"I believe in God, I think," said a young woman in relation to the words which were to be spoken at her wedding, "but I don't know what to do with Jesus. So could we kind of leave Jesus out of it?" An honest statement...a thought which many a confessed Christian has entertained...a doubt, I daresay, to which some perched on these pews might admit if pushed. I believe there is a God...but I do not know what to do with Jesus.What makes Jesus so problematic? So unbelievable? So annoying to the modern mind? Some would say it is not Jesus, so much as all the things the church has tried to say about him over the ages, words which have made our modern affirmations increasingly tentative: God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father....Throw in conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary and the church has lost the part of a reasonable public whose starting point for truth is that which can be proved. Incarnation is, in a word, inconceivable. Revelation which does not spring from our own reason must be ruled out of the question.
Which is to say, many of us would have sided with Arius rather than Athanasious back in the days when the church fathers were figuring out, for all time, what to do with Jesus. The doctrine of the Trinity was on the table. With Athanasius, Jesus could not be left out of the Godhead and salvation still assured. In Jesus, said Athanasius, we either had to do with God or with nothing much at all. Arius, on the other hand, believed Jesus to have been an extraordinary, even a one-of-a-kind human being. Arius, however, drew the line when it came to asserting Jesus' substantive kinship with God: God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God and so forth. I believe in God, said Arius in effect, but for God to be God, we have to leave Jesus out of it.
Which, in turn, leads me to ask after the God we think we believe in when we have sort of left Jesus out of it. For Arius, back in 325 A.D., what made God God, the essential mark of divinity was absoluteness. "We know," he writes, "there is one God, alone begotten, alone eternal, alone without beginning, alone true, alone immortal..." Alone. Other. Out there. For God to be God, according to Arius, God's being could not be communicated, could not be related, directly, to this world of God's making, could not be dragged into the give-and-take existence of limited and so merely human beings. We know, he writes, there is one God...if we leave Jesus sort of out of it. Though one is left to wonder how, without Jesus, we could even know that!
The irony, of course, is that it is Arius' notion of God which is entirely conceivable to the human mind. When pushed to talk about the God we think we believe in, leaving Jesus out of it, we can hold in our heads a kind of abstract notion of the Absolute. We can perhaps affirm "that God is," even though we are relegated to the silence of our minds to make up "who God is." At the least we may talk about a Principle, capital P, imprinted in the universe ...or a Cosmic Unity underlying creation...or an Intelligence ordering all things. At the most, we may tap in to a sort of free-floating Spirit connecting our inner being to some vaguely interested outer space...or we may hear the voice of God in the silence of our own souls...or we may find God lurking in the coincidences of our own experience. In any case, we can hold to some vague concept of God as long as we can leave Jesus out of it.
Therein lies what is really problematic with Jesus. There are so many other gods we can easily hold in our heads--gods that make so much more sense, gods that fit into our higher reason--if we leave Jesus out of it. We honestly do not know what to do with Jesus......We are not the first. Enter the woman at the well.
Left to her own devices, the Samaritan woman most likely was not known for her theological acumen. In fact the Samaritans as a whole, though they may have gained a reputation for compassion on the road to Jericho, could not be said to be very clear about the One whom they thus served in stopping by the way.
There are those who would contend the conversation reported in John's gospel between Jesus and this thirsty woman has nothing to do with her colorful sex life or her limited understanding of metaphor. Rather, they would say, it has to do with her people's propensity for whoring after other gods. "Go, call your husband, and come here," Jesus commands. "I have no husband," the woman replies. "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband,'" says Jesus, "for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly." The point was not with whom she slept, but to whom she prayed.P>
The Samaritans were syncretists. They took their cues, theologically, from the culture around them rather than from the sovereignty of the One who had, in the wilderness, been revealed to them. Hence there was Succoth-benoth, probably known through the Mesopotamian settlers and roughly translated to be the "daughter of the star of justice and right,"; there was Nergal, the god of Kutu, deity of the underworld; there was Ashima, most likely worshipped as a goddess, the secondary wife of Yahu; and finally Adrammelech and Anammelech, connected to the four great nature gods who capriciously played with human lives: all of them gods to whom the Samaritans prayed. Then, added to these five, according to the seventeenth chapter of II Kings, "they also feared the Lord...."
"You are right in saying, 'I have no husband,'" said Jesus, "for you have had five husbands (Succoth-benoth, Nergal, Ashima, Adrammelech, and Anammelech), and he whom you now have (the God of Israel) is not your husband; this you truly say."
