Given 5/16/2010
(Audio .mp3)
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. “It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”
John 17:25-26
"Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."
What do you think Jesus looks like?
When I was a child, my parents did a lot of church-shopping. We moved from Pentecostal to Baptist to Presbyterian to everything in between. These churches all had their differences -- major differences of opinion about theology and worship and politics -- but they had their similarities too. I saw the insides of lots of different Sunday school classrooms, and it was funny, because no matter where you went, in nearly every single classroom you'd see a portrait of Jesus hanging on the wall.
I think you know the portrait I'm talking about. Jesus' face is serene, peaceful, he has long, flowing auburn hair and a full beard. He's looking off into the distance at some far-off landscape with cool, gray eyes. He seems thoughtful but non-threatening, like a beloved uncle or a brother you wish you could see more of. This is a very human God. Someone who might listen to your problems and hear about your hard day at the office. A personal, relatable God.
There aren't usually any halos or choruses of angels in these portraits. Jesus looks like a normal guy. A man who gets hungry, who thirsts, who needs to sleep, who is completely and utterly human. For some reason Sunday schools like to feature the Jesus from the Gospel of Mark. In the earliest of the Gospels, we see a man with a full range of human emotions: he feels pity, anger, sadness, wonder, compassion, love and anguish.
There is a strain within Christian scholarship that gets very excited about this "historical" Jesus -- a man born in first century Palestine, a carpenter, a peasant -- although a seemingly well-educated one, a wandering revivalist preacher and prophet who got on the bad side of the wrong group of people in one of backwaters of the Roman Empire.
It seems like a very modern way to think about Jesus, and we like that human face because it seems very close to us. The reality of the Incarnation is a God who knows and understands the human condition. This is someone we can relate to, the Jesus we meet on Good Friday.
That's one kind of Jesus but not the only one. Because if you read some parts of the Bible you'll run into a second Jesus. A quite different kind of person. The image of Jesus we get in scripture today is a far cry from simply human. I was in Venice, Italy one day some years ago, at St. Mark's Basilica, and like many Byzantine churches I took a step through the doorway and my eyes were filled with an enormous mosaic depicting the Christ Pantokrator, Christ the Almighty, Christ the Ruler of All, his head surrounded by a halo, throngs of angels sitting at his feet, arms outstretched in blessing or judgment. It's a rare Sunday school that hangs a scene from the book of Revelation on the wall!
The reading from Revelation today is more like that mosaic: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end...I am the root and descendant of David, the bright morning star." Stunny poetry to describe a Jesus who existed before the beginning of the world, the Word made flesh, the Christ who reigns as God in Imperial splendor -- at least in poetry and in art. This is not a suffering God but a triumphant one, an object of worship. It's this exalted Christ that we meet sometimes in the liturgy on High Holy Days like Easter or the Day of Ascension.
These are the two great Jesus images of art and literature, suffering savior and conquering king -- a tension which has produced a great deal of fierce debate and equally impassioned artwork over the years. It was a paradox that really annoyed St. Paul, because he spilled a lot of first century ink over the problem of worshiping a Messiah who was also crucified and cursed.
These are two completely opposite images, but they coexist. The ancient tradition of the church has accepted both, learned to look to one for solace and to worship the other, but knowing that they are both one and the same Jesus Christ. Christians believe that these two sides of Jesus are united into one whole, inseparable, human and divine, God and man.
If these two images can coexist, expressing different truths about the same savior, can we have more? I think so, because I think there is a third image of Jesus, just as important, but one we rarely see depicted in art, at least, not directly. There is a third image of Jesus who doesn't sit still for portraits very often, and if it did it wouldn't look like much.
Do you remember what happens after the resurrection? The disciples don't always recognize Jesus as the same man they saw crucified. Sometimes Jesus appears to them in new ways, looks at them with new eyes and speaks to them with an unfamiliar voice. There are times, such as when they eat with the stranger at Emmaus, that they only come to that knowledge later, that they had seen Christ in front of their eyes, but not in the same form as he once had. What is this post-Easter story trying to tell us?
I'd like you to consider that perhaps the most important and profound form that Christ takes is not something we are very well trained to recognize. Consider what we mean when we say that the Church is the Body of Christ. What does that mean? What do we mean, in our Eucharistic prayer when we ask to be "made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him." What does Jesus mean, when he prays, as he does today in the Gospel, that "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they, [the disciples] also be in us...."
Is there another image of Jesus, one that consists, at least partly, of us? Of the people who are united to him in his work, of the people called to serve on his behalf, of the people who make up the church? It gives me shivers to say these words because they almost feel blasphemous, that we can somehow participate in Christ, BE Christ. But I'm beginning to understand that sometimes our most orthodox theology is also our most radical.
The sixteenth century nun and mystic St. Teresa of Avila put it like this:
Christ has no body now on earth but ours;
ours are the only hands with which he can do his work,
ours are the only feet with which he can go about the world,
ours are the only eyes through which his compassion can shine forth upon a troubled world;
Christ has no body on earth now but ours.
This is what we celebrate here at the end of Easter season, the transitional space between Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the King of Kings. The world we live in exists somewhere between those two pieces of art, the human Jesus and the Christ on the Throne of Judgment.
I think we are familiar -- too familiar -- with the images of Jesus in art. And we recognize those forms of Christ well. But that is not the Christ we are charged to see in the season of Pentecost. Our Christ is the homeless man without options, the homebound widow without family, the prisoner without hope, the whole hurting body of humanity who Christ loved so well. Those caught up in the sorrow and muck of this world, just like he was: "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these," Jesus says in Matthew, "you did for me."
We are united to Christ in Baptism, renewed in Eucharist, preserved in prayer, to be both the one in need of salvation and the one who stands to give it. The hands of Christ that give comfort and the heart of Christ that gives thanks. That is our role, our task, our destiny -- to leave this building with the grace and peace both to deliver and be delivered, to love the world as Christ does. To love it in all its sinfulness and cruelty, to love it with both pain and passion.
The third image of Christ is the image we live into through his grace. The third image of Christ is the one that looks like the suffering world around us, the Christ in the eyes of Haiti, in the face of Indonesia, in the visage of New Orleans, in the hands and hearts of our neighbors and friends.
And that is where the most orthodox of Christian teaching, the most fundamental part of our doctrine, can also be the most radical, because to be the Body of Christ is the most holy thing in this world, but it is also the free gift of our Baptism. And so before he leaves them for the last time, Jesus prays for his disciples, that the love that the Father had shown him would be in us so that He could also be in us. And that is a portrait far too priceless to hang on a classroom wall.
Amen.
Well said.
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