Henrietta United Church of Christ

Do you ever wonder what I’ve been wondering recently: Who was Jesus, really? What does it mean that he was “fully human yet fully divine?” Was he different in nature from us, or was he human like us, but somehow more so? Do our spirits grow most fully by worshiping him as the incarnation of God, or by following him and learning from him as an inspired human being?

As I thought about today’s scripture reading about Jesus’ baptism, those questions began coming into focus for me. So let’s see where this story takes us in our search for answers.

Jesus comes onto this scene by the Jordan River as a man in a huge crowd of people flocking to the Jordan River to be baptized. They wanted to get right with God and cleanse their souls of their guilt and shame.

So what do you suppose Jesus was doing there? Maybe he was there at the Jordan to answer the call that he had felt growing in him since he was young. As John plunged him down into the water, maybe Jesus let the flowing river wash away his identity as the nice young carpenter from Nazareth and carry away his own personal dreams for a life of relative comfort and security, so that when he came up out of the water he was totally open to God.

Or maybe he had been totally open to God since his birth and already knew exactly what was going to happen. If he was already perfect, maybe he went to get baptized because it was a righteous, holy way to start his ministry. How you imagine it depends on whether you see Jesus more as a human being or a divine being at this point in his life.

Here’s how Mark describes what happened next:

Just as [Jesus] was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

Now there are two ways you could look at this extraordinary event. The first and most common way is to see this event as God’s revelation to the people of Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, and as God’s way of giving Jesus the divine stamp of approval. Some biblical scholars liken this event to a coronation, where the king’s son and heir is now crowned the king. Our duty, then, is to believe in Jesus’ Lordship over us and worship him as our King. If we worship him as King now, he will receive us into his heavenly kingdom later.

From the very beginning of Christianity, the good news about Jesus coming as the divine Son of God and our supreme Lord and Savior was both compelling and saving–but people then heard it in a different way from how we hear that message today. In the early years of the Roman Empire, people were repeatedly told that Caesar was the son of God. The world had been embroiled in constant tribal warfare, but Caesar Augustus had united it into one empire. Only a man endowed with divine power could do such an amazing thing. He was the world’s savior and should be worshiped as a god himself. People could still worship other gods if they wanted to, just as long as they professed that Caesar was their supreme lord and as long as they demonstrated their loyalty by obeying his edicts, paying him taxes and tributes, and supporting him in his conquest of the world–including being ready to die for him as a soldier. The whole system of Roman’s control over so much of the known world was based on its subjects professing the “good news” that Caesar was their supreme lord and savior.

So along come the early Christians proclaiming some very different “good news”: Jesus is the true Son of God, and Jesus is the true Lord and Savior of the world. If we had lived back then, we might have heard a conversation something like this:

Mark: You believe that Jesus is the ‘Son of God’ and the ‘Lord and Savior of the world’?! You’ve got to be kidding! Caesar’s kingdom is the biggest the world has ever known. Where in the world is this Jesus’ kingdom?

Martha: Well, his kingdom isn’t exactly of this world–but it does become visible anywhere in the world where God’s love, compassion, truth and justice reign in people’s lives and in their relationships with each other.

Mark: Caesar has chariots, horsemen, and the latest military weaponry, with soldiers conquering new lands and enforcing the peace all over the empire. Can Jesus defeat such power?

Martha: Jesus’ followers don’t seek to defeat anyone, but to liberate everyone. What they can overcome is the mentality that we are enemies and therefore divided against each other.

Mark: Oh really! How exactly do they overcome that?

Martha: Jesus taught his followers that if a soldier compels you to carry his pack for a mile, offer to carry it for him a second mile. While he is forcing you to do it, he’s got dominating force that can coerce you. When you’re doing it willingly, you disarm him of his power with the power of love and generosity. He also taught about turning the other cheek, forgiving the people who wrong you, not judging, and a lot of other ways to overcome dominating power with the power of love.

Mark: So was he victorious over his enemies? Did they repent of their wrongs and worship him as their lord and master?

Martha: Actually, they killed him. On a cross. It was pretty awful.

Mark: So much for your starry-eyed idea that he was God’s Son, huh?

Martha: Well, that’s the curious thing. Even though most of the people who killed him didn’t repent, he prayed for God’s forgiveness of them. And ever since then, your dreaded Roman cross has been drawing more and more people to God, because they know that there is forgiveness there for them too.

Mark: People are actually being drawn to the cross, where your Son of God was brutally killed by Rome’s invincible power?

Martha: Like you wouldn’t believe! Not only that, but even after that horrible death, Jesus lives on. A lot of his followers swear that they saw him and even touched him after he came out of the tomb alive the third day after he was killed.

Mark: Yeah, right! Sounds like wishful thinking and tall tales to me.

Martha: Well, here’s something harder to dismiss. After he ascended back to heaven, his spirit of boundless love, deep peace, and holy fearlessness has been filling his followers all over the place. They’ve been starting communities like you’ve never seen before. Men and women, rich and poor, slaves and free, Jews, Greeks and Romans, all see each other as equal children of God.

Mark: This is subversive! This has to be stopped! I need to notify the commander right away!

Martha: Don’t worry, he already knows about it and has been putting Jesus’ followers to death at every opportunity. But Jesus’ followers are so filled with Jesus’ Spirit, they’re not even afraid to die! That’s why I’m talking to you instead of running from you right now.

