Excerpts from: The Iconic Jesus
11/11/2007
Luke 2:22-40

Jesus is more popular than ever, but what Jesus are we talking about?

Maybe Jesus as a boxer?  Here is the mugshot of Stephen Sawyers work titled, “Undefeated.”

The image is no doubt offensive to many on several levels.

The artist, however, may have been thinking about Jesus’ victory over sin, death and the devil. Kayoed.  Out for the count.  Off the ropes and on the mat.

Yet, even if this isn’t your image of Jesus, and it probably isn’t, it’s also true that no two people have the same image of a man who is still incredibly popular.

In American Jesus, a recent book by Stephen Prothero, it’s all spelled out. Jesus is a man “nobody hates.” According to figures Prothero reports, 93 percent of the U.S. population believe in God, and roughly 85 percent of the population is Christian. Sure, that includes people who may not have been to church since they were baptized as an infant, but even subtracting those, there are a lot left. In fact, according to Prothero, two-thirds of contemporary Americans say they have made a “personal commitment” to Jesus, and three-quarters of our countrymen and women say they have sensed Jesus’ presence at some time.

But that’s not all. Almost half of America’s non-Christians believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and resurrected from the dead.

Here in America atheists and Buddhists are active producers and consumers of images of Jesus, who in many respects functions as a common cultural coin. Talk to a Hindu and she might tell you that Jesus is an avatar of the god Vishnu. Ask a Muslim and he will tell you Jesus was a prophet sent from Allah.  Ask a Jew and you might be told that he was a great rabbi. In a best-selling novel from 1925, Bruce Barton described Jesus as The Man Nobody Knows. Today he is the man nobody hates.

In America, Jesus is very popular.

The same cannot be said for Europe, where Christianity isn’t showing much vigor and where half or more of the population of many countries claim no religious affiliation.

As I said, in America Jesus is popular, the only thing is, which Jesus are we talking about?

We ask that because, as Prothero tells it, we Americans have a history of continually remaking Jesus to resemble our current hero-types. Prothero distinguishes this popular chameleon savior from the living Christ of faith and the historical Jesus whom scholars seek by calling him the cultural Jesus or the American Jesus — “Jesus as he has been interpreted and reinterpreted, construed and misconstrued, in the messy midrash of American culture.”

Over the years of America’s history, this remaking of Jesus gradually separated him from the creeds, from the Scriptures and even from Christianity itself — some people claiming that the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus are very different things — what really matters is what Jesus did and taught, not what Paul and the church have said about him. And once Christ was disentangled from Christianity, Americans of any religion and even of no religion have felt free to embrace their own version of him.

Prothero identifies four different Jesus’ that have shown up in American Christianity, plus several reinventions of him that some other religions have welcomed.

Those Jesus’ within Christianity itself include first, the “Enlightened Sage.” This was the Jesus Thomas Jefferson envisioned. When he was president, Jefferson spent a few evenings scissoring out of the gospels all the references to miracles and Jesus’ divinity, ending up with a slim volume he called The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. Jefferson’s Jesus prayed to God and believed in an afterlife, but he did not die for anyone’s sins. In fact, that Jesus did not come to save, but to teach. Many believe that in our own day, the people of the Jesus Seminar are the children of Jefferson and un-enlightenment thinking.

Another Jesus is what Prothero calls the “Sweet Savior” who was a product of the evangelist fervor of the 19th and early 20th centuries. During that era, the style of preaching changed from doctrinal dissertations to storytelling, and the life of Jesus, often embellished by the pulpiteer, became a central subject. The call of evangelism was to an intimate walk with Jesus — so intimate, in fact, that preachers felt compelled to talk more about Jesus as a buddy whom we could come to know and hang out with, rather than either an historical figure or an object of faith.

To make this work, this Jesus had to be described as approachable and friendly, meek and mild rather than harsh and demanding. That, coupled with the fact that a lot of religious training took place in the home under the tutelage of women, led to a viewing of Jesus as one embodying the more feminine qualities — warmth, caring, humility, piety and so forth. The religion of this Jesus was not so much to be thought about as one to be felt. Hymns like “In the Garden” are typical of this era. Jesus is someone with whom you might have a rendezvous in a place where the “dew is still on the roses.”

A third American version of Jesus, says Prothero, is the “Manly Redeemer,” a muscular reaction to the girly-man Sweet Savior. Beginning in the late 19th century and elbowing its way into the 20th century, Jesus as a testosterone-powered hero came to the fore. Books with titles like The Masculine Power of Christ and The Manhood of the Master appeared. This Manly Redeemer was no more linked to the historic creeds of the church than was the Sweet Savior, but at least he was more vigorous — a Savior with sex appeal. This Jesus brought with him strenuous demands, and he was the one who was ready to lead Christians to war against the social ills of the culture.

