Reading: Luke 24:13-32--"On the Road to Emmaus"
In the past year or so I have preached sermons on money, sexuality, and now on Jesus. No doubt the trickiest of these subjects is Jesus. The difficulty comes primarily from the Achilles' Heal of Unitarian Universalism: Christian-bashing. I have addressed this issue with you on several occasions. Doing a sermon series on Jesus calls me to revisit the issue. As a Fellowship and as a denomination, we are remarkably tolerant and accepting of almost every religious viewpoint. We welcome and accept atheists, pagans, Buddhists, agnostics, and many other religious traditions as well as unique, individual hybrids without any problem. But too often our spirit is not so welcoming of Christians. I am sure that the principal reason for this is that so many of our members bring with them to Unitarian Universalism some negative personal experiences of Christianity. I understand and appreciate that these experiences are real and painful. The Fellowship needs to be a place to share about such experiences so that some healing might happen. My hope is that such experiences can be shared and discussed in a respectful way, in a way that doesn't tend toward dismissing all Christian institutions and people as the problem.
I know that some will accuse me of political correctness, that I am encouraging you to be careful of what you say so you don't offend anyone. This is not what I am trying to do. Rather, I encourage you to speak respectfully. I think we can speak respectfully even when we critique another belief system. Speaking respectfully enables us to come closer to achieving the line in our mission statement that says "We embrace diversity, and strive to accept and welcome all people with respect and openness." 'All people' includes the Christians who have joined or are visiting our Fellowship. Our mission calls us to symbolically "take our shoes off" when we approach another Fellowship member whose beliefs differ from our own, for we are on holy ground.
My problem with Christian-bashing isn't primarily that it is insensitive or offensive; my problem is that Christian-bashing is frequently uncritical and ignorant. Christian bashers tend to employ too broad of a stroke, painting all Christians as superstitious and non-rational, for example. Too often, Christian-bashing leads us to exemplify two rather unwelcome characteristics: smugness and hypocrisy. These words--unlike "accept" or "welcome" or "respect" or "openness" are not part of our mission statement.
We have made as much progress as any UU congregation I know on this Achilles' Heal of Christian-bashing. I don't want this sermon series to become an excuse to drift back into uncritical, ignorant Christian-bashing.
I think anti-Christian sentiment may have caused some of us to get an inaccurate sense from last week's discussion about the historical Jesus. I had the sense that some of us felt as the perspective I shared on the historical Jesus is not generally known among Christians. The truth is that what I shared last week would not at all surprise or even distress many Mainline Christians. Indeed, most of the radical work on Jesus is being done today not by Unitarian Universalists or others on the far religious left, but by Mainline Protestants and Catholics. We are the ones ignorant of much of the new scholarship about Jesus, not our Mainline brothers and sisters.
Last week I spoke mostly about the historical Jesus. This week I am focusing on the mythological Jesus. Next week I will be talking about the prophetic Jesus, a combination of the historical and the mythological Jesus. My final sermon a week later will try to bring all of these Jesuses together.
The roots of the mythological Jesus can be found in what happened in
the days after Jesus' execution. There is ample historical evidence that
Jesus was crucified after a brief trial before the High Priest and an appearance
before the Roman authorities. Most historians are in agreement that Jesus
did something in Jerusalem during Passover that the Roman authorities and
their collaborators among the Jewish leaders found particularly threatening.
Jesus' provocative act might have been his entry into Jerusalem--an entry
that appears to fulfill Hebrew Bible prophecies of the Messiah's entry
into the capital. If he was hailed as the King of the Jews during his entry
into Jerusalem, the political authorities would have surely noticed. Or
maybe it was Jesus' preaching to the huge crowds of pilgrims gathered in
Jerusalem for Passover that led to his arrest and execution. Most likely,
though, it was a provocative act at the Temple itself, the holiest spot
in the Jewish cosmos. The gospel accounts report some sort of scene at
the Temple. Here's the account from Matthew:
Such an action even if more symbolic than substantive, even if done in a small, obscure corner of the temple complex, would likely have been seen by the authorities as dangerously provocative. An action like that in the tinderbox of Roman-occupied Palestine had tremendous potential for inciting a riot or even a rebellion.
Whatever the reason, Jesus was arrested after a last supper with his disciples, interrogated by the Temple authorities, and turned over to the Romans for execution. Chances are good that Jesus' crucifixion was a routine state execution that created little controversy among those in the government. Thousands of Jewish pilgrims travelled to Jerusalem each year for Passover. Fearing the possibility of rebellion among the throngs of fervent pilgrims, the Roman authorities insisted that all potential threats be quickly and ruthlessly dealt with. So Jesus was taken out of Jerusalem and crucified. There was nothing unusual about this event. Records indicate the Romans crucified thousands of people around Jerusalem during the first century. They were especially quick to dispense with those they perceived to be religious fanatics.
Then what happened? This point is the crucial intersection between the historic Jesus and the mythological Jesus. Historians don't really know just what happened after Jesus died a horrible death on the cross. The gospels report that the authorities gave a powerful man named Joseph of Arimathaea permission to take Jesus' body down from the cross so that he could have a proper burial. Though possible, this would have been an extremely rare departure from the normal custom of leaving the naked, crucified body of the condemned person on the cross. Part of the horror of crucifixion was that the body of the victim was not given a proper burial--a very significant oversight in Judaism. Instead, the body was left on the cross to rot slowly in the hot sun or to be torn apart by buzzards and wild dogs. Crucifixion was meant as a public warning. Taking the body down immediately after death prevented this warning from being nearly as effective. The fact that the remains of only one crucified body have been found around Jerusalem indicate that the crucified were hardly ever buried. After the hot sun and the wild animals were done with the body, there simply were no remains left.
