We are going walk a narrow path, traverse a fine line this morning. It is the line between knowing for sure, and being known in truth...it is the line between grasping historical facts here and now, and being grasped by history's saving end and purpose...it is the line between human reason and God's revelation...between knowledge and faith. We are going to ask, as theologians have asked for centuries, what to do with Jesus historically. We ask this, in part, because there is something in us which wants to know for sure that Jesus said what the gospel writers tell us he said, that Jesus walked where the gospel writers tell us he walked, that Jesus did what the gospel writers tell us he did. We ask this because we want to believe the truth of the biblical witness in a time when truth is determined by what our minds can verify as fact."Even for those who are Christians," wrote one recent biographer of Jesus, "the figure of the historical Jesus poses problems which are not easy to solve. What are the sources for our beliefs about Jesus? How do we know whether or not they are accurate? Is it possible for a twentieth-century reader of those sources to get close to this man, or to envisage with anything approaching accuracy, what he might have been like? How far does the Christian faith depend upon history? Would Christian faith collapse if it could be proved, for example, that Jesus did not exist, or that he did not rise from the dead; or is the Christian faith an essentially imaginative exercise, focussed largely upon myths which have been fashioned out of historical material, but remain only myths...not susceptible to historical analysis?"
These are the questions before us as we seek to walk that narrow path, that fine line concerning what to do with Jesus historically. Three roads are worth exploring this morning, the test of which is whether or not they help us walk the fine line of faith and understanding: the line which holds reason and revelation together, the line which connects history's events to faith's story. For you see, the human temptation, when figuring out what to do with Jesus historically, is to quit the narrow path and instead comfortably collapse the paradox of the Christian claim--that God entered human history and was made known in the face of Jesus Christ: a paradox without which we would be but poor philosphers, gathered for a Sunday morning seminar...or idle believers, subjectively sharing our spiritual experiences to pass the time of day.
So to the first road, a road currently taken by the so-called Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar is a group of academics who set out to determine, objectively, what we could really know about Jesus, historically. Beginning with his sayings and going on to his deeds, they wanted to clear away all the interpretive words, the layers of editorial addition, the theological presumption lurking in the gospels: they wanted to get at the essential Jesus.
To be sure, the method they used in constructing the real Jesus out of the rubble of the gospel accounts was very democratic: they voted on the historical authenticity of the content of the gospels. They began by putting on the table all the things Jesus was quoted as saying [you know, those red words in the old King James' version?] and, with color-coded beads, they voted: red: That's Jesus!; pink: sure sounds like Jesus; gray: Well, maybe; black: There's been some mistake. Finally, using the real sayings of Jesus with which they were left, they reconstructed the Jesus suggested by those sayings. One would guess, if we are talking about historical accuracy, every seminar participant would end up with the same Jesus. Curiously, their books and attempts at biography are as varied...or rather they are more varied...than the original gospels. For one, Jesus ends up as a politically correct revolutionary; for another, the charismatic founder of a movement; for another he is a "marginal Jew."
The question they raise for us this morning, once the voting is in and the authentic sayings verified, or even once the actual deeds sorted out from the layers of ancient interpretation, the question is simply: with what are we left? Did they not address our need to know for sure what Jesus really said and what Jesus really did? Perhaps, but what this road reveals is literally a dead end...a book of sayings which cannot even be made into a philosophical system...a compilation of acts which are neither here nor there in relation to our lives. "Just the facts, m'am," they said and discovered that verified words, spoken in human history and strung together, left them academically confident, perhaps. But it also left them with Pilate's question as they faced the fact of Jesus' life and death. To wit: what is truth?
What we learn, down this first road, is that having to do with Jesus in human history is having to do with a truth we cannot get our minds around, though we may have the facts! Dealing with Jesus historically is having to do with God's mind more than our own, with God's purposes more than our presuppositions, with God's actions more than our academic disciplines. What we learn is that, if we are having to do with the real Jesus, we are having to do with God, or we are having to do with nothing much at all!
All of which heads us down the second road meant to tell us what to do with Jesus historically. The scholar who actually cleared the wilderness of biblical interpretation and forged this highway was named Rudolf Bultmann. For Bultmann, history and historical fact were anything but objective. "When [man] turns his attention to history...he must admit himself to be part of history," writes Bultmann. "He is considering a living complex of events in which he is essentially involved....In every word which he says about history he is saying at the same time something about himself....Therefore, if this...is to be anything more than information on interesting occurances in the past [what the Jesus Seminar believed itself to be up to], more than a walk through a museum of antiquities, if it is really to lead to our seeing Jesus as a part of the history in which we have our being...then this book must be in the nature of a continuous dialogue with history."
