Do we Know Jesus? (Colossians 1:9-23)

Sunday, May 18, 2014

            If you open your Bible, turn to Colossians and begin reading in the very first verse, you are struck with how positive this letter is.  “Grace and peace … we have heard of your faith and your love … [we heard] from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant; … he has made known to us your love in the Spirit” (from v.1-8).  What a ‘feel good’ start! 

And yet, it is not all rosy.  It could not be, not for a first century church.  In the midst of a truly uplifting introduction, we read, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience.  … He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:11, 13-14).

            Why is Paul praying that the Colossians be “made strong?”  What ordeal required them to have strength?  Was the life of their church and their very selves as Christ followers threatened to the point that the only way they could maintain true faith and correct belief was by the glorious power of God?  Why did Paul think such a prayer was necessary?  What evil threatened the Colossian fellowship?

            “May you be able to endure everything with patience.”  He does not ask that God remove the threat, whatever it may have been.  He does not ask God to deliver the Colossians.  He asks God to uphold them that they might endure some trial.  I hear Christians ask God to protect them from trials and to heal wounds and for shelter in the storm.  Paul asks God to help the Colossian weather the storm.  The storm is inevitable.    The only hope they have is the help that comes from the Holy Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

What can be said about him?  Who is this son of God?  Who, exactly, is this Jesus to whom we have pledged our allegiance?  We have staked our lives, our souls, our eternal hope on what the Bible tells us about him.  Paul knew the Colossians could not hold up as a church without help from him.  For them and for us, he is the key to everything.  Do we truly know Jesus? 

            When he met a blind man, he spit in the dirt, made mud, and rubbed it in the blind man’s eyes.  Would you allow someone to rub mud made from saliva on your face?  It’s kind of gross.  Yes, gross, but the eyes of the man born blind were healed.  He could see.

Jesus enjoyed weddings so much he turned water to wine to keep the party going.  Before his disciples, he dropped to his knees and washed their feet.  He befriended prostitutes and disreputables, society’s dregs and rejects.  He partied with them and with those in high society.  Jesus was able to genuinely love everyone. 

All these anecdotes about Jesus form a picture of a great man – the greatest of human beings.  It is perfectly appropriate to talk of Jesus as a person.  You and I – we are persons, individuals.  So too was Jesus. 

            The very human Jesus truly is Jesus.  He was a first century Jewish man who came from the region of Galilee, received Rabbi training, whether formal or informal we don’t know.  His humanity must never be forgotten or ignored or intentionally shelved.  Neither may we do away with his divinity.  Jesus is both: 100% God and 100% human.  A robust, healthy Easter theology recognizes and insists upon the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus.  This duality is a great paradox, impossible to rationally explain yet undeniable.

            In Colossians, where the faithful have exhibited devotion in their faith, the accent is on the divine nature of the Son of God.  The Colossian believers are confused by other teachings that have come from countless angles in a culture so religiously diverse it’s dizzying.  Jewish, Roman, and numerous forms of Greek religious expressions competed for the attention and hearts of these people who have pledged themselves to Jesus. How could they maintain true faith?

Similar challenges confront Jesus’ church in every era and in every place.  Even though thousands of years and thousands of miles make us as different from our Colossians siblings in the faith as one might expect, we also are tempted by forces around us that would divert our loyalty away from our Lord.  Worse, we are weakened by sin.  Jesus has rescued us from sin in his death on the cross (v.13), but we are still vulnerable to temptation.  They were.  We are. 

            So Paul names his worries – weakness (he prays for strength), and trials and temptations (he prays for endurance).  Then , pointing to our source of help and hope, Paul quotes a poem that is dedicated to the rule and wonder of Jesus.  Most scholars believe Colossians 1:15-20 is a hymn Paul quoted, one likely older than anything Paul wrote.  What we read here was used in worship in the ancient church by the Christ followers probably even earlier than Paul’s conversion which is described in Acts 9.  Another example of Paul quoting an ancient hymn to make his point is Philippians 2:5-11.  In both cases, we find Christianity in its earliest most authentic form.  

In times of trouble, in times of confusion, when darkness threatens, we turn to Jesus.  Do we know Jesus Christ, the beloved son of God?  What would we say about him?  Look at Colossians 1:15-20 and see what the Apostle said.

            Jesus, the Son of God, is the firstborn of all creation.    Jesus, the man we meet in the New Testament, did not exist until the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary.  But Jesus as God, the divine logos described in John chapter 1, the Word, certainly did exist prior to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  He was, says Colossians, before the universe was.  From verses 16 & 17, “In him all things in heaven and on earth were created.  … He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together.”  Science can study observable phenomena, only that which occurs or exists within the history of the universe.  Jesus is before the history of the universe.  He is the pre-existent one.

