Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

  The Jewish tradition before Jesus is full of such people. According to the stories told about them, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets of ancient Israel were all people for whom God or the sacred was an experiential reality. These people did not simply believe strongly in God; they knew God. Once one takes seriously that there really are people like this, then it seems clear to me that whatever else we say about Jesus, we need to say that he was one of these—one who knew God in his own experience.

  If we take Jesus seriously as a Jewish mystic, it also affects how we think about God or the sacred. It means that we need to think about God not as a personlike being out there separate from the universe, a long way away, not here. But it means we need to think of God or the sacred as the encompassing Spirit that is all around us and that is separated from us only by the membranes of our own consciousness. A mystic like Jesus is one in whom those membranes of consciousness become very thin, and one experiences God or the sacred. Jesus invited his followers into a relationship to the same Spirit, the same God that he knew in his own experience.

  How do we become centered in the Spirit of God? How do we actually experience what Jesus experienced? Well, the Gospels of the New Testament have many ways of talking about that, about the “way” or the “path.” One of the central images for the way or the path is what the journey of Lent itself is about.

  The journey of Lent is about journeying with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem—which is the place of endings as well as beginnings, the place of death and resurrection. It is the place where, to use an old wordplay, “The tomb becomes a womb.”

  That journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem is at the very center of the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We see it, perhaps, with greatest clarity in Mark’s Gospel. Three times in that great central section (8:27–10:52), Jesus speaks of his own impending death and resurrection in Jerusalem. He says, “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (8:31). After each of those three predictions of the Passion, as they are called, Jesus speaks of following after him, of following him on that path of death and resurrection.

  Lent is about precisely that journey. Lent is about mortality and transformation. We begin the season of Lent on Ash Wednesday with the sign of the cross smeared on our foreheads with ashes as the words are spoken over us, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19).

  We begin this season of Lent not only reminded of our death, but also marked for death. The Lenten journey, with its climax in Holy Week and Good Friday and Easter, is about participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Put somewhat abstractly, this means dying to an old identity—the identity conferred by culture, by tradition, by parents, perhaps—and being born into a new identity—an identity centered in the Spirit of God. It means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being, a way of being centered once again in God.

  Put slightly more concretely, this path of death and resurrection, of radical centering in God, may mean for some of us that we need to die to specific things in our lives—perhaps to a behavior or a pattern of behavior that has become destructive or dysfunctional; perhaps to a relationship that has ended or gone bad; perhaps to an unresolved grief that needs to be let go of; perhaps to a career or job that has either been taken from us or no longer nourishes us; or perhaps even we need to die to a deadness in our lives.

  You can even die to deadness, and this dying is oftentimes a daily rhythm in our lives—that daily occurrence that happens to some of us as we remind ourselves of the reality of God in our relationship to God; that reminder that can take us out of ourselves, lift us out of our confinement, take away our feeling of being burdened and weighed down.

  So that’s the first focal point of a life that takes Jesus seriously: that radical centering in the Spirit of God that is at the very center of the Christian life. Now, this radical centering in God does not leave us unchanged. It transforms us, and this leads us to the second focal point of what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to take Jesus seriously.

  In a single sentence, it means compassion in the world of the everyday. Slightly more fully, it means a life of compassion and a passion for justice. I need both of these words, “compassion” and “justice,” for compassion without justice easily gets individualized or sentimentalized, and justice without compassion easily sounds like politics.

  Compassion is utterly central to the teaching of Jesus. As those of you who have read one or more of my books on Jesus know, I see it as the core value, the ethical paradigm of the life of faithfulness to God as we see it in Jesus. Jesus sums up theology and ethics in a very short saying (six words in English). It is found in Luke 6:36 with a parallel in Matthew 5:48 (very early Q material for those of you who like to know things like that): “be compassionate as God is compassionate.” The word for “compassionate” in both Hebrew and Aramaic is related to the word for “womb.” Thus, to be compassionate is to be womblike, to be like a womb. God is womblike, Jesus says, therefore, you be womblike.

  What does it mean to be womblike? Well, it means to be life-giving, nourishing. It means to feel what a mother feels for the children of her womb: tenderness, willing their well-being, finding her children precious and beautiful. It can also mean a fierceness, for a mother can be fierce when she sees the children of her womb being threatened or treated destructively. Compassion is not just a soft, cozy virtue. It can have passion and fierceness to it as well.

  To speak of compassion as the core value of the Christian life may seem like old hat to us, like ho-hum. But contrasted for a moment to what some Christians have thought the Christian life is most centrally about, that it is really about righteousness—keeping your moral shirttails clean, avoiding being stained by the world—in that sense, the Christian life is profoundly different from compassion. In many ways, compassion is virtually the opposite of righteousness in that sense. Jesus, as a person, was filled with compassion, and he calls us to compassion.

