Weakness of Words
Luke 7:18 – 23, 31-35, 9:18-22
Gettysburg Presbyterian Church
Rev. Daniel T. Hans
January 13, 2008

Think of someone, you know well and love dearly, someone who has a great influence upon your life for the better.  As you reflect upon that person, all sorts of memories: images, stories and feelings, flood your mind and fill your heart.  Given the opportunity, you could speak for a long time about your positive recollections about that special person.

Now, think about how you could describe that special person to someone else, to someone who does not know your special person.  How would you put into words all of your memories: the images, stories and feelings, associated with that special person?    Trying to put into words the essence of that special person and your experiences with that person, you quickly realize how inadequate words alone are.  You quickly become frustrated because words cannot fully express what that special person means to you.  Now you know Luke’s struggle in trying to tell others who Jesus is and what Jesus means to him and what he can mean to them.

I

Jesus has just raised/resuscitated a widow’s dead son.  The crowds begin speaking about Jesus as a great prophet and one sent from God.  John the Baptizer isn’t satisfied with these descriptions.  So he sends two of his disciples to ask Jesus pointblank:  “Are you the one? The long-awaited one? Are you the Christ?”  Jesus responds with a question:   “How do people experience me? Answer my question and you will answer your question.”
How do people experience Jesus?  Profoundly!  The blind see; the lame walk; lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised; and the poor receive good news! How do people experience Jesus?  They are given new life, free from whatever once labeled and limited, disappointed and defeated them. Jesus concludes his reply to the question about his identity by saying in essence:  Blessed are those who are open to what I can do in their lives?
Notice, Jesus does not specifically or narrowly define himself.

Luke’s Gospel and the other three Gospels in the Bible are not definitions of Jesus’ identity or lectures about his nature. They are narratives, stories, of his life and his ministry. The four Gospels use words to tell the story of who Jesus is.  Words, though inadequate to capture another person’s essence, are all that the Gospel writers have to try to tell who Jesus is.

In his book, The Faith of a Physicist, physics professor and Church of England minister, John Polkinghorne, writes that in the Bible: we enter a realm of discourse where the dominant impression is of people groping for concepts capable of doing justice to their experience.  The evidence is of an event [the event of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection] that cannot be contained within conventional limits of thought. (p. 124)
“The conventional limits of thought”, conveyed by words, cannot fully express the action of God in Jesus; and yet, words are all we have.

II

Two words that Christian theology has long used to describe and define Jesus are deity and humanity. We catch a glimpse of each word in our passage. A detection of deity is heard in Jesus’ self-claim:  “The blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead live and the poor get good news.” A harangue of humanity is heard in the words: “The Son of Man comes eating and drinking and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”  Each word, deity and humanity, can be used accurately and acutely of Jesus; but neither word can be used exclusively nor exhaustively of Jesus.

The exclusive use of one of these two words to describe Jesus leads to our common tendency to try to compartmentalize God.  Of this tendency, best-selling author, psychiatrist, Christian, M. Scott Peck writes in Further Along the Road Less Traveled:
Human beings have a remarkable capacity to take things that are related to each other and stick them in separate airtight compartments so they don’t rub up against each other and cause them much pain.  We’re all familiar with the man who goes to church on Sunday morning, believing that he loves God and God’s creation and his fellow humans, but, who, on Monday morning, has no trouble with his company’s policy of dumping toxic wastes in the local stream.  He can do this because he has religion in one compartment and his business in another… It is a very comfortable way to operate, but integrity it is not.  The word integrity comes from the same root as integrate.  It means to achieve wholeness which is the opposite of compartmentalize.  Compartmentalization is easy. Integrity is painful.  But without [integrity] there can be no wholeness.

To be true to Jesus’ whole and complete identity, we must let go of our precise and narrow theological compartmentalizing and embrace a messy and complex theological integration. Deity and humanity together, without one word excluding the other, is the whole of Jesus’ identity.

Neither can the descriptive words deity and humanity be exhaustive when used to try to describe and define Jesus. Roman Catholic writer, Andrew Greeley, said:
The only real Jesus is one who is larger than life, who escapes our categories, who eludes our attempts to reduce him to manageable proportions so that we can claim him for our cause.  Any Jesus who has been made to fit our formula ceases to be appealing precisely because he is no longer wondrous, mysterious, surprising.  We may reduce him to a right wing conservative or a gun-toting revolutionary and thus rationalize and justify our own political ideology.  But having done so, we are dismayed to discover that whoever we have signed on as an ally is not Jesus.  Categorize Jesus and he isn’t Jesus anymore. (Introduction to Lloyd Douglas, The Robe)

III

In trying to tell who Jesus is, we are caught between a rock and a hard place.
Greeley is correct: “Categorize Jesus and he isn’t Jesus anymore” and yet, in a later passage in Luke, Jesus invites us, demands us, to try to define him, to categorize him, when he asks: “Who do people say I am? and “Who do you say I am?”