Mark: Just you wait! If you think your little band of deluded idealists can stand up for long against the mighty Roman Empire, you are to be pitied. We’ll see soon enough who has the real power and who the real son of God is!

This is why I said that seeing Jesus as the divine Son of God was both compelling and saving. Jesus had opened up a whole new way for people to see themselves, see God, see other people, and see the kind of world that God wanted. People who professed that Christ rather than Caesar was their Lord and Savior were reborn into a whole new way of living–if they survived the persecution, because this new way was such a radical change from the old way of domination, divisions and oppression. Christ the King ruled with love, not fear.

Now, when we here today worship Jesus as the incarnation of God’s nature, God’s love and God’s truth, our faith can have a similar transforming, saving power today, in a world that defines power, success, relationships, and truth in soul-stifling, exploitive, and shallow ways. We probably won’t get persecuted for our faith, but it will get us marching to a different drummer and make us a catalyst for change.

The way I see it, worshiping Jesus as “the way, the truth and the life” doesn’t have to mean that we think Christianity is the only way to have hope for eternal life. To me, it means that Jesus embodied the way to God–of humility, faith, forgiveness, unconditional love, and self-giving service. He embodied the ultimate truth that we are the sons and daughters of our infinitely loving Creator and that we can trust that love. And he embodied the fulness of this life that we were created for–grounded in faith, abiding in hope, filled with love, and flowing with joy.

But if we worship Jesus in a way that puts him on such a high pedestal of purity and perfection that we can never aspire to follow his path to God, we are left to grovel in our unworthiness, and we can end up missing the whole point of all that Jesus taught and did.

This brings us to the other way of looking at that revelation that happened when he emerged from the waters of his baptism. As I read Mark’s words again, see if you can imagine what it might have been like to be Jesus, who had just released his claim on his life and opened himself fully to God.

What would it have been like to hear, and feel, and know the power of God’s love for you in such a personal way? Jesus saw the veil between heaven and earth torn open, and God’s own Spirit descended on him, entered him and filled him.

Thinking about it this way made me think of what the great psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences.” Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes Maslow’s description of peak experiences. They are intensely joyous moments characterized by heightened feelings of “wellbeing, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective).” A peak experience is “uplifting and ego-transcending; it releases creative energies; it affirms the meaning and value of existence; it gives a sense of purpose to the individual; it gives a feeling of integration; [and] it leaves a permanent mark on the individual.... Peak experiences tend to increase the individual's free will, self-determination, creativity, and empathy. The highest peaks include feelings of limitless horizons opening up,...[and] the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more [humble] than one ever was before....When peak experiences are especially powerful, the sense of self dissolves into an awareness of a greater unity.”¹

That makes me think of Jesus saying, “I and my Father are one.”

Speaking personally, I went into the ministry because I had an experience like that changed my life. I felt filled with divine love, peace, unity, and connectedness with everything. It was like my blinders fell off, the lights were turned on, and I was seeing the truth that had always been there but my blindness had kept me from seeing. “God” wasn’t just a word to me any more. God was the ultimate reality that I was swimming in and that was within me.

I believe that Jesus’ experience of God was uniquely powerful and ongoing, and that Jesus’ faithfulness in manifesting that divine power of love, truth, and wisdom was as full as a human’s can be. But Jesus never suggested that he was the only one who could have an intimate, inspiring, empowering relationship with God. In fact, his whole ministry was about helping everyone, no matter who they were, receive the unconditional love of God, and carry this love into all their relationships and interactions.

As many of you know, Bobbie McKay and Lew Musil have gone all over the country visiting all kinds of Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and now Muslim mosques, collecting thousands of stories of all kinds of people in all kinds of situations whose lives have been unexpectedly touched and changed by God.

So now let’s come back to the questions we started with. Who was Jesus, really? What does it mean that he was “fully human yet fully divine?” Was he different in nature from us, or was he human like us, but somehow more so? Do our spirits grow most fully by worshiping him as an incarnation of God, or by following him and learning from him as an inspired human being?

So here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe Jesus was a human being who so fully embodied God’s living Spirit that we rightly call him the supreme incarnation of God and a revelation of what God is like. Maybe we rightly call him the Son of God because he completely released all of his human identities and roles and claims on his life, and lived out of that ultimate truth of who he was as a child of God, so that we could see what it might look like for us to live into that truth of who we are. Maybe the more we follow him and learn from him as our teacher and guide, the more his human qualities dissolve away, and the more we find ourselves bowing in reverence before the transforming God whom we meet through Jesus our brother. In our own experience, Christ and the Father/Mother become one.

This is what today’s story about Jesus’ baptism suggests to me. Does this have to be what you believe? Not at all. I find that Jesus is like a diamond, and each angle you look at him from reveals a different facet of who he was and is. Are my conclusions my final answer for myself? I hope not. These questions will always keep me probing deeper and deeper into the mystery of who Jesus is, and the mystery of who I am and who you are as sons and daughters of God. In fact, I hope that these questions will keep us deepening and growing the rest of our lives, until at last we meet him face to face, and the glorious truth of who he is, and who God is, and who we are, lift us into eternal wonder, love and joy.