The Four Faces of Jesus

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© Davidson Loehr

23 May 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Prayer

We pray not to something, but from something, to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: “The Four Faces of Jesus”

It was a time of terrible fighting. Everywhere people were divided into separate groups, like little clubs. And everywhere they fought against all the people who weren’t in their little club.

They all said they hated the fighting, of course. But they all knew that only the people in their little club were really right – and it is so important, being right. And as long as so many others were wrong – well, they all prayed that God would give them victory so the fighting could stop. But in the meantime, it was a time of terrible fighting.

One day a young magician came to the area. He didn’t belong to any of their clubs, but he was a wonderful magician who did some amazing tricks. And he had that kind of “star quality” about him that drew people to him. Many people loved watching him, though they didn’t much care for listening to him, because of the things he said to them.

What he said to them was that if they weren’t divided into so many little clubs, there wouldn’t be so much fighting. Their clubs, he told them, were the cause of their wars.

To the people, this was about the dumbest thing they had ever heard. Their little clubs gave them a tiny area of peace and friendship among people like themselves, in an otherwise hostile world. They liked their clubs. So they almost never listened when the magician tried to teach them. But they loved his magic, and so kept coming to watch him, and they started telling stories about what a great magician he was.

Years later, after the young magician died, a funny thing happened, though it wouldn’t have seemed funny to the magician. People formed a new club. And to be in this new club, you had to believe all the stories they told about the young magician. They even made pictures and statues of him, and put them up in their meeting-places, so people could remember how great he had been.

The club became very popular, and soon had thousands of members. Before long, they even had an army.

That’s when they finally decided that they could use their army to end the fighting once and for all. Their priests and generals went to their meeting-places – which had become churches – and sort of talked to the pictures and statues of the dead magician, as if to ask his blessing. After all, hadn’t the young magician always talked about bringing peace?

Then they went to war. It was a long war, and many people were killed or wounded. But their army was bigger, so they won. And they forced many, many people to come into their club, because they wanted them to be right – it is just so important to be right.

After the battles, their priests and generals went to church to give thanks. They stood before the pictures and statues of the dead magician, and told him their proud story of the victorious battle.

That’s when the miracle happened. Just as all the priests and all the generals were looking up at the statues telling them about their successful wars, it happened: all the pictures and all the statues began to cry.

The young magician, of course, was Jesus.

There are risks in stripping a man like Jesus of his halo and asking what kind of man he was, and how wise his teachings really were. It offends the popular romantic picture of Jesus as the Son of God and supernatural savior of humankind. Yet for over two centuries, scholars have known that those were mythic attributes invented by his followers long after he died, and that the real Jesus was 100% human – since that’s the only category there is for us. Calling him a “son of God” was poetry, not biology or genetics. We don’t like in a world constructed in such a way that people can receive half their chromosomes from a human and the other half from a sky-god – and neither did they.

I want to respect the truth without worshiping the myth this morning, by suggesting that this man Jesus had at least four different aspects, or “faces.” One aspect was useless, a second – the most “magical” – was real, but not supernatural. A third was just wrong. Then there is that fourth face of Jesus, which still seems to look into our souls with uncomfortable accuracy.

1. Jesus as an Itinerant Cynic Sage

The first face of Jesus concerns his life style, his personal values, the kind of role model he would have been. This is the dimension of Jesus that has hardly even been discussed, because it is so bizarre. For instance, see how many sermons you’ve ever heard preached on these quotations attributed to Jesus:

“Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be a follower of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters – will not be worthy of me.” (Gospel of Thomas 55) – Not the text for a “family values” sermon!

On another occasion, a woman from the crowd spoke up and said to Jesus, “How fortunate is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” It was a conventional way of handing a compliment to the mother through the son, like saying “your mother must be very proud of you.” But Jesus replied, “How fortunate, rather, are those who listen to God’s teaching and observe it!” (the Q Gospel, in Luke 11:27-28). – This one would be a bad Mother’s Day text!

And the last quotation is the most extreme and the most famous. It comes from the gospel of Luke, where Jesus says “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Q Gospel in Luke 12: 51-53) – You seldom hear the Christian Right preaching on this one, either!

