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Who is Jesus?

Matt 2: 1 – 23

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 24 Dec, 2006

WHO IS Jesus? People often ask that kind of question, maybe not in those words. They make statements. “He is a prophet. He is a teacher. He is a voice from the past.”

Jesus asked his disciples,

Who do you say that I am?

It’s a good question. And don’t forget that a question is merely a statement in an uncertain voice.

People say, “Jesus is a prophet,” but they mean, “Can you show me otherwise?”

Each gospel attempts to answer the question, “Who is Jesus?” Each gives a different, but complementary answer. Paul gives another answer, also related to what the gospels say. Perhaps it is time for us to look more closely and see whether we are giving the right answer to the question.

When we had the clay modelling day a few weeks ago, Toni remarked that, when she was studying art, she learnt that early Christian art rarely depicted Jesus dying on the cross. Early representations showed him as Christos Pantokrator — Christ, the Ruler of everything.

But in the middle ages, when plague broke out, and people died in their thousands, the idea began to grow of Jesus as the suffering saviour who shared in our human sufferings.

Both ideas are in the Bible, but the emphasis fell in a different place.

I was thinking about what Toni said. I remembered reading some Coptic literature, looking at Jesus from the perspective of Egyptian Christians, and was fascinated by the way they interpret the Bible.

They talk about how the Egyptians often oppressed the Israelites. But then they go on to look at how they played host to Jesus and his family when they had to flee Israel and take refuge in Egypt.

They feel that, in some way, the Egyptian people made amends for their earlier wrongdoing, by welcoming the Saviour when his own people tried to kill him.

We all see Jesus in different ways.

Each gospel shows the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in a different light. We will look at his beginnings this morning.

MARK: The Bringer of the Kingdom

The earliest of the gospels was probably Mark’s. Scholars still debate it, but most put Mark before the others. He certainly wrote before 70 AD. Most commentators say that he wrote around 60 – 65 AD, but some think he wrote even earlier, maybe in the 40s or 50s.

How does Mark present Jesus?

Mark says nothing about his birth. We first meet Jesus as a young man who comes to his cousin, John, to be baptised.

Then he goes into the desert, comes back, and, after a little while begins preaching that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

This is the rightful king, returning to reclaim his kingdom from an enemy.

Luke: The charismatic Saviour

We looked at Luke two weeks ago, and saw Jesus announced to shepherds by angels.

In Luke 4, we read Jesus’ first sermon, based on Isaiah. He says,

^{LUKE 4:18} “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to release the oppressed,

¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

²⁰ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, ²¹ and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Here we see Jesus as the Saviour who is also the Messiah and the Lord. He does not come to self–satisfied people. He comes to the poor, the blind, the imprisoned, the oppressed. He comes proclaiming release and,above all, God’s acceptance of those who feel unaccepted and unacceptable.

Matthew: The Messiah from heaven

We could have focused more on the visit of the wise men, and seen Jesus as the new King of Israel, the exalted, heavenly ruler who has come to earth to reveal his glory. Those wise men were royal advisers. They were en whose role in life was to attend to the needs of some of the world’s most powerful rulers. For them to come and bring gifts, for them to come to worship a baby in a foreign land says something about how they viewed this child.

John: God become human

Or we could have turned to John’s gospel.

John is like Mark, because there is no birth story. But Mark calls Jesus, Son of God and Saviour, and then hurries on to the beginnings of his ministry in Galilee. But John takes us right back to the beginning. Jesus is the Word, the creative expression of God, the one who existed right at the beginning, the one who was equivalent to God and was face to face with the Father. Instead of telling about a young woman becoming pregnant and giving birth to a son, he tells us that this mighty, pre–existent Word took human form and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. What Mark covers in 15 verses, John takes nearly two chapters to carry us through.

Paul: the Lord of heaven and earth

We could turn to Paul and see how he presents Jesus.

The Jewish mission under Peter emphassed that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the King sent to rule on David’s throne. Every Jew knew the verses. Just as the wise men knew that God would send a great leader to break the bonds of evil, and recognised the fulfilment of ancient Zoroastrian prophecies in the appearance of that star, so the Jews knew that God would send a King to break Satan’s power, and there were pious, believing Jews who were waiting and ready when the child was born.

But what about the Romans? What about the Greeks? They had no ancient prophecy to turn to.

So the Messiah, the Christ of the Jews became the kurios of the Greeks and Romans.

Paul says,

I tell you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus be cursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.

He also says,

“The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: ⁹ That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰ For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved..”

The Apostles asserted that Jesus is Lord, and that brought them into conflict with the entire Roman world, because the Romans insisted that there is not Lord but Caesar. The early Christians said, “Jesus is not only supreme over every Roman authority, supreme over every Governmental instrumentality, supreme over Caesar himself; Jesus is supreme over every power and every authority in heaven and on earth!”

But there are many possible ways of presenting Jesus.

