Who Was He? (Should Unitarian Universalists Help Save Jesus?)
Rev. Diane Rollert
The Unitarian Church of Montreal, 17 April 2022
Years ago, we had a tradition of raffling off a sermon topic for our annual service auction. Everyone would pay $5 for a ticket that got thrown into a hat. The person with the winning ticket then got to tell me what to say in a Sunday sermon! Well, not exactly. The winner got to challenge me, stump me, or simply have the dubious joy of hearing me speak about something that really mattered to them. One year, our minister emeritus, Rev. Charles Eddis, drew the lucky ticket, leaving many of us to wonder if the fix was in…
That was more than ten years ago—and what Charles asked me to address was Jesus! This was his request: “Tell us whether you think Unitarian Universalists should help save Jesus.”
Sadly, Charles died in May of 2021, not long after Easter last year. So I’d like to dedicate this updated sermon in memory of my colleague and dear friend Rev. Charles Eddis.
There’s this story I love, told by Carl Scovel, minister emeritus of King’s Chapel in Boston. You’ve probably heard me tell it before, most likely around Christmas.
Carl always believed that a cool house was a healthy house, even in the coldest winter months, much to his two daughters’ frozen frustration. One Christmas Eve, for the first time at King’s Chapel, Carl set up a crèche with a nativity scene: Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus and all the others. Such a move was a bit over the top, since King’s Chapel’s members are Unitarians and Puritans. Just as it was time to go home, the church’s custodian came to Carl with a worried look. “One of the pieces of the crèche has been stolen,” he said. Jesus was gone, and in his place was a note: “We’ve got Jesus. Turn up the heat and you can have Him back for the morning service.”
It may not have been for ransom or for heat, but ages ago Jesus was taken hostage. Maybe it happened days after his death. Maybe it happened later, as the gospels were written, or as Paul wrote his letters to the earliest gatherings of Jews and Gentiles who eventually became known as Christians within the Roman Empire.
There are some who say Jesus never really lived; that he is a composite of several Jewish prophets who were giving radical voice to a growing movement in Galilee around the time of what came to be called the first century. Whatever you understand Jesus to be, he left behind no writings in his own hand. The first fragments of gospel that can be dated scientifically go back to the second century, maybe a hundred years after his death. What was left behind was an oral history that got passed along in many versions, and written down by scribes who may or may not have been accurate, and who in some cases may have added their own spin.
Many gospels, perhaps hundreds, were written by the earliest followers of Jesus. There are certainly many more gospels than just the four we know as the New Testament or the Second Testament. Many of those earliest gospels were destroyed or hidden, and some, like the Nag Hammadi library, were only discovered near the second half of the twentieth century.
Scholars who study Christian scripture have unravelled the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, finding evidence of those earlier writings, such as the gospel of Q, the gospel of Thomas and even the gospel of Mary Magdalen (which is a topic I’ve really got to address one of these days!). As a result, the scholars mark up the gospel texts until they look like archaeological excavation sites or complicated math problems. Sections within sections are marked with the letters Q, T, M, L, or J, as the scholars try to attribute each section of the text to its original source. If you are into puzzles, this is great stuff.
There used to be a group of scholars called the Jesus Seminar, whose goal it was to find the historical Jesus. They met from 1985 to 2006, folding shortly after the death of the group’s founder. They would pick apart the gospel texts by drawing upon scholarly work, and would try to come to agreement on what Jesus actually said. They developed a complicated voting system for what they believed to be real or false. Their texts were colourful. Red: he said it for sure. Pink: a strong maybe. Grey: Not so sure. Black: definitely not. There was a fair amount of agreement within the Seminar about what constituted the words of the historical Jesus, but there’s much that still remains a mystery.
The point is, Jesus was taken hostage long ago, his words and his story being made to fit into the agendas of others. That’s certainly what our Unitarian forebears would have said. Jesus got taken hostage and the lessons he taught lost their force. Christianity became the religion about Jesus rather than the religion of Jesus.
The teachings of Jesus mattered more to the early Unitarians and Universalists than the meaning of his death. This was, in fact, one of the reasons that our tradition came into being. Although our forebears didn’t have the archaeological findings of later centuries to draw upon, they read their Bibles attentively. They used reason to understand the message of the carpenter who walked along the shores of the Galilee.
The Unitarians spoke of Jesus as a teacher, a rabbi. They did not see him as God, but as a human son of God whose teachings provided the most persuasive moral example of how to live. Jesus demonstrated the perfectibility of human nature. He offered hope through an example of love, charity, forgiveness and tolerance.
The early Universalists saw Jesus as representing the infinite goodness of God. He was the son sent to renew humanity’s love for its creator. They believed that in the end, all souls would be restored to paradise, whether or not they had known or accepted God or Christ. Still, like the Unitarians, they held that what mattered most were the teachings of Jesus: his gospel of justice and love.
More than a century later, when the Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961, they agreed that the official purposes they now shared as one religious body were to “diffuse the knowledge and promote the interests of religion, which Jesus taught as love to God and love to man,” and to unite “for more and better work for the Kingdom of God.”
Over time, we shifted from those purposes. Perhaps we quietly retained their spirit through our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, or our dedication to justice, equity and compassion, or our statement that our living tradition draws from “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbours as ourselves.” Still, since the 1960s we have grown increasingly uncomfortable with anything that reminds us of our Christian roots. We are more comfortable hearing or teaching just about anything else.