In the 21st century, we can easily accept Jesus’ humanity – among us as one of us.  However, in the 1st century, it was a different story. The first heresy about Christ, the first false teaching in the early church, denied Jesus’ humanness.  Docetism, from the Greek word meaning “to appear”, claimed that Jesus only appeared to be human.   He was deity with only a human veneer. Thus one of the early accounts of Jesus not in the Bible, a book called the Gospel of Thomas, tells of Jesus as a boy cutting a board too short in Joseph’s carpenter shop.  Wood was a scarce commodity, not to be wasted, but a short board was no problem for boy-wonder Jesus.  He merely reached down and magically pulled the board to a longer length. Thomas’ Gospel didn’t make the cut into the Bible because it compartmentalized Jesus by elevating his deity over his humanity.

For many Christians in the 1st century and even for some Christians in the 21st century, Jesus is a docetic deity, a magical messiah who invites them to step out of their everyday struggles of human life in order to be with God.
But that is not the Jesus of the Bible who, being God and human, steps into the human predicament of everyday life to be with us. Does our understanding of Jesus present a God who calls us to go somewhere else and to be something else? OR does our understanding of Jesus present a God who comes to be with us where and as we are? Is Jesus too much deity to be with & in our messy, complex lives? If so, then Jesus isn’t much help to us humans.

IV

While many Christians in the 1st century had a hard time swallowing Jesus’ humanity, Christians in the 21st century choke on Jesus’ deity.  And yet, even for 1st century Christians, Jesus being God was not easy to swallow.
Listen to how John Polkinghorne presents the 1st century dilemma.
The New Testament writers raise the question of Jesus’ relation to the divine without resolving it.  This is set out most plainly in the opening formula of many of the letters.  Paul starts almost all his letters with the greeting: ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 1:7)  It is a very strange sentence.  God and Jesus are bracketed together, without any apparent feeling of incongruity. (How unthinkable it would have been for a Jew so to associate God and Moses.)  God is the Lord and yet Jesus is the Lord also, without the two being identified….these opening formulas are nothing short of astounding, when one considers that they are written by monotheistic Jews with reference to a figure of recently past history. (Faith of a Physicist p. 126)

To talk about: who Jesus is, as his 1st century followers experienced him and as his 21st century followers experience him, we have to talk about Jesus as God and human, even though the words God and human are qualitatively different and seemingly incompatible.  An analogy from science is the composition of light.  Does light exist as a wavelength or as particles? 
It is both wave and particle even though they are qualitatively different and seemingly incompatible. Is Jesus God or human? He is both God and human. Jesus is what we mean by the word God and what we mean by the word human.

Those who wrote about Jesus in the New Testament were content to state this truth without feeling the need to explain it which they did not and could not do.  Former Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, William Temple, said:
If [someone] says that he understands the relation of Deity to humanity in Christ, he only makes it clear that he does not understand at all what is meant by an incarnation [God coming to us in human flesh] (Christus Veritas, p. 139)

We cannot understand Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Savior as both God and man; nevertheless, we can believe in, love, and be committed to Jesus as the Christ, Messiah, and Savior who is both God and man.  We can love and be committed to what we do not fully understand.  Faith is like family and marriage.  Such relationships can & do exist without complete understanding: What spouse completely understands the other spouse? What parent fully understands a child? What child can make any sense out of parents? What Christian fully understands Christ? Nevertheless, love and commitment can and do exist among them.

V

Let’s go back to my opening invitation to think about that special person you know well and love deeply, that person who has had a great influence on your life for the better. Recall how difficult it is to put into words the essence of that person.  The only way you can communicate who that person is to someone else is to invite that someone else to draw close and get to know personally your special friend.  Could it be that Jesus told his followers not to tell others about him because words alone could not fully describe him?  People needed to draw near to and experience him for themselves.

More than knowing about Jesus, each of us needs to know him, to know him in that biblical sense of personal, intimate encounter that we call faith.  And even then, we do not fully understand him for we cannot fully understand him. We can only begin to love him and trust him and follow him.  Jesus did not come into our world to be explained with words; he came to be experienced with loving and committed faith.

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