Copts: Jesus the refugee

As I said before, the Copts see him as the refugee who found safety in Egypt. They see God’s redemptive hand in the way that God took a rebel nation and turned it into a refuge nation to receive the Son of God himself.

In our own nation, we would do well to think about Jesus as the pattern for all refugees.

We have an appalling record of mistreatment of refugees.

We have imprisoned them on Christmas Island and in concentration camps like Baxter.

We have sent some back to countries where it was certain that they would die, and too many have died. We would not upset a trading partner by saying, “We are not convinced that these people would be safe if they returned.”

We have even sent some of our own citizens to other countries because we were so keen to get rid of refugees that we would even rather deport our own people than risk letting someone through the gate who might not deserve to be there.

A problem for our times

Maybe the time is here for us to present Jesus in a fresh way.

People are less able to identify with Jesus the ultimate Messiah. That’s partly because our society has a very distorted view of what a Messiah means. This is no longer exclusively a Jewish concept. Literature talks about ant-messiah figures. People like Jim Jones of the Jonestown suicide or the leader of the Branch Davidian set in Waco in Texas are presented as messianic figures. Computer games have names like Dark Messiah — a figure more like the Beast in Revelation. The concept of Messiah is losing its original force.

On the other hand, “Lord” doesn’t mean anything like what it used to.

In Roman times, Caesar was the Lord with absolute powers of life or death Even when a Roman citizen appealed to Caesar from a decision of the courts, there was no guarantee that Caesar would judge fairly. It seems that Paul found that when he appeared before Nero. The story is hazy, but it seems that he was executed on Nero’s command.

But today a Lord may be little more than someone who owns a large property in the country.

When we proclaim Jesus as Lord, do people understand what we mean?

At Christmas, we are at a time of beginnings. Far more than New Year, Christmas should start our season of starting over.

How do we start over with Jesus?

Jesus, the self-exiled freedom-fighter

I wonder if we could find parallels with Xanana Gusmao of East Timor? Can we think of Jesus as an exile from heaven, a refugee in a strange land, who has had to leave his natural home in heaven because of a massive rebellion in heaven and on earth?

Can we think of his exile as being a way to catch Satan in a pincer action and free the humans whom the enemy has trapped and enslaved?

All of this is in the Bible, isn’t it? We are not deviating from the Christian message.

There was a massive rebellion in heaven and on earth. When the serpent appeared to Eve, this was not the first act in the spiritual revolt against God. This was the enemy of human souls drawing the world into the conflict which had been going on for who knows how long?

The book of Genesis tells of how humans rebelled against God. Never get confused. Never think it was about eating apples when God only wanted them to have oranges. And, worsestill, never imagine it is about sex. That was an idea that some early Christians p;icked up from paganism, and it entered Christianity slyly when people didn’t know their Bibles well enough to counter the idea.

The essence of the story is that God gave humans remarkable freedom and one small restriction, but they chose to disobey at that one point.

And, in that single act of rebellion, the entire universe fell into bondage to Satan; it was forfeit to the Evil One.

Jesus was like Xanana Gusmao, who suffered under the Indonesians, and eventually ran to Australia to get away from evil so as to be able to fight another day.

Except that Jesus didn’t run. He chose to leave

^{Phil 2: 5} Have this mind among you which was also in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, being in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, taking the very nature of a slave, being made in human likeness.

⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!

⁹ Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰ that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

He had to live in poverty, as exiles usually do. He had to flee further into Egypt and then settle in a quiet outer district when they returned. But all the time he was organising, planning, building a team, getting ready to launch the counter–offensive. It was the only way. The Father ruling from above, the Son among us — incarnate love. Satan knew he'd lost the fight: darkness overcome by light. It had to be done at two levels. It would be enormously costly. It would cost him his life. But in losing he would win; in dying return to life, in being defeated emerge the victor.

Is Jesus a victim? Yes, but not a pathetic one. He is in control. He came with a goal in mind, and he might have had to move around, he might have had to go forward, to step back, to make a move and to lie low, but every bit was for our freedom from bondage to the evil one.

He came to conquer: he came to die. That is basic to the Christmas message.

He left his Father’s home above

So free, so infinite his grace!

Emptied himself of all but love,

And bled for Adam’s helpless race!

’Tis mercy all, immense and free

For, O my God, it found out me.

Conclusion:

This Christmas season, I want to encourage us all to think again about the message of the gospel: not just the message of Christmas, but how Christmas and the cross meet. I want us to consider how we can present it in a fresh way, in a way that speaks to our world.

The old truths are unchanged.

There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we might be saved.

That will never change.

But how we explain it will change. We have to talk to a world which doesn’t understand what Messiah means; a world which has confused ideas about what a Lord is; we have to talk to a world which sees Jesus as the victim of a cruel scam on God’s part. We need to show our world that Jesus is the victor who overcame death and the devil to liberate the entire world from an evil takeover.

This confronts us all with a question, though: what side are we truly on? Do we choose to follow Jesus wherever he leads us in the final thrust to defeat evil, or do we weakly submit to the evils we hate, because the alternative is too hard?

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)