The fourth and most recent incarnation of the American Jesus is the “Superstar.” In the 1960s, a Jesus movement began among the youth counterculture, and some started to see Jesus as a revolutionary, a leader of an underground Christian liberation movement. When that movement fizzled in the ‘70s, that Jesus emerged unscathed, and became the subject of the rock musicals, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell.

He was thereafter adopted by rock groups and rap singers and heavy metal bands as an upbeat guy who offers an experiential high that is better than drugs, cause I got a friend in Jesus.  Eventually this Jesus morphed into the figure on whom is built Jesus T-shirts, bumper stickers, posters and other collectables, much of the Christian music industry, as well as some seeker-sensitive mega-churches who gets cover story treatment every Easter and Christmas by Time and Newsweek.

During Jesus’ trip through mainstream American culture, other religions in this country were looking at him, too. There isn’t room here to go into them, but suffice it to say that the Mormons have made another version of Jesus their own, as have American Jews, as did the black liberation movement, as have some of the Eastern religions that are flourishing under the Stars and Stripes. Prothero details it all.

The upshot is that while many Americans cannot agree on religion, doctrine, worship styles, the role of the Bible, the place of the church, social action, political position and a host of other things, a great many find common ground of a sort in Jesus, or at least Jesus as they picture him. Even some who cannot believe that he was divine still see him as an example to follow. Thus, in the United States at least, Jesus no longer belongs exclusively to Christians.

But is this Jesus, or, more properly, this collection of Jesus’, the person we meet in the gospels? It’s like a room full of 25 Elvis’s. Will the real Jesus please — do something? Thank you very much.

One place to think about that is in today’s text where Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, or the Messiah—the anointed one of God.  In that regard, the question of who Jesus is isn’t that difficult. The gospels, if we look at them in total, give us some basic answers:

• Jesus is the one, who, after he was baptized, lived up to his baptism every day by the way he honored and obeyed the heavenly Father.

• Jesus is the one who proclaimed the good news of God, preaching repentance and announcing that the kingdom of God had begun.

• Jesus is the one who was so filled with compassion that though it sometimes seemed to get in the way of his proclamation ministry, he still took time and energy to heal the sick.

• Jesus was the one who embodied the very authority of God, and whose life embroidered the deeds of God on the fabric of human experience. This was so evident that people who heard him commented on it.

• Jesus was the one who did not shun bad company, but who called them also to repentance and a place in the kingdom.

• Jesus is the one who repeatedly withdrew to pray.

• Jesus is the one in whom his contemporaries recognized a special connection with God — a recognition that led Peter to call him “the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).

• Jesus is the one who went to the cross, understanding that in doing so, he was being obedient to the will of God, and was reconciling humankind back to God.

• Jesus is the one who arose victorious over death on Easter and is thus living today.

Those are the things the Bible tells us directly. We may not understand the implications of all that we can say about Jesus from Scripture, but those things are enough to help us frame an answer to the question, “Who do you say Jesus is?”, an answer that includes the words “example,” “teacher,” “guide” and “Divine Savior.”

Stan Purdum, recently published a book about Jesus in which he looked at the gospels to see what they actually said about Jesus during the active ministry period of his life, and then identified specific themes, some of which I just shared with you. Purdum did on the street interviews and says that some of the responses he received were from longtime Christians who, referring to some point in the book, said, “I didn’t know that about Jesus.”

But perhaps that should not surprise us. We are all affected by the various images of and ideas about Jesus that have floated around in our culture. Those things have shaped our thoughts about Jesus, and unless we read the Scriptures thoroughly, we may find ourselves confusing the American Jesus with scriptural Jesus, or, more likely, mashing the two together. The Bible is still the primary outward guide to who Jesus is and what his life means for us.

The other source of understanding Jesus, the inward inspiration of God’s Spirit, is, of course, not something that we command. He is, however, something we can ask God for in prayer. To be a Christian means, by definition, to be a follower of Christ, and so it is important to perceive all that we can about who Jesus is, what he expects of us, and what he gives us.

Thus, asking for God’s guidance to help us see Jesus as clearly as we can is never wasted effort for us who bear the name of Christ. In fact, it is necessary for our spiritual growth.

Peter saw Jesus as he really is. Whom do we see?