These sayings don’t fit the traditional picture of a sweet Jesus who preached family values. They show us some of Jesus’ personal values and lifestyle, and make him seem very strange and foreign, not to mention unappealing. For most of the styles of living that Jesus exemplified have never had many takers.

This is the profile of someone on the fringe of any culture at any time. Scholars recognize this profile, however. It was a marginal but well-known style of living in the ancient world. From about the fourth century BCE until the sixth century CE, there was a name for this style of living exemplified by Jesus. These were the people called cynics.

Some scholars describe Jesus as an “itinerant cynic sage.” The name itself is derogatory, given to the “cynics” by their detractors (the way most such names originate). It came from the Greek word for “dog,” and was meant to imply that cynics lived like dogs. They had no home, no property, no spouses, no fixed circle of friends, no jobs, and no love for the society in which they lived. Cynics didn’t offer a correction of society so much as they offered an alternative to society.

The best of the cynics were astute social critics: they were like secular versions of the Old Testament prophets, standing outside the accepted order of things, trying to subvert it.

Someone who could live a life in this manner had to be, among other things, extremely focused and dedicated to his particular vision. For history’s most famous cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, the vision was one of personal autonomy, freedom from the unnecessary demands of society. An old story makes the point:

The king’s messenger came to find Diogenes, who was squatting in the street, eating his simple meal of lentils. “The king invites you to come live in his castle,” said the messenger, “and be one of his court advisors.”

“Why should I?” asked Diogenes.

“Well for one thing,” said the messenger, “if you’d learn to curry favor with the king you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.”

“And if you would learn to like lentils,” replied Diogenes, “you wouldn’t have to curry favor with the king.”

The message of cynics was always extreme, and they were willing to sacrifice everything for it. Furthermore, they generally thought that everyone else would also be better off abandoning the society’s vision of life and adopting their cynic vision. Their message was to individuals. They didn’t belong to or care about a real community. They weren’t social reformers. They thought society was fundamentally wrong, and people should “tune in, turn on and drop out,” to recapture that slogan from the Hippie years.

Jesus fits very neatly into this conception of a cynic sage. He had no home, property or job. He didn’t respect the accepted images of “the good life” or the normal expectations made upon people in a civilized society – the religious and cultural rules that gave people their social identities, for example. His vision of the “Kingdom of God” was, for Jesus, the only thing worth living for. His parables presented the “Kingdom” in this extreme way over and over again: it was a “pearl of great price,” a “treasure buried in a field” for which the lucky finder would sell everything.

What must be noted about cynics, including Jesus, is that their message is never likely to be heard or followed except for the extremely marginal person – another cynic. Husbands, wives, children, the joy of working at a job, making a contribution to society, nationalism, ethnic or religious pride of identity – all these counted as nothing for cynics compared with their singular vision. In Jesus’ case, his entire family was treated as though they counted for nothing compared with his vision of the “Kingdom of God.” This doesn’t make Jesus exceptionally cold or uncaring, it just identifies him as one of history’s great cynics – and a sage whose vision was sometimes too extreme to be either useful or wise to the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, then or now.

And so the first face of Jesus was his cynic lifestyle. It was a huge part of who he was and what he valued. For nearly everyone in history except other cynics, however, it was not a wise road to follow, but a useless aberration.

2. Jesus the Faith-Healer

Virtually all biblical scholars agree that Jesus was a man with great charisma, and a remarkable ability for what we today call “faith healing.” While almost all scholars agree that the stories have been greatly exaggerated, and that scenes like”walking on water,” raising Lazarus from the dead or feeding 5,000 people from a few fish are all Christian mythmaking, the core fact remains that Jesus was primarily known in his time and in the early centuries as a gifted healer. It was this almost magical power that really attracted people to him, even if they didn’t understand, or didn’t want to hear, the things he wanted to teach. His followers also shared this healing power, though not to quite the same extent as did Jesus.