            The son is distinct from the father, and here we find another paradox no theologian has adequately reduced to a definition we can grasp.  The term ‘trinity’ is not mentioned in the Bible, but it adequately names how God exists and how we know God.  Great minds have tried to make the trinity comprehendible for 2 millennia with no success.  The Father is God.  Jesus is God.  The Spirit is God.  They are distinct from one another.  There is only one God: 3 in 1.  This is where we turn, to this triune God, when we are in desperate need.  I could offer a plethora of metaphors to try to illustrate the trinity, but all come up short. 

            A while ago, a priest was the guest on Steven Colbert’s show.  The comedian is a devout Catholic.  I don’t know if he prepared the priest for what he was going to ask, but I was thoroughly impressed with the priest’s answer.  Colbert asked, “OK, what is God’s job.”  How would you answer?  I thought the question was kind of strange, but then I was struck by the thought that as a Christian, and especially as clergy, I should be able to answer that.  And I was stuck.  I did not know exactly where to begin.  What is God’s job?  Without missing a beat, the priest said, “God’s job is sustaining the universe.”  Brilliant! 

            The Father creates the universe and sustains it.  The Son draws humanity to the father, saving us from our sins and presenting us as righteous.  The Spirit is the constant presence of God in Jesus’ absence, the comforter and helper.  Each member of the trinity has a specific role and that is how we understand the trinity. 

Not so fast!  Colossians 1:17 says in the Son all things hold together.  Yes, God the Father sustains, but Jesus the Son has a role in holding everything together as well.  And, per v. 16, Jesus has a role in the creation of all that we see.  This verse, Colossians 1:16, indicates that the man from Galilee, before he was ever born in a Bethlehem stable, was the agent of creation and the goal of creation.

            Then verse 18 zooms in from the view of everything that exists in the cosmos to a focus on a particular people on earth, those who follow Jesus, the church.  We are the church.  From believers in megachurches housed in multimillion dollar facilities that sit on campuses that would make many colleges jealous, to groups of believers that gather in dirt floored third-world huts, the church is the gathering of people who follow Jesus and worship God through their knowledge of Jesus.  From the first century believers in Colossae to us who gather on Sundays at HillSong in 2014, we are the church.  Colossians 1:18 says the beloved son, the pre-existent one and creator of all, is the head of the church. 

            He who formed the Milky Way galaxy astronomers spend their lives observing is the one who watches over and leads us and all churches like us and those thoroughly unlike us.  Why?  Jesus is the firstborn of the dead.  The resurrection links his humanity and divinity; and it links us to him. 

            We would be destined to be separated from God for eternity if not for Jesus.  Our sins cut us off.  I think Hell is eternal separation from God.  All the descriptions of unquenchable fire and lakes of sulfur and weeping and gnashing of teeth – these are Biblical metaphors employed to show just how bad eternal separation from God is. However, Jesus came, died, and rose.  The New Testament says over and over, because of what he did, we have hope of resurrection.  He paves the way and makes resurrection a reality for us, his followers, so he holds first place in everything.  Any portion of life we can imagine, no matter how we see our lives or divide life into segments, Jesus, the resurrected, is first in all.  Not only is there no portion of life Jesus does not touch.  There is no portion of life Jesus does not rule.

Because of sin, the world is a fallen place, a place of pain, but Jesus is working through His church for the healing of the world.  Verse 20 says, “Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven by making peace through the blood of the cross.”  This verse does not say that the purpose of Jesus’ death on the cross was to provide salvation for us from our sins so we would go heaven when we die.  It does not say his death on the cross was for that.  Salvation is a consequence of the crucifixion of the son of God.  We are saved.  We are made righteous by him and promised to be with him eternally.  But Colossians 1:20 says through the cross all things are reconciled to God: animals, plant life, the elements (wondrous rock, gems, and metals in the earth), the cosmos, and people – all was declared Good in the creation.  All was corrupted in the fall.  In the death and resurrection and return of Jesus, all will be reconciled to God.  When we love the earth and act as the stewards God has called us to be, we are caring for what God made and what God will make new in the future through the work of Jesus, the Son.

Paul prayed that his readers would be made strong and be prepared to endure.  They worshiped as a minority faith in the midst of an empire that was pagan, polytheistic, and insistent upon all acknowledging the supremacy of the Roman emperor.  They were surrounded by people who sneered at their monotheism or mocked their claim that the Messiah had come and had been resurrected.   The first readers of Colossians were trying to follow Jesus in a world that potentially could hurt them severely for doing so.