  Jesus was also filled with a passion for justice. This is probably the least understood part of the teaching of Jesus in the modern American church, and maybe throughout most of the church’s history. It’s because we often misunderstand what the word “justice” means or we understand it poorly. We sometimes think that justice has to do with punishment, with people getting what is coming to them for what they have done wrong. When we think that way, then we think that the opposite of justice is mercy. But in the Bible, the opposite of justice is not mercy; the opposite of justice is injustice.

  Justice and injustice have to do with the way societies are structured, with the way political and economic systems are put together. Like the Hebrew social prophets before him, Jesus’s passion for justice set him against the domination system of his world and time. It set him against a politically oppressive and economically exploitative system that had been designed by wealthy and powerful elites in their own narrow self-interests and then legitimated by religion. And the domination system of his time, like the domination systems of all time, had devastating effects on the lives of peasants.

  Also, like the Hebrew social prophets, Jesus was a God-intoxicated voice of peasant socioreligious protest, and not just protest against the domination system, but also as an advocate of God’s justice. God’s justice is about social justice. God’s justice is about the equitable distribution of God’s earth, and a passion for God’s justice sets you against all of those systems designed by people in their own narrow self-interests to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

  Indeed, it was Jesus’s passion for justice that got him killed. That is why the authorities, the powers that be, executed him. The journey of Lent reminds us of that too: that Jesus was killed; he didn’t simply die.

  In Luke 13, some Pharisees come to Jesus to warn him that Herod is planning to kill him. Jesus replies, “Go and tell that fox Herod”—“fox” i
n the world of the Jewish homeland in the first century did not mean a sly, cunning, wily creature; it had more the connotation of “skunk”: “Go and tell that skunk Herod”—“that it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.” Then he speaks of Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it” (13:32–34).

  It is Jerusalem, of course, not as the center of Judaism, but Jerusalem as the center of the native domination system, of that economically exploitative and politically oppressive system that radically impoverished peasants and drove them to an existence of destitution and desperation. Jesus is killed because of his passionate criticism of that system and his advocacy of the kingdom of God, which is what life would be like on earth if God were king and the domination systems of this world were not. This is the political meaning of Good Friday.

  To connect this back to compassion, justice is the social form of compassion. Justice and compassion are not opposites or different things; justice is the social and political form of caring for the least of these. If we take Jesus seriously, we are called to both compassion and justice.

  To move to my conclusion, following Jesus—the journey of Lent—means a radical centering in God in which our own well-being resides, reconnecting to a center of meaning and purpose and energy in our lives. It means a passion for compassion and justice in the world of the everyday. The gospel of Jesus is ultimately very simple. There is nothing complicated about this at all. The gospel invites us to stand with Jesus, to take Jesus seriously. Take seriously your relationship to God, and take seriously caring about what God cares about in the world.

  * * *

  Sermon delivered at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee, as part of the Lenten Noonday Preaching Series, March 15, 2001.

  Chapter 10

  Renewing Our Image of Jesus

  I HEAR VERY FEW SERMONS about Jesus. Perhaps this is because of the kinds of churches I have most frequently attended (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian), though I think it is probably the same for most mainstream churches. True, sometimes a parable or saying or healing act of Jesus may be preached on, but I seldom hear a sermon about Jesus except at Christmas or in Holy Week (though not always then) and occasionally on other festivals that celebrate his divine identity.

  Scarcely ever have I heard a sermon about what Jesus was like as a historical figure, or about his purpose as he saw it, or about the way he related to the society of his own time. If, as we affirm, the Word became flesh in Jesus, then surely the historical life of Jesus discloses something about that Word. Paul’s recognition that “we no longer know Jesus according to the flesh” (2 Cor. 5:16) should not be construed to mean that Jesus’s historical life is irrelevant.

  I suspect this lack is because neither the popular image of Jesus nor the dominant scholarly image learned in seminary provides a gestalt of the historical Jesus suitable for mainstream preaching. The popular image—popular in the sense of most widely held—pictures Jesus’s identity and purpose with great clarity: he was the only begotten Son of God, whose purpose was to die for the sins of the world. Christians and non-Christians alike share this image, drawn from the Gospels (especially John) and creeds, carried through the history of the West and nurtured by our culture’s celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Christians are those who believe the image to be true, while non-Christians are those who do not.

  The popular image of what Jesus was like continues to thrive in fundamentalist and much conservative preaching, but for those of us schooled in mainstream seminaries or divinity schools, that image died as part of our educational process. There, if not before, we learned that the popular image does not correspond to what Jesus was like as a figure of history. Rather, we saw that the popular portrait came about by projecting the church’s later beliefs and images back into his ministry itself. We learned that in all likelihood Jesus did not speak as he does in John’s Gospel; that even the synoptic Gospels are a complex mixture of historical memory and post-Easter interpretation; that the image of Jesus as one who deliberately gave his life for the sins of the world is the product of the church’s sacrificial theology; and that Jesus probably did not proclaim his own exalted identity or even think of himself in such terms. In short, we came to see that the popular image was the product of Christian theology and Christian popular culture. The image of Jesus as one who proclaimed his identity in the most exalted terms known to Judaism, who asked his hearers to believe his claims, and whose purpose was to die for our sins itself died.

