"SCARIER THAN THE WALKING DEAD: JESUS AS A HUMAN BEING!"

“SCARIER THAN THE WALKING DEAD:  JESUS AS A HUMAN BEING!”

            Those of us in the church spend a lot of energy seeking to deny the reality and the importance of the life of Jesus.  The idea of Jesus being a real, live human being frightens us deeply.  We prefer the Crucified and even the Resurrected Jesus to the living Jesus.  To paraphrase Clarence Jordan, one of the principal founders of Koinonia Community in south Georgia, we have thoroughly de-humanized Jesus.  In so doing we have done a much better job of getting rid of him and his message than the Crucifixion did. 

            There are two main reasons for our dismissing the humanity and the ministry of Jesus.  First, if the importance of Jesus is to be found in his Crucifixion and Resurrection, then we don’t have to worry about the ministry of his life or about his teachings and message.  Most especially we don’t have to worry about our lives and our actions.  It is the reason that attorney general Jeff Sessions, while claiming to be a Christian, could order the kidnapping of children from their parents.  He quoted the Bible on this, but he did not quote Jesus, because he could not justify his actions if he looked at the life and ministry of Jesus.  It is the reason that people can exploit others for greed while claiming to be Christians.  It is the reason that people claiming to be Christians could hold other people as slaves.  We so prefer that Jesus be the walking dead rather than being the walking live.  

            There is a second reason that we prefer to diminish or even deny the humanity of Jesus.   We don’t want Jesus to be a human being like us – we don’t want to believe in the idea of the incarnation, the idea that God and humanity are fused in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  We will go to just about any depth to prevent our having to consider that Jesus was a human being like us.  Caroline and I are doing a dialogue sermon this Sunday at Susan’s church in Baltimore, and we are using Matthew 15:21-28, where Jesus learns something about being a neighbor from a Gentile woman.  In this story, Jesus calls this woman a dog (wasn’t that image used again this week in the White House?).   This Gentile woman refuses to yield to this image, and in her engagement with Jesus, he learns more about her humanity and about his own.  When he begins the dialogue with her, he tells her that he can’t help her because he was sent only to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  But, she teaches him that they are neighbors, and that they belong in the same house.  By the end of the gospel of Matthew, he sends his disciples out, telling them to go to all people, not just to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. I’d like to think that he learned this from the Gentile woman.

            When I preached on this passage at a Presbytery meeting in 1998, one church Session charged me with heresy because I indicated that Jesus was a human being by participating in the cultural prejudices that he received as a child.  There was shock and a big outcry over the idea that Jesus might really be a human being.   The heresy charge did not go very far because it became clear that those attacking me were actually committing heresy themselves by saying that Jesus had no humanity, that he was never prejudiced. 

            Who cares about all this theological turnings?  Those who are oppressed and dominated and marginalized – they care.  They care because the life and ministry of Jesus took him to the margins and indicated that God has a preference for those who are oppressed and exploited.   It’s why folk often talk about the black Jesus, using the term that indicates in American culture that Jesus was black.   “Blackness” here doesn’t refer to his skin color but rather to his economic status.  He was marginalized and oppressed, and his life and ministry were based there.  This theme runs all through his life – born out of wedlock on the streets, chased by government soldiers to be executed, fleeing as a refugee to Egypt (we’re glad that Sessions was not in power then), having no income, associating with people at the margins, challenging rich people to stop worshipping their money, and finally executed as a revolutionary.  Taking these themes seriously in our individual and communal lives would radically change everything, and it is why the living, human being Jesus scares the daylights out of us – we prefer him as the walking dead.