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February 06, 2005
Jesus Christ—from Heaven
Jesus Christ—from Heaven
Psalm 104: 1-4 / Hebrews 1: 1-8
February 6th, 2005
This morning we again partake of the Lord’s Supper. We don’t do this as often as some churches do but more often than others. But nearly all churches remember Jesus with some regularity in this way because we must remember that Christianity is about Jesus. Jesus told His disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Things we don’t remember regularly we forget. Students review before writing an exam. Reviewing is practice in remembering. The best students refresh their memories often as they go along.
Christians who don’t remember Jesus often forget that Christianity is about Jesus. We say of Him, He is the head, and we are the body. Cut the head from the body and you know what happens—a dead body. It matters what we remember of the Head, of Jesus Christ. This is why we say we should read the Bible often as well as take the Lord’s Supper often. They remind us of Jesus.
Over the past twenty years or so there has been a lively discussion about Jesus prompted by a group of New Testament scholars called “the Jesus Seminar.” The Jesus Seminar is interested to discover what we can know for sure about the Jesus who worked in a carpenter shop in Nazareth, who walked the dusty roads of Palestine, taught, healed, and in the end was crucified and then was reported to have been seen by numerous people afterward. This seminar has pressed very hard on a challenge that arose after the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
This challenge was that there is a difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This challenge raised a big question: Did Jesus grow in peoples’ imaginations so that He changed from being a wise, inspirational faith-healer, but just an ordinary man, into a God? In other words, have Christians remembered Jesus all wrong?
The movie Mel Gibson created about the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life tried to turn the clock back two thousand years so we could visualize as precisely as possible Jesus’ last twelve hours. Even Martin Scorscese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” tries less reverently to bridge the gap between the One in whom Christians believe and the Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jesus Seminar has walked across this bridge in a way that specifically challenges what the New Testament tells us about Jesus. On the basis of the vote of twenty-four committee members, the things Jesus actually said have been whittled down to about eighteen percent of the words the New Testament tells us Jesus said. The rest, they say, was made up and put into Jesus’ mouth.
Similarly, the Jesus Seminar assumes that Jesus’ reputation has swelled from the peasant sage of Nazareth who was born in the ordinary way and crucified by Pontius Pilate into the Son of God and King of Kings and Lord of Lords born to the Virgin Mary—who could literally walk on water.
Who was this Man, Jesus? In past weeks we have remembered the words of the Nicene Creed that was written three hundred years after Jesus left the visible scene. It says, “For us and for our salvation He came down from heaven.” Did He really? If the astrophysicists and even ordinary people now know that the words “down” and “up” don’t really fit when talking about the universe, what does it mean to say Jesus “came down from heaven?”
There are no bad questions. But it matters if we ask questions with the assumption that we won’t accept the answers unless they fit within boundaries we understand, that we’ve set before hand.
And it matters if we understand something of the larger picture within which the answer can fit. One of my good tennis friends is a sub-atomic physicist. I asked him one evening in the locker room what he studies. He chuckled and told me, it’s sort of like following rabbit tracks in the snow to find a rabbit when you don’t actually see the tracks but know they are there. I may not have got his answer quite right. But he wanted me to know his work wasn’t all make-believe. After all, he’s paid good money for snooping into those unseen rabbit tracks. And money is tight for universities these days.
This morning we read together the opening lines of a letter written nearly two thousand years ago that describes Jesus with these words: “He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.” I have the inkling that what the writer is telling us is a bit like what my physicist friend was trying to tell me about his work. Only, the rabbit tracks in the snow in studying Jesus are His footprints in the dusty roads of Palestine, and the memory of his words to the people He met on those roads.
But the “rabbit” making these tracks in the snow is far more amazing than the intricacies of the physical world that my friend studies so brilliantly.
We don’t know who wrote this letter we call “The Epistle to the Hebrews.” At first they thought it was the Apostle Paul, but now almost nobody thinks this. Some think it might have been written by Priscilla, a very wise woman well known to Paul. But more than human wisdom was needed to penetrate the “space” between the ordinary and the extraordinary source of our creation and salvation.
The author begins with what all devout Jews and Christians knew from reading the Bible. They knew about the prophets, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. These were strange men often enough. But their strangeness was due to their extraordinary task, to speak from God. Often their messages were cryptic, hard to understand.
But there came this one in the prophetic heritage, of whom they spoke and wrote, who was different from them all. “In these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.” Jesus lived as close in time to those who read these words as John F. Kennedy lived to our time. My grandchildren will learn the details of this president’s life as I learned the details of the First World War. But there was this difference. There was something about Jesus more mysterious than President Kennedy or World War I. With Him it wasn’t just a matter of remembering what He said and did. There was something more about Jesus, something connected not only to the history of the Jews, but even beyond that.
