The Meaning of Jesus in Human Experience

April 10, 1960
Akron

The important place of Jesus in human experience is matched only by the insignificance of his influence in human experience. Both sides of this paradox are writ large in order to get some grasp on the startling difference in what he has meant to persons and to acquire some understanding of the social consequences of a man's life which may dilute the substance of his life and teachings.

Jesus is not the same person to all minds. To some, Jesus was the Messiah; others look upon him as the pre-existent, second member of the Trinity, "very God of very God"; others, attempting to separate what Jesus was from what theologians have believed about him, insist that he was a teacher of the highest kind of ethical behavior -- gifted, virtuous and martyred -- but a man. Others, who may have felt the sting and outrage of persecution by Christians, respond with hostility at the sound of the name of Jesus -- for them he represents the leader of the intolerant and inhumans.

In the experience of some, Jesus offered the world a way of living which would solve all the problems of greed, conflict and hate. In the Sermon on the Mount and in his parables are rules for human behavior which will root out all the terrible passions reflected in man's inhumanity to man. His defenders testify that if only people would follow his way of life, all that is good and true would be universal among persons everywhere. Unromantic critics find considerable merit in the criticism of George Bernard Shaw that there must be some fundamental wrongness about a religion that has been preached and taught for two thousand years, but never followed.

Schweitzer and others have demonstrated the difficulty of knowing and understanding what Jesus really was. There are no original records or drawings. Everything he said and did has been strained through the theological beliefs of those who believed that his life and death were the hinge of history. For example, if one wanted to become thoroughly acquainted with the life, thoughts and acts of Franklin D. Roosevelt, there is a full written record, movies and recordings compiled by both foe and friends. Even with this library of information, the legends grow about President Roosevelt. For the life of Jesus, we have no factual material recorded during his lifetime .We do not know his appearance. Efforts to mold his image firmly have never succeeded. The encrusted layers of theology and myth are too deeply fixed for any possibility of an authentic historical image.

When one speaks of the meaning of Jesus in human experience, one of necessity must deal with what he has meant to people who have always differed in their interpretations. His influence is persistently dynamic on those who encounter him in the New Testament, in miracle story and sign, in the dogma of a church or the debating circle of a philosophical society. Differing emotions and intellectual contradictions produce varying impressions. The emotional impact has different degrees of shock and the intellectual interpretation differs, not only among those of opposing faiths, but even among the followers of a single communion. Sometimes it seems that the only widespread area of agreement is that
Jesus was hrs name -- and even then there are those who challenge.

How can one confront all the varieties of Jesus in human experience without becoming bogged in complete bewilderment? In this discussion, I am limiting arbitrarily the meaning of Jesus in human experience to what he may have meant to himself, what he meant to his immediate disciples, what he has meant to the Christian Church and to the world.

One of the extraordinary designations for Jesus is the "Son of Man."

What is distinctive about the "Son of Man" is that this is how Jesus described himself. This title appears more than eighty times in the gospels, but only four times outside the gospels. In the gospels, it is Jesus who used the phrase in speaking of himself. What did it mean?

First of all the Son of Man meant the human individual. Jesus was expressing his human powers and limitations. He was an individual man, with all the frailties and glories of the human individual. The Greek expression is probably a translation of the two Aramaic words (bar anasha) which indicated the separateness of the person from the crowd.

If Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah, or came to believe that in the course of the Galilean and Jerusalem ministries, then "Son of Man" would also indicate that Jesus thought of himself as the Messianic person, the creator of a new humanity, sent by God to conquer and to judge.

But we will never really know what Jesus meant to himself.

The disciples he gathered to him found his leadership strange and difficult, but magnificent. In the gospels they eventually testify that he is the Messiah, Son of the living God.

But even then there was no precise understanding of what the Messiah's salvation was to mean. Some Jews believed the Messiah would bring political independence from the rule of Rome. Perhaps they shouted loudest on that triumphal entry. Others in that day, ground to bone-weariness by poverty, believed the Messiah would being food and prosperity. Eagerly, they may have waved palms and elaborated the rumors about the story from Galilee about loaves and fishes. Still others may have cared not at all for political independence or full stomachs but were stirred by faith that the triumphal entry would inaugurate the spiritual reign of God and the people of the covenant would have the new heart and the new spirit prophesied by Jeremiah.

But to his disciples, he was teacher, also. Tradition has it that Mary, whose life Jesus had transformed to wholeness by power of acceptance and forgiveness, is said to have called him Rabbi (teacher), in that strange moment of recognition in the garden.

The meaning of Jesus in the human experience of the disciples involved faithfulness to Jesus' teaching of the Kingdom of God.

From our remote point it seems that Jesus' affirmation of the Reign of God was no easy way of living. He taught them that salvation was not measured by the usual dimensions, but that every man is secure even if he should forfeit his life forthwith and all earthly possession. "He who loses his life shall save it." Furthermore, basic to the reign of God was the law of love (good-will) -- whole hearted love of God and one's neighbor were indivisible, basic motivations.

That this way of life was as difficult then as now, is illustrated by the desertion of the disciples when Jesus was arrested and executed. That they should return from cowardice to courage, from desertion to duty not only testifies to the restoring powers of this simple, fundamentally ethical way of life, It also indicates that the meaning of Jesus in the human experience was not dependent on his individual tragedy and triumph, but on the power generated for his ideas by his life and death.

But as the Jerusalem group finally became dominated by Paul, and the missionary enterprise extended beyond the Jewish community and among the multitude of Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Asiatic peoples, the Jewish Messianic predictions were complicated by other influences.