There is nothing here to debunk, except to note that this kind of charismatic power doesn’t necessarily imply that the healer is wise or good. There are still lots of faith healers today, from Oral Roberts to Bennie Han. Furthermore, the principle of faith healing is behind placebos — those sugar pills that can often make your symptoms disappear if you think they can. It is easy to think of other historical figures who also had immense charisma and personal power over other people, who were unwise or evil: Rasputin, Hitler, Jim Jones, Matthew Applewhite, and David Koresh come quickly to mind. Not all wise people are magicians, and not all magicians are wise. Still, Jesus was one of history’s gifted faith healers.

3. Young Idealist Without a Concept of the “Sangha”

The third face of Jesus shows a severe limit to his vision, one that would have almost undoubtedly relegated him to the dustbin of history without the contributions of St. Paul. That statement alone is enough to upset or enrage many who love Jesus and can’t stand Paul.

The ethical teaching most associated with Jesus is the Golden Rule. While he is reported to have said it means to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it has also been equated for twenty centuries with another of Jesus’ sayings: “turn the other cheek.” Some radical Christian sects, like the 14th Century Cathari group in France or the 16th century Mennonites in Germany, took this literally and refused to resist the violence of others altogether. This led to the slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of Cathari, and the slaughter of most of the first generation of Mennonites.

It wasn’t a new teaching. It had been around at least five hundred years before Jesus came along. We know this because we have the story of one of Confucius’ followers asking him five centuries earlier what he thought of the idea of repaying evil with forgiveness. Confucius thought it was a dumb idea. “With what, then,” he asked, “will you repay goodness?” Instead, Confucius taught that we should repay evil with justice and repay good with good. Confucius lived to be much older than Jesus did; perhaps this just shows the greater wisdom of a much older man.

Others have said that if you want to see a place where people have lived by the rule of turning the other cheek, go to a battered women’s shelter. It was a very idealistic teaching, but not a wise one, unless you are in a community where all are treated with respect.

And that’s the second and more important limitation on the teachings of Jesus. All of his teachings were directed to individuals. He did not come to reform Judaism; he didn’t come to start a new religion or found a new church. He had no home, no job, no community, and he never addressed the necessity for a healthy community in his teachings.

A quick look at Buddhism can help understand what Jesus omitted. Buddhists say you must have three things to become awake, enlightened. You must have Buddha, dharma, and sangha. Buddha means a center, a source of authority and inspiration. Dharma means the personal work that you must do. Jesus, you could say, taught that you must have God and dharma: you must live as God wants you to live. But he had nothing at all to say about the sangha. The sangha is the supportive community devoted to serving these high ideals, like a good church. And the Buddhists are right: we’re not likely to do the growth and awakening we need alone. We need a supportive community, a faith community, a church. Jesus never mentioned this.

It’s ironic – especially for people who like Jesus but dislike Paul – but the concern for community was what Paul contributed, making it possible to create a religion out of the memories, myths and teachings of Jesus. Without Paul, Jesus was just another teacher who stressed individual duties but neglected to address the necessity of being part of a community of faith.

4. Subverter of Artificial Identities

It’s hard to know what to call the fourth face of Jesus. As all biblical scholars know, Jesus’ primary concern was for what he called the Kingdom of God. What Jesus meant by this Kingdom of God was fundamentally different from what most Christians have meant by the phrase. Properly understood, it was Jesus’ most radical teaching. It was also his most profound and timeless, and his fourth “face.”

The phrase “the kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus. It was a popular phrase in the first two centuries, used by many people. It meant the ideal world, the kind of world that could have the most compassion and justice. John the Baptist, who had been Jesus’ teacher, said the world was too far gone to save, that we should wait for God to destroy it all and start over with the right kind of people — those who believed as John the Baptist did.

After John the Baptist was killed and the end of the world didn’t come, Jesus emerged as a charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him. But Jesus’ message was very different. John’s “kingdom” was to be supernatural; for Jesus, the kingdom of God was existential, here and now, not in a world to come.

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God wasn’t coming. It was already here, at least potentially, within and among us. Or as he said in another place, the kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.

How do you rejuvenate a hostile world? That has almost always been the question to which our greatest sages have offered their different prescriptions. For John the Baptist, as for many apocalyptic preachers today, we have to wait for God to act. For Jesus, God was waiting for us to act. And we act, we create the kingdom of God, or the best possible world, simply by treating all others as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. What Jesus was doing was attacking and subverting exclusive identities, identities that make us feel special or “chosen” at the price of casting others into a second-class status.