We read Colossians as we live in the American empire.  Ours is vaguely Christian, or at least was born in the tradition of Christendom.  What threatens and causes us to rely upon Jesus for help? 

-                           Some reduce our faith to a system of morals.  We cannot.  The way of Jesus is very moral as are many religious faiths.  We are distinctive in that we insist that Jesus is Lord. 

-                           Another threat is the idol of materialism.  Life is all about me, so following Jesus is fine as long as it is good for me.  This idolatry will lead us straight out of the kingdom of God and in America, where freedom has been corrupted into the notion that we “deserve” immediate satisfaction in all things, we are bombarded by the deception of materialism. 

-                           Another threat is the way our culture has turned the concept of tolerance into the undiscerning practice of saying all things are OK and all religions are basically the same.  It’s a double lie; all behaviors are not OK and all religions are not, at the core, the same.  Each religion is unique from all others. 

We need help from our Lord so we can be strong enough and clear enough and loving enough to say Jesus is King, to kill the idol of materialism and to overcome the lies that are birthed by the siren song of tolerance. 

We could probably name numerous other threats to Christian faith in America.  If we considered other places in the world, the threats would be deadly in addition to being ideologically dangerous.  The Colossians prayer fits.  We need Jesus if we are to stand for him and with each other.  That we will be made strong and be prepared to endure so that with a gentle voice of welcoming love we can tell the world around us that all things come together in Christ alone – that prayer is one we need.  And we need to look to and point the world to Jesus, the beloved son of God, the creator and sustainer of all. 

He is Lord of the universe and head of the church and we and all his followers, no matter how different than us, comprise the church, the body of Christ. 

No matter the cost or consequences, together we are in Christ, the Lord of all.

AMEN

Divinity of Jesus: The Difference between Christian and Muslim Views

 

            The ocean is a big place.  We had a chance, as a family, to go to the beach earlier this summer.  For a second time in my life I was humbled by having to ask a fellow swimmer to help me out of a riptide.  It was pretty close to shore but it caught me.  Most people don’t like to need help and I felt especially small considering this wasn’t a place with w0rld-class surfing waves. 

            The ocean can do that – make one feel small.  In ancient times, the ocean was a place of industry; fishermen could make good money.  The ocean was the pathway to exploration.  What’s out there?  The ocean was the highway to commerce and the means by which people encountered one another.  Dominant armadas could enable empires to rule the world.

            The ocean was a also a source of mystery and fear.  What creatures lurk beneath the black depths?  How deep does it go?  There were no satellites, no light houses, no GPS, and no coast guard.  The ocean was seen as a place of danger and death. 

            When we were at the ocean and I was raucously riding the waves but also trying to stay close enough to the shore so I could handle any riptides, we looked out, far out to sea.  We watched fishing boats.  We tried to sight dolphins.  We think we saw one.  But the most amazing thing was a man, guy.  He was way, way out there, swimming for all his might.  He’s wasn’t swimming in.  He was swimming parallel to the shore.  I thought, who is this guy?  If he got a cramp or if he became complete exhausted, he was dead because he was so far out, no one could get to him.  In fact, it’s unlikely anyone would see him unless they were looking hard.  He must be a serious triathlete who does the iron-man competition. 

            As amazing as his stamina and strength are in swimming, even he is small next to the expanse of the ocean.  It is beautiful, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring.  And the ocean declares that Jesus is God. 

            Why is this declaration so important?  And why is it so important to do more than just say, “Jesus is God?”

            I write a blog and occasionally I write on the way Islam and Christianity co-exist in the world.  Sometimes this coexistence is a violent collision.  Sometimes it is a warm friendship.  In my writings I make it clear that I see the two faiths as fundamentally contradictory.  They cannot both be true because Isalm sees Jesus as a prophet.  To be sure, Muslims believe in most of the miracles reported in the New Testament.  Muslims revere Jesus.  Muslims love Jesus.

            However, Christians worship Jesus.  This is anathema to Isalm.  To say something is anathema is to say it is so detestably untrue it calls for damnation.  Muslims feel it is damnable to call Jesus ‘God’ because this is a direct assault on monotheism.  God alone is God, and in their view, to say that Jesus is God is to have a second God.

            Christians are as fiercely monotheistic as Muslims or Jews for that matter.  We believe there is one God.  And this one God exists in three forms and three manifestations and the three have a relationship with each other within the Godhead.  Father God, Son Jesus, Holy Spirit – one God; God is three in one.  It is utterly against Islam to say Jesus is God.  It is utterly essential to Christianity that we acknowledge Jesus as fully human and fully God. 