Now we are getting somewhere! Or are we? For like the Jesus Seminar, Bultmann is first of all concerned to uncover the authentic sayings of Jesus, so as to be in dialogue with his message. He strips away the layers of early Christianity which put the early church's message in Jesus' mouth. He demythologizes the mythological language of the first century, so that we may understand the real meaning of Jesus' words in twentieth century thought forms. He digs as deep as he is able, into the biblical text, to arrive at the oldest layer of tradition, acknowledging that even here, we cannot be assured we are dealing with Jesus' actual speech.
Though he even takes a further step, the step which, for me, collapses the tension between fact and faith, sidesteps the paradox essential for faith's leap. "It is precisely this complex of ideas in the oldest layer of the [gospels] which is the object of our consideration," he writes. "It meets us as a fragment of tradition coming to us from the past and in the examination of it we seek the encounter with history." Now here's the turning point in the road: "By the tradition, Jesus is named as bearer of the message; according to overwhelming probability he really was. Should it prove otherwise, that does not change in any way what is said in the record [the message]. I see then no objection to naming Jesus throughout as the speaker. Whoever prefers to put the name of 'Jesus' always in quotation marks and let it stand as an abbreviation for the historical phenomenon with which we are concerned is free to do so." What to do with Jesus historically? Distill the message and disgard the messenger, thereby suggesting that, if it were proved that Jesus never had been born, lived, died and was raised, it would not matter.
What matters on this road is the message in its purest form [without the gospel writer's claims about its meaning or the early church's additions]. The message becomes history every time we encounter it in our own histories. "Jesus" [in quotes] enters history at the point of our own personal encounter with him here and now. Whether or not he actually lived does not affect the truth of our experience, the reality of our encounter, the change in our self-understanding, the content of the message. There must be another road.
There must be a road not so easily travelled in our minds, a road down which we are taken by Him who both accompanies us as saving grace in our human histories and awaits our arrival, at the end of our journey, as Savior of the world. According to Luke, the road on which we have to do with Jesus historically is, I do believe, the Emmaus road.
The Emmaus road, on which walked two followers of Jesus who had actually heard him say what the gospel writers say he said... who had seen him do what the gospel writers say he did...who had walked where the gospel writers recorded he walked. Here we have two followers who had heard his message with their own ears, seen him with their own eyes, and trusted the experience enough to be counted with the disciples in the aftermath of the crucifixion. Still, they awaited the gift of faith which fact cannot bestow. All that they had seen and heard and experienced with Jesus, all that could have been caught on a video camera had such been available, did not lead them to faith. In fact, they found themselves on the Emmaus road as those full of doubt and disbelief about the meaning of Jesus' life and death. They did not know what to do with the Jesus they had known in their own histories.
I think it is so, that when we do not know what to do with Jesus historically or aesthetically or ethically or theologically, when all the understandings of Him we have constructed and all the experiences of Him we have conjured are of no avail...when we find ourselves walking down a road not of our own choosing...full of doubt and disbelief and disappointment: there the real Jesus finds us. There he questions us, not we him, and we tell him the facts as we know them. Foolish, he calls us, and slow of heart. For though we may have the facts straight, we have missed their meaning and the God who would be known in them. Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he introduces us to the history that is his, to God's saving purposes in history, to salvation history. Still we do not connect the One who has come to us now with the One of whom scriptures speak. But we trust him enough to invite him in, urge him to spend the night, set a place at table for him.
Finally it is there, at table...and then a few miles up the road in Jerusalem...where Luke holds fast the fine line, the narrow path, the paradox of the historical Jesus and the salvation history his gospel's orderly account has revealed. At a table like the one in your kitchen, Jesus breaks bread and they know the risen Christ to be the same Jesus with whom they had eaten before. Then again, as they are gathered on Jerusalem's streets, they think they see a ghost but the ghost bids them touch his hands and his feet and they know the risen Christ to be the same Jesus beneath whose cross they had wept and from whose side they had fled.
What has this to do with you and me some two thousand years hence? Only this, says Albert Schweitzer in his watershed book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side. He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the task which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who His is. " What to do with Jesus historically? Do not despair, for the real Jesus is, even now, having historically to do with you! Thanks be to God. Amen.