From Mesopotamian cults to astrological configurations to eternally returning cycles of nature, such was the stuff from which the Samaritan gods could be fashioned: impersonal gods, detached deities at whose merciless whims the Samaritans bowed down. Even when the King of Assyria asked for a theologian to come and straighten them out, it did no good: "Every nation still made gods of its own, and put them in the shrines of the high places which the Samaritans had made....So they feared the Lord but also served their own gods...To this day their children and their children's children continue to do as their ancestors did," records the second book of Kings, ominously I might add. They did, that is, until centuries later, when one of their company--and a woman at that--stood before Him in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Clearly, she did not know what to do with Jesus; "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" He asked of her what she could not, of herself, give to him. The well from which she drew, the well of her ancestors, could keep a body going day by day. But a saving grace, a redemptive power, a life-giving hope: none of these gods could thus sustain her. Though, if she could just leave Jesus out of it, she likely could live the rest of her life simply skimming the surface of life's purpose and meaning ...praying to Adrammelech or Anammelech that the well not go dry...turning to a new god when and if she hit rock bottom.
What we know in the first place is that having to do with Jesus is having to do business with our own emptiness, with our unquenchable thirst for a truth which lasts, with our weariness in whoring after the gods who are powerless to save. He reveals to us our deepest need, even as he thrusts us assuredly on the grace of the Living God. One of the most difficult challenges before the church today has to do with proclaiming the gospel in all of its depth such that the paucity of every other supposed savior is, without a word, evident. He first reveals to us our emptiness.
But what we know in the second place is that having to do with Jesus is having to quit all other gods--another reason we would like to leave Jesus out of it. Jesus must relieve this woman of her other gods before she can know him as the Christ, the revelation of the Living God: hence this question from out of the blue concerning her husbands...her ba'als...concerning those to whom she has turned to uphold her life thus far. "They are no ba'als," says Jesus. "Sir," says the woman, "I see that you are a prophet," referring not to the fact that he knew her sordid personal history, but as if to say, "You seem to have become my critic." Could we just leave Jesus out of it?
We may not be syncretists, but we surely are a people and we certainly live in a time that would critique the Christ by way of the culture's idols long before we would judge the general culture by way of Jesus Christ. Ask yourself what the lens is through which you read the Sunday Inquirer...what the filter is through which you hear a Sunday sermon: patriotism, pacifism, feminism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism? We listen for a Christ who confirms our previously held ideals (Jesus as revolutionary, as patriot, as feminist, as social conservative, as thoroughgoing liberal)...and we would rather leave this critic, who questions the perspectives, who challenges the little gods we hold most dear, we would rather leave him out of it.
But if it is the Living God with whom we have to do in Jesus, then this story reveals to us a God whose claim is outrageously clear, whose identity is scandalously particular, whose grace and mercy are more powerful than we can bear to believe. For in him, the abstractions are over; in him, the distance is ended; in him all general ideas about a god are shown to the door; in him the God for whom we have searched in all the wrong places has sought us out at the edge of our dry wells...and has claimed us, by grace, as God's own. To this woman's vague affirmation of faith in a savior on the way, there stands this person in the flesh saying, "I who speak to you am that One."
"...what could possibly be meant," asked the Scottish preacher and theologian John Baillie, "by saying that any reality of an impersonal kind could exercise over me such [a claim] as that?...I have never been able to see how any being that is not a person could possess a moral and spiritual claim over me. That is why, as Brunner says, 'it is so much more comfortable to have a pantheistic philosophy than to believe in [the] Lord God...." So much easier just to leave Jesus out of it than to believe on the only One in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
What this little story is about, my friends, is knowing and being known by a God who loves us more than we could ever imagine. I dare you to hang on to some Cosmic Principle when your wife is dying...or to be comforted by some Universal Intelligence in the depths of your own despair...or to be claimed for a purposeful life by an Ideal constructed in your head. We were made, you and I, to live in personal relationship, day by day, to the One who made us and redeems us and sustains us. How in the world do I know that? The only possible clue I have is Jesus. I tell you, in him I know for sure that God is for you...that God is with you, even now... and, no matter what, will not let you go. In him, God of Gods, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father...in him God has come to us. So like the woman at the well, like John Baillie who, himself had "no choice," he said, "but to set my feet upon the pilgrim's way," the only thing I therefore know to do with Jesus is take off for the center of town, shouting Sunday after Sunday to the gathered crowd, "Come see him for your self," that you might say one day, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world." Thanks be to God. Amen.