Many of the ancient religions had doctrines and celebrations about the divine child, miraculously conceived, dying-rising savior gods and sacramental salvation.

In the period from the death of Jesus to the end of the second century, a time from which original Christian records are almost non-existent, Hellenistic and Asian influences become theologically dominant. Creeds continued the long development, from their origin in primitive Christianity in the Jerusalem disciples group, to the elaborate Christology of authoritative church, ecclesiastical pageantry and political dominance.

The meaning of Jesus became controversial among churches and the incitement to jealousy and struggles between Christian churchmen.

When emperor Constantine became a convert in name, at least, to Christianity, he wanted harmony among the quarreling Christian bishops in order to build unity in the Roman Empire. Constantine called the council of Nicea in 325 A.D., the most important council in the history of the Christian Church.

The meaning of Jesus was the issue. Arius, of Antioch, was the leader of the group who maintained that God was uncreated, always existing, but that Jesus was a created being, not eternal. Although the position Arius maintained was not one liberals would endorse today, Arianism is one of the roots of the prevailing belief in Universalist and Unitarian churches that Jesus was human.

The famed Athanusius was the leader of the other faction who maintained that the Son was wholly uncreated and co-eternal with the Father.

Constantine decided for the latter point of view. When the council at Chalcedon in 451 further defined Jesus as "very God of very God," the meaning of Jesus in human experience was settled for the large majority of Christians then and now. Jesus was God, the second person of the Trinity. The incarnation and atoning sacrifice developed as essential dogma. These are ancient notions of the Pagan world, more than they are characteristic of the Jew, Jesus.

From time to time, but most importantly in the last hundred years, scholars and independent thinkers have taken another look at the meaning of Jesus.

The growth of higher criticism of the Bible found significance in the fact that the early Christian Church produced the New Testament. The New Testament did not produce the church. The Jesus of the gospels and the early church was so merged with what the developing church believed about him, that it became apparent that one could not separate the historical Jesus from the theological Jesus.

Therefore, our immediate forebears in religious liberalism sought to strip away the encrusted theological layers so that the real Jesus would be revealed. It was widely held that important clues lay in his teachings – the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the conversations with lawyers, tax collectors, sinners, and disciples.

But many liberals in so seeking to find the meaning of Jesus in human experience have made the error of trying to attach to Jesus, 19th and 20th century progressive, enlightened, rational viewpoints. This just won’t do – Jesus was not a modern liberal holding rational philosophy. But the swing of the pendulum of theological viewpoints now impresses us with the probability that we will never recapture Jesus as he really was. In spite of the excitement over the discovery of scrolls in caves by the Dead Sea, no essential knowledge of Jesus has been recovered. Today an overwhelming majority of Christians through the creed of their churches and the preambles to their councils, have proclaimed again that Jesus is God. This dogma is not supported by reason or historical evidence but by faith. They stake their meaning of Jesus in the assumption that he was God and saved men from sin from which man was powerless to save himself. Many centuries ago, Anselm, the theologian based his theology of revelation on that premise, “I believe in order to understand.”

But there are still those of us who seek another basis for faith. We wish to understand in order to believe. Nevertheless we respond emotionally to the dramatic events of the life of Jesus even in a theological setting that offers him as a god whom we could not worship.

But beyond all the historical difficulties and beneath all the theological absurdities we feel the presence of his way upon us.

There is a story about a father, who wishing to keep his small son entertained, cut up a map of the world from a magazine and gave the puzzle to the boy. In unbelievably quick fashion the boy had the pieces together in correct position. With surprise the father asked, “How did you do it so quickly?” “There was a picture of a man on the other side. I put the man together and the world came together.”

Jesus was a child of his times. The more strenuously we try to make him a 20th century Catholic, Baptist, Universalist or Unitarian, the more certain becomes his place in 1st century, Roman-occupied Galilee and Jerusalem. Yet can we utterly ignore all the testimony that at very least he was the kind of man who makes the world come together?

There is a common ground among all the persons who believe so many different things about Jesus. Whether one thinks of Jesus as a social revolutionary, the Jewish Messiah, the second person of the Trinity, the pre-existent logos (wisdom) or the master teacher with more than a close affinity for modern methods of education, Jesus has been the creator of expectancy.

Among his immediate contemporary followers he created an expectancy of the reign of God.

When the long awaited kingdom did not appear, his later followers found in him the source of their salvation. While many of us would reject individual salvation for a few and eternal damnation for many, as an unworthy parody of real religion, this has been the expectancy of most Christians.

When persons have been saturated with the high ethical sense that flows out of the gospels, they have turned their hands and hearts to helping persons in need. Hospitals, prison reform, care of needy children, medical missions and the export of surplus food to starving peoples in far lands are all demonstrations of religion serving humans. Beneath all the liturgy and theology is the strong motivation that service to human need is expected of all those who have some high meaning for Jesus in their experience.

The Christian Churches feel the wrath of some because study groups and national councils adopt courageous and unpopular positions on political and economic issues. The so called “Social Gospel” has never been an easy position to adopt or maintain. Yet those who stand courageously on controversial issues do so because they feel it is expected by the Creator of Expectancies, that far-away person, Jesus of Nazareth.

Those of us who believe Jesus to be human, not divine in a way none of us can be, are also under the magnetism of this creative expectancy.

We feel a strong thrust for the supreme worth of persons and the continued search for truth which found its unforgettable phrasing in John’s gospel, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Even for those of us who assert that it is the humanity of Jesus which gives weight to his ethical direction, his embodiment of the highest teachings of his Jewish religion creates in all who touch the meager records of his life with a sense of creative expectancy that life can be fairer in social ways and more significant in its individual meanings than ever before.