This sounds sweet and nice, but it’s a dangerous thing to teach. For instance, the food laws of the Jews set them apart from their neighbors. So Jesus’ instructions to his followers were to eat whatever was set before them: pork, shellfish, goat, whatever the host was serving. The Jews hated the Samaritans, who bordered them to the north, more than they hated almost anyone. So Jesus told a story about a beaten Jew lying by the side of the road, when priests passed him by and the only person who helped him was a Samaritan. During their high holy days, the Jews ate only unleavened bread. So Jesus said the kingdom of God is like leaven that you put in dough to make it rise. Over and over, he spurned the artificial identities that set us apart from others. There was only one identity possible for us in the Kingdom of God: to treat one another as brothers and sisters.

Do you see how subversive this is? This is a message that could threaten any form of government, all ideologies, and all religious or racial identities. The world is in chaos, we’ve lost a shared center, so we create a hundred little artificial centers, or “clubs,” from which we get our identities. The problem is, they’re all too small, all exclude those who believe or live differently than we do, and so they’re precisely the structures that keep the world hostile.

Today, his message might be Stop joining clubs! Stop identifying yourselves with your nation, your race, your religion, your political party or your sex. All of these are ultimately divisive identities that make a peaceful world impossible. You want the Kingdom of God? You want a world of peace and justice? It’s in your hands, and only in your hands. You’ve been given everything you need, now it’s time to act.

This is a message that would still get the messenger killed almost anywhere in the world. Imagine going into Northern Ireland a few years back, telling the fighters that neither side is Christian, both are agents of evil, and they need to stop thinking of themselves as Protestants and Catholics, because those identities are themselves the problem. The only thing the two sides would agree on would be lynching you from the nearest tree.

Imagine trying to sell that message to the Jews and Palestinians, telling them the only way to stop the murderous fighting is to grow beyond thinking of themselves as merely Jews or Palestinians, and begin seeing each other as brothers and sisters, the children of God. You’d be shot!

I don’t want to imply that Jesus was the only person in history to see this vision of a world kept small and hostile by our artificial identities and our territorial impulses. You can find this idea that we are all brothers and sisters in many religions, many cultures. You also find it in cultures that never had contact with any Western civilization. Remember these lines from this morning’s responsive reading by the Lakota Sioux Medicine Man Black Elk:

And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight. And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

These things aren’t true just because Jesus or Black Elk or the others said them. They are true because they have seen to the essence of what it means to be human, with a clarity few people in history have ever had. I don’t know of any way to argue against that insight. It seems deeply, profoundly, eternally correct. Our human or animal tendencies to create artificial identities for ourselves are the original sin of our species. We feel bigger and more worthwhile as parts of a family, a nation, a race, a culture. So naturally we join the little clubs and wave their flags, and we wait for Jesus’ second coming so there might be peace in the world.

The real tragedy of a man like Jesus isn’t that he has had so much silly hokum dumped on him through the ages – though God knows he has. The tragedy is that we elevated him into a man-God, then joined the religion of John the Baptist who expected this man-God to come save the world for us, as we sat silently by reciting whatever creeds our little religious or political or social cult has declared to be the current orthodoxy. We took the man who lived and died preaching against divisive identities, and created a club around his name. It is a cruel and ironic fate for the simple Jew from Galilee.

The tragedy is that this strange man, this marginal Jew without family, friends, property or job, really did have something to offer us, and nobody wants it. It’s too hard. It asks too much of us. So we found a simpler route. We made thousands of mental and physical pictures and statues of this man Jesus, whom we turned into a Son of God. And we pray that he, through his infinite power, will bring peace to this world in which we’re making war by identifying with our tiny religion, nation, party, race or territory. Then we say Amen, go outside, and prepare for the day’s battle against the infidels in the next church, next town, next nation.

And then I imagine the rest of the story. I imagine that all over the world, as people leave their churches, they turn their backs on the pictures and statues of Jesus they’ve made. And after they’ve gone, all over the world, in the cold darkness of the empty churches, all of the pictures and all of the statues begin to cry.