The author of this letter wrote more explicitly than any other New Testament writer in describing the link between Jesus and Israel’s sacred history. We are lured back, not just beyond, but also behind the words of the prophets to the realm of God. You might think that people would have tossed out this letter as imaginative nonsense for saying of Jesus, “When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” They knew about the crucifixion, and that Jesus died for our sins. But now they read of grandeur beyond what they could have dreamed.
What did it mean to say that Jesus “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high?” It is the language of mystery we would say, but to write such things in actual words plunged into the fog of mystery to describe something like real facts. The right side was the side of honor. In some way, Jesus who was crucified, the greatest human indignity, not only had a place of honor with God, but He was the one “through whom God created the world.” And by “the world” they didn’t just mean our planet.
We read in the 104th Psalm, that the Creator “stretched out the heavens like a tent.” If we follow the rabbit tracks doubling back through the forest of this New Testament book of Hebrews, to the Old Testament book of Psalms, we get images of unspeakable grandeur. God is one who “covers Himself with light as with a garment.” We don’t see light itself. We see by means of light. Light begins to break on the world in the morning. As we say “the morning light breaks on the eastern sky, or the crack of dawn.” I look out the window in the wee hours of the morning and gradually I can see the outline of trees out there and the shape of houses, whereas before I could “see” only darkness. God, whom we can’t see, wears the light.
Our minds drift to Psalm 8 with its sound of wonder, describing the heavens as “the work of God’s fingers.” We say this is metaphor. God has no fingers as we do. But the idea is there that the grandest things that we can see, the sky, for example, are small potatoes to God.
And when we think of Jesus, we have to go far beyond the tiny metaphor of the things He did with his fingers in breaking and distributing five small loaves and two small fishes to feed 5,000 men plus women and children, to His real greatness. By metaphor I don’t mean just a figure of speech. Jesus, I believe, actually turned water into wine, and actually fed multitudes with a tiny lunch, but these were merely the fringes of His compassion and power. They were all anyone could see and recognize. But they pointed to something far greater even more than a metaphor refers to a great idea.
And so we read that Jesus is superior to angels. Some people today think that angels are imaginary creatures. I don’t. All of us believe there are some things that really exist that we can’t see. Some things are too small, like quarks, for even electron microscopes to see, but we trust the scientists who say they are there. Some things can’t be seen for other reasons—like angels. We know that animals are aware of things we humans are not aware. There is an invisible realm of the spirit that far from being merely imaginary is beyond the imagination. Who Jesus was exceeds this imaginary realm.
We read in the Bible of the connection between Jesus and this beyond-the-imagination realm. Hebrews 1 reminded us this morning of the second Psalm, “Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee,” as though they are written to an Israelite king. But even the great (adulterous) King David didn’t qualify—though in a way he did. The prophet Nathan told David that God said to him, “I will raise up your offspring after you . . .and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son.”
But these words never fit with anything in the boundaries of David’s lifetime or even the lifetime of his descendants. David’s dynasty seemed to end in 597 BC. The words of the psalm pointed to something beyond. But nobody dreamed how far or much beyond it pointed.
When my physicist friend tells me about rabbit tracks in the snow it’s a bit like what the Bible is telling us of Jesus. All that the Bible tells us of God as the ancient Israelites knew of Him it tells us of Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth.
The second chapter of Hebrews begins, “Therefore we must pay the closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” How easy it is to drift away from remembering who this Jesus is who is represented in the bread and wine before us on this table. Some well-meaning scholars tell us that what the New Testament tells us about Jesus is pious imagination. And thus they mysteriously reduce Jesus to the creation of pious folklore. And in doing so, they step away from the One of whom an eyewitness said, “We saw His glory the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
There are some things no science can study. There is a point at which questions fail to find the right words and faith has to take over. Faith does not believe in spite of the evidence. It trusts as true what no evidence is capable of showing. We do the Christian faith no disservice when we admit that we have arrived at a boundary we cannot cross by inspecting the records of the past with even devout skepticism. With Thomas who doubted we either will say “My Lord and my God,” or we will dally all our lives in whimsical dithering.
I present to you this morning Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” He invites you, “trust in me and I will save you in every way that matters.”
Let us pray: O Lord, enlighten our hearts to trust what our minds cannot possibly know, that out of great love You sent for us and for our salvation Jesus Christ; that He came down from heaven to be born of the Virgin Mary, to live for us, and to die for our sins, and to rise again on the third day according to the Scriptures. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at February 6, 2005 09:30 AM