After the Joseph of Arimathaea story, the gospels tell about some of the female followers of Jesus returning to his grave a few days later to anoint him with oils. It is they who first discover that Jesus' body is gone and who first experience a resurrected Jesus. Afraid that they would be rounded up by the authorities and executed, the male disciples were at this point long gone from the scene. The women seek the male disciples to share their news. The story of the women being the first to have some sort of experience with the risen Jesus seems to based in history. I assume this because the story is repeated in all the gospels and because the gospel writers never went out of their way to give women a prominent role. It is unlikely they would have invented such a prominent role for the mostly marginalized women.
The gospels then contain many and various accounts of other followers experiencing the resurrected Jesus. Now Jesus is no longer a figure of history but is rather a living reality experienced by his two followers on the road to Emmaus, by Paul on the road to Damascus, by many Christians everywhere right up to the present time. This is the Jesus who, as in the Emmaus story, comes alive in the hearts and homes of his followers. These experiences of the resurrected Jesus are non-historical and timeless. Whether the Emmaus story happened at all is not relevant. Emmaus is important as a metaphor for continuing experiences of Jesus. As John Dominic Crossan writes, "Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens."[2] The Emmaus Jesus is no longer human but is instead a timeless manifestation of divinity. The Emmaus Jesus is the mythological Jesus.
In many ways, this is the Jesus of the gospels. The four gospels of the New Testament came out of communities that experienced the mythological Jesus and not the historical Jesus. This is why it is so difficult unraveling...
I suspect that it is tempting for many of us in this room to dismiss the mythological Jesus out of hand. Surely the historic Jesus is far more appealing to most of us than the mythological Jesus. Going back to the beginning of Unitarianism in England and this country, we have put reason at the center of our religion. Much of our Unitarian history has been a process of abandoning myth and embracing the rational insights of history and science.
This is exactly the place I have been for most of my life. But in recent years, I have found myself more and more drawn to the Jesus of myth. The key for me lies in my understanding of myth. What is myth? In my sermon series on mythology several years ago, I defined a myth as a lie that tells a truth. In this understanding of myth, whether a myth is historically true or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is this: a living myth reveals some truth about life. A living myth is ahistorical; it is timeless. I am increasingly discovering truths about life in the timeless myth of Jesus.
My symbol for the timeless, mythological Jesus is the Isenheim Altarpiece, a masterpiece painted by the German artist Matthias Grunewald in the early 1500s. The central panel of the altarpiece contains one of the most vivid and gruesome representations of Jesus' crucifixion in the history of art. The blood oozes from the nail wounds and the crown of thorns and the lance wounds. His limbs twist on the cross, fingers distended in horrible agony. Jesus' lips have the ultra-realistic, colorless, parched look of an agonizing death. And perhaps most hideous of all, Jesus' skin is covered with countless, festering lesions.
Grunewald painted this altarpiece for a hospital chapel at Isenheim. Most of the patients in the hospital suffered from a venereal disease that caused lesions exactly like the lesions Grunewald painted on the crucified Jesus. Can you imagine the power of that painting for those patients? Here's their Lord, suffering just as they were suffering, dying in part from the same disease they had. Here's their Lord, vividly present with them in their suffering. One of the most significant theological movements within Christianity in this century is process theology. Process theology acknowledges that God cannot stop bad things from happening to people, but that God (and God's Incarnation Jesus) are present with us when we suffer. Grunewald's altarpiece embodies process theology--five hundred years before process theology was created.
On Sundays the altarpiece at the Isenheim hospital chapel would be opened, revealing a beautiful, fully healed, radiant and joyous Risen Christ shooting up out of his grave. Gone are the lesions. Gone is the pain. He is risen indeed! The patients will be risen indeed! The patients experienced this Jesus not as a historical person locked away in a distant place 1500 years earlier, but as a living presence right then and right there in their hospital. Grunewald's Jesus today is a living presence for many people with AIDS. People suffering with AIDS-related lesions also look remarkably like the crucified Jesus in the Isenheim Altarpiece. This is the timeless, mythological Jesus. The resurrection never happened. The resurrection always happens.
The same is true with the story of Jesus' birth. As I said last week, the Christmas story we celebrate never happened. There was no virgin birth. There was no census. Joseph and Mary never went to Bethlehem. There was no manger; there were no swaddling clothes. There were no wise men. There was no star. There was no donkey or cow. The creche from my Grandmother my family puts up each year depicts a total fiction. Bethlehem never happened. And Bethlehem always happens. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a Flemish painter who lived near the time of Grunewald, recognized this when he painted Joseph's and Mary's entrance into Bethlehem. Joseph leads Mary on a donkey not into the Bethlehem of Palestine two thousand years ago, but into Brueghel's own Flemish village in his own time.
Bethlehem happens each year, right here in this very room. It happens when we retell the story and sing the carols and light the candles attached to those old Hardees ashtrays. It happens when we turn to our loved ones after blowing out our candles and say, "Merry Christmas." It happens when we hear again the timeless myth that reveals truths--truths about the birth of babies and the persistence of hope, truths about peace and love and joy. I celebrate Christmas not because I believe Jesus literally was born in a Bethlehem stable, but because the story helps me understand a little more about the mystery of life. It helps me understand not just in my mind, but in my imagination and in my gut and in my heart and in my bones. This is what myth is all about.
Complete bibliography will be included in the final sermon of the series.