  In part this conclusion resulted from the dominant scholarly understanding of Jesus that did emerge from the withering fire of historical criticism: that Jesus was the eschatological prophet who believed that the final judgment was coming in his generation. Originating with Bernhard Weiss and Albert Schweitzer around the turn of the century, this understanding (in a stripped-down version) was propounded by Rudolf Bultmann and his successors. Moreover, according to it, Jesus’s conviction concerning the coming end was not simply an odd, adventitious belief he held, extraneous to some more important conviction, but was central to his sense of who he was and what his mission was. He himself was conscious of being “the eschatological prophet”; the crisis that runs throughout his teaching was the imminent end of the world; his historical purpose was to warn his hearers to repent before it was too late and to invite them to ground their existence in God, for the world was soon to pass away.

  This view does yield some powerful existential insights that can readily be made the subject of Christian preaching. But as an image of the historical Jesus, it is very difficult to incorporate into the life of the church, for, according to it, Jesus was a mistaken preacher of the end; he was wrong about the most central conviction that animated his mission. It is difficult to imagine this tenet forming part of a sermon; I cannot recall a preacher ever saying, “This text tells us that Jesus expected the end of the world in his own time; he was wrong of course, but let’s see what we can make of the text anyway.” Indeed, I suspect that most pastors have held the dominant scholarly understanding at arm’s length largely because of its unhelpfulness for Christian preaching and teaching. It is not only a speculative scholarly construction, but an unattractive image of what Jesus was like as a historical figure.

  And so we in the mainstream churches believe we cannot know much about Jesus, and what we do know does not compel our imaginations. No wonder we are left with so faint an image.

  Holy Man

  First, Jesus was vividly in touch with the world of Spirit. Whatever else he was, he was a “holy man,” to use a semitechnical term from the history of religions. The word “holy” here is not an adjective pointing to righteousness or purity, but is used in the sense made famous by Rudolf Otto: as a noun, pointing to the numinous, the mysterium tremendum, the awesome reality and power at the heart of existence. A holy man is a person who experiences the holy vividly and frequently, who is experientially in contact with the power of another realm, the power of the Spirit.

  Such persons, known in many cultures and including both women and men, are delegates of the tribe to the other realm, to use an anthropological characterization. As such, they are mediators between the realm of the Spirit and this world, entering the former realm in order to mediate power from that world to this one, especially in deeds of healing. To state the two defining characteristics of such people as compactly as possible, they are mystics and healers.

  Such figures are known not only worldwide, but specifically within the history of Israel. Moses and Elijah are the two great holy men of the Old Testament, both known for their direct encounters with the other world and for their deeds of power. The classical prophets of ancient Israel regularly report seeing into another world (see, e.g., the opening verse of Ezekiel: “The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God”), though they are without the healing powers characteristic of the holy man proper. Contemporary with Jesus are several Jewish holy men, especially Honi the Ci
rcle-Drawer, Hanina ben Dosa, and, slightly later, St. Paul.

  That Jesus belongs within this charismatic strand of Judaism is evident. According to the Gospel accounts, his ministry began with an experience of “the heavens opening” and the Spirit descending upon him; he applied to himself the words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Luke 4:18); and he spoke of the Spirit as active through him. He practiced spiritual disciplines common to holy men: fasting, solitude, long hours of prayer (presumably contemplative), even an ordeal in the wilderness. He called God Abba, clearly reflective of an experiential intimacy with the holy. To his contemporaries, both friend and foe, he was known above all as a healer and exorcist, as one who mediated the power of the Spirit. Whatever else he was, he was a holy man.

  Social Concern

  There is a second feature of the historical Jesus that can significantly inform the life of the church today: his relationship to the society of his time. He was deeply involved in the historical life of his own people. Specifically, he saw them headed on a course toward historic catastrophe flowing out of their loyalties and blindness; he called his hearers to a radically different understanding of what faithfulness to God meant, an understanding that was to be embodied in the life of a community in history.

  This connection to the life of his own time can be seen in his roles as prophet and renewal movement founder. As recent scholarship has emphasized, Jesus founded a renewal movement within Judaism that competed with other Jewish renewal movements for the allegiance of his contemporaries. Each had a different vision of what the people of God should be, each with different historical consequences. Jesus sharply denounced the path on which his people had embarked, including the ways advocated by the other renewal movements. He warned of catastrophic consequences—war, the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple—if their blindness continued.