Many of the members of our congregations throughout North America come to us rejecting a Christianity they found filled with intolerance and fear. For some, this has meant an understandable need to completely let go of the past in order to begin anew, unburdened and free. But I wonder if we may be losing something valuable. We may have left Jesus hostage to others when we could still claim him as our own. (And you’re hearing this from someone who identifies strongly as both a Jew and a Unitarian Universalist.)
Back around 2010, there was a fledgling movement in the US that called itself “Saving Jesus.” Its members were liberal-minded Christians who wanted to reclaim the religion and image of Jesus from what they saw as a reactionary, fundamentalist Christian Right. They asked, “Ever feel like Jesus has been kidnapped by the Christian Right and discarded by the secular Left?”
They argued that too much emphasis was being placed on personal salvation and not enough on the teachings of Jesus that called for creating a socially just world. Too many walls were being built, they said. Those who need the most help, the least and the lost of whom Jesus spoke, were being forgotten.
Rev. Robin Meyers, one of the group’s leaders, had this to say more than ten years ago:
“Everybody knows something is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you talk to liberals, conservatives, Unitarians or Pentecostals. Do you think we are on the right track? No. Are you worried? Yes. Our society has divided itself into camps and we’re all warring against each other. We’re not talking to each other. We’re not listening to each other. We’re hunkering down, circling the wagons and lobbing shells at one another. That has no future.”
Sadly, what Rev. Meyers described years ago has only persisted and worsened into our time.
The members of Saving Jesus attempted to reset the terms. Jesus was a Jew who lived in a time of turmoil and violence. His people had lived through five hundred years of oppressive empires, beginning with their enslavement in Egypt, as recounted in the Passover story. So it was that Jesus spoke of another empire, another kingdom: the kingdom of heaven, a place that has the potential to exist on earth.
Charles and I, as well as many Christian progressives, agreed that so much of what we can learn from Jesus is found in the power of his parables. These are stories that speak of a radical vision of society, more than just turning the other cheek. You heard some of this in Camellia’s story earlier, of the inspiration that led Martin Luther King Junior and Nelson Mandela to take radical action that was always grounded in Jesus’ teachings of equity and love.
Amy-Jill Levine, who is Jewish and a professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Tennessee, explains that the goal of the parables of Jesus was to throw people off balance, to get them talking and thinking and questioning. But we tend to take the easy route when we try to explain their meaning.
It is true that we often leave Christian teachings to Christian churches; after all, they draw upon the gospels weekly. We UUs, in contrast, have the freedom to draw upon a wide range of sources for inspiration. Yet what a wealth of material we are missing when we leave out Christian teachings as one of our options. Our challenge is to reclaim our roots and to put what we read into its historical context. Take one example: the parable of the labourers in the vineyard.
Jesus tells this story to his disciples. A landowner goes to the marketplace to hire some labourers to work in his vineyard. He goes twice in the morning, again at noon and at five o’clock, each time to hire more workers. When he asks the five o’clock group why they have been standing idle all day, they respond, “Because no one has hired us.” At the end of the day, the landowner instructs his manager to pay the workers their wages, beginning with the last and then going to the first; and each worker is given the same amount. Of course, those who worked all day grumble bitterly at this. Why are they being paid the same amount as those who worked for only an hour? This is unjust and unfair, they say.
The landowner responds, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So, says Jesus to his disciples, “the last will be the first and the first will be the last.”
This parable is often read to mean that the owner is God and the workers are the faithful. The wage is salvation and those converts who come last (even at the moment of death) are as favoured as those who have been faithful all their lives. Others say that the first hired are the Jews, and those hired at 5 p.m. are the Gentiles.
But Levine says that this is not how the story would have been interpreted among first-century Jews. For one thing, Jesus was speaking to one people, a community of Jews. If you read the Greek, it is clear that the landowner is giving a fair, living wage, as was the expectation of the time. And the landowner may simply be a landowner. Sit with the parable long enough and you might see a message that people are to be rewarded for their needs and not for their talents or luck. Think about that. It may be a hard pill to swallow, and if it is, that’s exactly what was intended. We are called to be generous, even when it may seem unjust or unfair.
Place this parable within a modern-day context and invites us to think about more than just corporate managers making salaries a thousand times greater that their workers. These days I think about the Russian oligarchs, Putin and the small but immensely powerful class of billionaires all over the world — whether it’s the Mercers, the Koch brothers, Peter Thiel, the list goes on and on — who have the ultimate stranglehold on whether we live in peace and whether we save our dying planet. These are the super-wealthy who are more concerned about their own power and wealth than the well-being of the rest of us and of future generations.
Jesus does say the poor will always be with us. He doesn’t exactly begrudge the rich their wealth per se, but he does admonish them for being unwilling to give away what they have.
How often do we grumble because someone has gotten more than us, or because we feel we’ve worked more or contributed more? Maybe we feel we are justified in our complaints, but maybe we’ve also lost sight of the bigger picture. We’ve forgotten that we may not know the circumstances of others. Maybe there was a reason why the five o’clock workers couldn’t find a job earlier in the day. Maybe what really matters is the health of the overall community, and not justice from an individual perspective. Maybe the kingdom of heaven is a place where everyone receives enough, whether they are able to contribute equally or not. We certainly saw how providing something as egalitarian as a living wage saved lives during this pandemic.
Parables give us something to chew on, and this is but one among many. When we leave Jesus hostage to the interpretation of others, we lose access to a rich tradition. So, to the question Charles once asked me, “Should Unitarian Universalists help save Jesus?” my answer is yes. For the survival of this world, we have a right and a responsibility to save him.
It’s okay to turn up the heat.