            The two religions can co-exist.  We can and should befriend Muslims.  We can and must love Muslims.  That love includes respecting their commitment to their faith.  Respect means if we want to invite a Muslim to consider Jesus, it has to be that, an invitation.  If he’s not interested, we still love him and respect him and honor him as a friend even when we’re completely convinced that he’s wrong about Jesus. 

            Along these lines Muslim readers have commented on my blog writings.  There is no way Jesus could be God, they say.  One reader linked me to a Muslim talk-show.  It’s a setting that skews younger, is hip, cool and the host had a guest who was a Christian pastor but then converted to Islam.  He was giving 10 reasons why Jesus could not be God.

            We can stop right here and just say, “Who cares.”  We think Jesus is God and he doesn’t so we think he is wrong.  There.  Now can we all just get on with our lives?  We can, sure, but if we take that kind of a shrug-of-the shoulder approach, then our faith is not a reasoned faith.  It is not a thought-out faith.  It is one we inherit, one we accept because it was given from people we trust, and it is one based on our emotions.  Our emotions tell us we are sinners who need Jesus; people we trust – authors of scripture, pastors, youth pastors, Sunday school teachers – tell us Jesus forgives us and we need Him.  And so by trust and by emotion we are Christ-followers. 

            That is all good and nothing I am saying negates that or detracts from it.  What I offer this morning adds to that emotional confession born out of a faith community and relationships with Christians and relationship with the Holy Spirit.  We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind.  To Love God with the mind, I think includes a reasoned defense or explanation of why we believe what we believe to be true.  And this is where the ocean and Jesus’s demonstration in Mark’s gospel comes into the conversation.

            The ex-Muslim turned youth pastor gives 10 reasons why Jesus never says he is God.  We might say, “Oh yes he does say it.  He says, ‘the father and I are one,’ in John 10:30.”  Be careful with that response.  Remember, this Muslim was a Christian.  He knows many of the references on which we base our belief that Jesus is God.  He looks at that and says, ‘wait a minute.   That means Jesus and God are united, one in purpose, not one in being.  In those terms, God and I are also one because I am united with God.’  He makes this point pretty clearly.  His articulation is not good but his arguments have logic.  Many of the standard verses we use to show that Jesus is God are well-known to Muslims and they have a ready refutation. 

            The host of the talk show says, “If Jesus was really God, why doesn’t he say, ‘I am God?’”  A few years, this very question troubled me, and I went searching for that verse, and it’s not in there.  It’s not in John’s gospel, the primary source for Jesus’ “I am” statements.  It is not in the other gospels.  Why doesn’t Jesus say, “I am God”?

            We need to be able to answer that.  The world is shrinking.  It’s not just in college towns and big cities.  Across America people are setting up homes, people who do not have a Protestant or Catholic worldview.  We can stay isolated, stick to spending time with people who think like us and talk like us.  But if we do that, we dare not call ourselves Christ-followers.  He calls us beyond our familiar circles and once we step out of our comfort zones and into conversations and friendships with people who see the world total differently, we have to be prepared to say why we think what we think.  “Jesus is God.” 

            Why do we think so?  Did he say that?  Not in those words. 

            The statement would have been absurd to the ears of the first century Jew Palestine.  So instead of saying, “I am God,” Jesus said things only God can say.  Jesus did things only God will do.  And Jesus received things only God can receive.  In this way, there was no mistake.  Everyone around him understood him to be claiming to be God; otherwise, they would not have killed him. 

            I am thankful for David Garland’s commentary on Mark’s Gospel.  Before reading it, I always thought the place to look for declarations of Jesus’ divinity was the Gospel of John.

            In Mark 6, Jesus is rejected by his old neighbors in his home town of Nazareth.  Herod, the Jewish King, a puppet of Rome, imprisons and executes John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin and the prophet whose preaching and practice of baptism paved the way for Jesus’ ministry.  On a remote hillside, Jesus feeds 5000 people by miraculously multiplying one person’s lunch. 

            Then he does something very human.  He sends the disciples off on their boat out into the Sea of Galilee.  And in isolation, he prays.  Human beings pray to God.  Jesus was exceptional as a human being and he was 100% human.  His wisdom was supreme; his prayer life incredible; and his love perfect.

