"The older I get, the more I realize it's all about Jesus."
So said my old friend, Scott Countryman, as we were sitting and drinking coffee together at the Dunkin' Donuts on West Chester Pike in Havertown, PA. It was the 7th of October 2006. Scott was in town for the funeral of his mother, who had passed away earlier that week from the cancer that had stricken her for a number of years.
Scott and I have been friends for 50 years. We lived only a few blocks apart in our comfortable Philadelphia suburb and attended the same church, where both our mothers were accomplished lyric soprano soloists in its estimable choir. We both attended Haverford High and played trumpet together in the band. As Bruce Springsteen sang in his classic "Bobby Jean," his ode to friend Steve Van Zandt upon the latter's 1984 departure from the E Street Band, "We liked the same music/We liked the same bands/We liked the same clothes"―even as many in our religious circles disapproved of our choices. We both loved sports, and some of my fondest memories of youth are of our playing softball at Karakung ("The Launching Pad"), Merwood, or the Haverford High School fields whenever we could get a chance every summer. Scott was one of the groomsmen at my wedding in 1979. Most importantly, after studying history in college, Scott followed me in attending seminary, after which he has spent decades, first in Germany, then in Minnesota, and now throughout the world, in missions. We are, in the best sense of the words, not only friends but brothers and fellow workers in the ministry of the gospel.
When Scott uttered those words, I immediately agreed, and the truth of the sentiment becomes clearer to me with each passing year. They are a salutary reminder to me, a lifelong academic biblical scholar, of what really matters, of what all my critical and theological study was really meant to undergird, that what I loved to sing as a Kindergartener 59 years ago ("Jesus Loves Me") is but the acorn which contains, in nuce, the oak of my later theological knowledge attained through diligent study. Of course, I do not mean to imply that academic biblical study is unimportant, let alone worthless. Indeed, any of my former students can attest how seriously I took my work (the inverse of how seriously I take myself) and how deep my love for theology was (though, I must confess, perhaps surpassed by my love of sports and music). Yet academic rigor and theological sophistication amount to a hill of beans when reduced to sophistry and disconnected from what really matters, to wit, the work of the gospel―the gospel, as Mark, the earliest Evangelist, puts it, "about Jesus Messiah, the Son of God" (Mark 1:1).
A Christian is, by definition, a "disciple" or follower of Jesus (Acts 11:26). And this is what causes me concern. When people think of Christians, especially self-described "evangelical" ("gospel") Christians, in today's America, do they see Jesus? Or, to put it more pointedly, what Jesus do they see? Do they see the Jesus found on the pages of the New Testament (granting the differently nuanced Christologies of its various authors, which in my view together form a richly variegated, yet coherent and compatible tapestry)? Or, God forbid, do they see an idolatrous Jesus of American imagination, one whose sacrificial death overlays and "sanctifies," if you will, a presupposed conservative Americanism?
The most explicitly "high" Christology in the New Testament is found in what is almost certainly the last canonical Gospel to be written (in the '80's-90's CE), the Gospel of John. In the prologue to this most theologically profound of Gospels (John 1:1-18), the human Jesus who lived, taught, and died in 1st century Palestine was none other than the incarnation ("en-fleshment") of the eternal Word of God, God himself in his self-revelation in creation and new creation. For John, the Word/Logos (1:1) was not merely a personified attribute of the invisible God, as so often in Jewish literature, both canonical and otherwise. On the contrary, the Logos is "hypostatized," being both "with God" and "God" by his very nature, and thus intrinsic to the very being of the one God. Hence this Word, who "tabernacled" with us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (1:14), was the very "exegesis" of the God of Israel (1:18). In other words, if you want to know what the one God is like, look not to Greek philosophy or any human-made system, but to the Jesus who lived, died and, as Christians believe, rose again in the first century.
This is very profound indeed. Jesus of Nazareth―the Jesus we discover in the four Gospels, not the Jesus of later pious or impious imaginations―did not seek power. Indeed, he offered no resistance when arrested and crucified by the Romans as "King of the Jews." Even though he counted among his 12 closest followers a Simon described by Mark (perhaps anachronistically if, as is likely, he wrote either immediately prior to or following the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE) as a "zealot" (Mark 3:18), he famously taught an ethic of nonresistance and love for enemies (Matthew 5:38-48). Throughout his "ministry" he was a thorn in the side of any and every group of people who considered themselves to be "leaders" of the community. Both the priestly, aristocratic Sadducees as well as the scholarly Pharisees, who had more respect among the common folk, were targets of his criticism. He excoriated self-righteous hypocrites of every kind even as he had compassion on the poor, weak, despised, and marginalized among the people. In short, he both proclaimed and embodied the "gospel" of the kingdom, perhaps even, as N. T. Wright has argued forcefully, viewing his final journey to Jerusalem as the long hoped-for return of Yahweh to Zion (e.g., Isaiah 52:8), where that kingdom would be inaugurated precisely by his dying as Israel's king/Messiah on a Roman cross.
Yes, as my friend said so simply, "It's all about Jesus." For me, the text that best encapsulates what this means is found in Matthew's Gospel where, by both word and deed, Jesus displays himself to be the fulfillment of what the Torah's Sabbath Law was designed to point forward to (Matthew 11:25-12:13). In his words:
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke on you and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and my load is not hard to carry (Matthew 11:28-30, NET Bible).
May this be the Jesus we who claim his name both proclaim and emulate.
I close with a couple of pictures of myself with my old friend, 38 years apart, from 1977 and 2015.
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