God

There was widespread feeling among zealots that the Jewish Temple priestly hierarchy which had been appointed by Rome was corrupt, interested mostly in power and money.

There are acts reported in the Gospels that show Jesus to be a revolutionary, in line with the zealot philosophy. They include:

Jesus goes into Jerusalem riding a donkey, which fulfills a prophecy in the books of Zechariah and the Maccabees.
Jesus goes to the Temple and upturns tables of money changers and releases sheep, cattle, and birds to be sacrificed. He proclaims, "My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves." There is an incident in the Old Testament prophet Nehemiah where he overturned furniture in the Temple.

Naturally, these acts of Jesus did not go down well with either the Jewish priestly hierarchy or with the Romans who want to keep order. For these offenses, Jesus was convicted of sedition, that is, engaging in zealous activities. He was crucified because his messianic aspirations threatened the Roman occupation of Palestine, and because his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities.

So one can say that the Jesus of history was a revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on Earth. He defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem. And he was a radical, charismatic Jewish nationalist who drew crowds of followers and who challenged the Roman occupation. This vision of Jesus has largely been lost to history. It certainly wasn't in the lessons I learned in Sunday School as a child. The reasons for this have to do with what happened after Jesus was crucified.

After Jesus' Death

After Jesus died, his brother James kept the faith alive among Jews in Jerusalem along with some of Jesus' disciples. James was highly thought of in the early church, and his message was similar to Jesus's message, and meant for the Jewish community.

Meanwhile, Paul, a Jew who had been punishing Christians, had a dramatic conversion experience and became a Christian evangelist. His was a different approach. He had very little luck in trying to sell his message to Jews, and finally had a fair amount of success with Gentiles in a number of communities throughout the Mediterranean area. This message redefined the term "messiah" to be the divine only Son of God, sitting at the right hand of God, and God made flesh. This was a blasphemy of the Jewish idea of a messiah. This was a new definition and a new religion.

Some scholars believe the miracle stories were added to the Gospels because they were characteristics of divine power, to emphasize that Jesus was divine. But there are others who believe at least some of them are legitimate - after all, we hear of people today who have healing powers. In fact, some in our congregation, including me, have experience with healing energy work.

Needless to say, Paul and James did not get along. The New Testament has examples of James' emissaries visiting Paul's congregations trying to undo some of what Paul said. And stories of Paul angrily trying to re-do his undone teachings. Yet even though Paul's vision of Christianity was reviled at the time by people who knew Jesus and what he taught, it is Paul's vision that has prevailed. It prevailed due to historic events. Chief of these was that most of the Jewish followers of Jesus, including his brother James, were annihilated in the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 CE. The letters of Paul to his various communities were the first written accounts of Christianity, written before the Gospels. Reza Aslan states, and I think it is true, that if it were not for Paul, there would be no Christianity. It would have been another Jewish sect that died out when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

Three centuries later, when Christianity became the state religion of Rome, Rome desired a religion that was peaceful and encouraged people to obey. Paul's Christianity fit the bill, or as some believe, was altered to fit the needs of the Roman Empire. I think some of these dynamics continue today.

My questions

All of this brings up some questions for me that I will pose for your thought and ideas:

What is history?
Is it what factually happened, or is it stories that people need and want to hear? How much of what we are taught as history is literally true, and how much has been selectively chosen and maybe augmented? In Jesus' story, we see a challenging of "factual history."
What is the place of prophecy in history?
Stories of Jesus' birth and some of his actions were added to match the prophecy of Old Testament prophets. Can you think of examples where this happens to the stories we hear today?
Whose story gets told?
Who writes the history and what interpretation are they putting on the facts that they are writing? I remember a quote by Winston Churchill which said, "I will come out well and Chamberlain will come out of this rather badly, where history is concerned. I know this because I intend to write the history." How do we know the viewpoints and maybe invisible biases of historians?
Why does this matter?
Does it matter that we are getting historical facts that are biased? What about the peaceful Jesus story that I grew up with? Is there something to admire in that Jesus? I think there is; it clearly worked for many people for 2000 years. Would it be possible for a false story to lead us to believe and do things that we wouldn't otherwise do? Think about the stories of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, or the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Finally I would like to ask: What are the nascent stories, histories and myths of today? Here are my own answers:

We should have compassion for others as expressed in the Golden Rule. This I keep from the Jesus I learned about as a girl, as well as similar sayings in other world religions.
The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. We need to be sure that it continues to do so by taking care of those who have been oppressed. Jesus clearly cared about the oppressed, and I share this sentiment.
This is one world and all human beings are inherently worthy. This I get from the intent of most systems of justice which aim to treat all fairly, and from my life work helping those who are commonly maltreated by society.
A life well-lived is a life of meaning and purpose. This I learned from my own life journey, and sharing the journeys of others. Jesus clearly thought he had a mission to live out.

Hmmm... Compassion. Justice. Worthiness. Meaning. This list sounds like some of our UU Principles.

Who do you think will write today's history? What events will alter the shape it takes? In the best Unitarian Universalist tradition, I invite you to live the questions I've posed today. Live the questions. I'd love to hear your answers.

So may it be. Amen.