            While he was praying, the disciples were out to sea and straining against the wind.  This is different than what we read in Mark 4.  There the windstorm was so fierce, it kicked up the waves to the point that the boat was swamped and in real danger of sinking.  In that situation, Jesus commanded the storm to be silent and it obeyed.  That account illustrates the same truth this one does, but the circumstances are different.  There Jesus was in the boat and the disciples were about to die.  Here in Mark 6, the disciples are not going to die, but they’re also not making progress.  They’re straining at the oars against the power of the mighty sea and the uncontrollable wind.  As he’s praying, he sees them.  This must have been a vision.  Still, this is a human thing.  Peter, Paul and many others had visions while praying.  The clincher is what Jesus does next.

            Alone on the land, praying, in a vision, Jesus sees the disciples as they row at night, and he walks on the sea.  Who does that?  Who just walks across the water?  Jews in the first century would have had a ready answer that they would have accepted without question.  Thinking back to their scripture, they would remember the prophet Habakkuk.  “Was your wrath against the rivers, O Lord?  Or your anger against the rivers or your rage against the sea?  … You trampled the sea with your horses” (Habakkuk 3:8a-b, 15a).

            They would remember the book of Job where God says to Job, “Who shut for the doors of the sea? … Have you entered the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep” (Job 38:8a, 16).  Who?  God.  God walks on the sea.  People were terrified of the unseen depths, but God walks in the recesses of the deep at His pleasure.  At His pleasure, he shuts the sea as you or I would shut a door.

            The disciples and later, Mark’s first readers would remember Psalm 107.  “They saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep.  For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.  … He made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed” (107:24-24, 29).  Ancient Israelites spoke in scripture; “it was written;” “as the prophets said;” “Moses wrote.”  This is how they conveyed ideas and understood the world.  So, in these terms, Jesus made very clear statements and some of his statements came through actions.

            Note the end of Mark 6, verse 48.  Jesus is walking on the water and it says he intended to pass them by.  He didn’t.  They were terrified and he got into the boat to calm them.  They had not been terrified by the wind.  They strained against but did not fear it.  But a man walking on the water sent them into heart-thumping panic and Jesus came to them.  But his intention was to pass by.  Why?

            Moses, the greatest of prophets wanted to see God.  God set Moses in the cleft of a rock, and passed by and Moses saw God’s backside glory.  Elijah, the great prophet in the book of 1^st Kings, the one who never died but was just taken up to Heaven in a Chariot of Fire, got so depressed in his fear he was suicidal.  Again, God set him in a cave, and in silence passed by him.  Who are the Old Testament two prophets who join Jesus on the mount of transfiguration in Mark 9?  Moses and Elijah. 

            The disciples out on the sea were not in trouble in the sense of needing Jesus to save them from imminent death.  He didn’t need to walk on water to save them.  He walked on the water so they could see that God was passing by again.  The final verse of this section says their hearts were hardened.  Shortly after this, James, John, and Peter, would come with Jesus to a mountain top where Moses and Elijah visited from the Heavenly beyond to watch God pass by. 

            When Moses asks God’s name in Exodus 3, God says, “I am.”  That is God’s self-identification.  In Greek, that phrase is rendered “ego emi.”  “Ego emi” from Greek to English can be rendered, “It is I,” or “It is me,” or “I am.”  Knowing this, it is pretty clear in John’s Gospel that Jesus is saying “I am” to indicate that he is the same God who visited Moses and named himself “I am.”  I never paid attention to “I am” statements from Jesus in the other Gospels.  But, here, on the sea, a place of dread and terror, the disciples see what sailors fear most, a phantasm, a ghostly creature come to take then to death.

            To their fear, Jesus says, “Take heart, Ego emi, it is I, I am.”  In Mark’s symbolic world, no clearer declaration can be made.  Mark’s gospel shouts that Jesus is God in human flesh, to be followed and worshiped.  To hear Jesus say, “I am God,” you have to turn to Revelation 1:17.  At the end of the verse he says, “I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the living one.”  That is a direct reference to God in apocalyptic language, and Jesus makes that reference to himself.

            Some skeptics won’t be satisfied by such evidence and that’s just the nature of things.  Muslim friends will believe Jesus walked on the water and say it didn’t mean he was God.  Jewish friends will deny that it really happened.  Modernists and naturalists will say it could not have happened and thus it is just a legend.  When Mark wrote it, he did not believe he was writing a legend.  He believed he was describing how Jesus demonstrated for his disciple who he was and is. 

            This is who we worship and follow.  This is the Lord, the master of our lives.  We are in service to Him for eternity.  This is our creator, redeemer, protector, defender, and savior, the one who forgives us of all sin, and makes us new each day.  All that we are depends on who He is.  And thus we submit ourselves to Him completely.

AMEN