In some ways the Gospels are presented as a mystery. This is, of course, not your average whodunit, even though there is a murder. With your average mystery novel or television mystery the question from the outset is: who did it? That is: was it Colonel Mustard in the parlor with a candlestick? And while, as I stated, the Gospels all contain a murder, the question is not who did it or even why they did it, but rather the question centers around who Jesus is. Is he the Son of God or is he just some regular guy with delusions of grandeur? The Gospels all answer this question in one way, which is that Jesus is the Son of God, but they also all show the other side; meaning that in the Gospels you have two different narratives. Those who say Jesus is not the Son of God are often given the blanket description of the Scribes and the Pharisees. This group, to one degree or another, believes that Jesus is a fraud. Or put another way that Jesus is very mortal and that any actions he does that are Messiah-like are either delusional at best or are attributable to a darker power at worst. On the other side of this mystery, we have another group which includes Jesus himself, who posit that Jesus is much more than what his detractors say and that who he is and what he does is something which comes from God. Or to quote St. Peter, this side believes that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God. And as we get closer to Easter the drama of the Gospel narrative is getting us closer to the answer of whom Jesus is. And today’s readings are making the case for this second answer-that Jesus is the one true Messiah. But so what? What does it really matter on which side someone comes down as to who Jesus is? Well, it matters a whole lot. So today while I want to look at this question and the two possible answers, I also want to personalize it a little and ask how the way in which we see Jesus affects us and the way in which we live.
C. S. Lewis once wrote that, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” And so the question for us is if we believe the answer to the question is that if Jesus is truly the Messiah, then Christianity must be infinitely important, but are we living that way? Does it infuse everything we do or are we living like it is moderately important – sometimes affecting what we do and other times being forgotten about?
Honestly, though, if we think about it allowing Jesus to be infinitely important at times, but not at others, really makes no sense. And the reason it does not make sense is because it means that we view the world in two different and contradictory ways. And those two ways are either bottom up or top down. And let me issue a bit of a caveat and say that I know what follows is a bit of an over generalization, but I believe it is sufficient for our discussion. A bottom up view of the cosmos basically posits that the universe is here, it started somehow and the highest form of intelligence as far as we know is mankind. Someday Mr. Spock might show up or dolphins might mutate and become our sea-mammal overlords, but right now we are all there is. The other side, which is the Judea-Christian view, is that there was nothing, God created something, which includes us and part of us is that we are created in the image of God. As a result we have some knowledge of Him and how he meant for things to be. So to summarize one side says that there is nothing higher than us and the other says there is nothing higher than God.
Now depending where you want to put the starting point we have been living in a man-centered era for somewhere between 130 and 400 years. And while the exact date of its beginning is not that important, what is important is to see where it all ends up. What happens when a society has largely answered the question by saying that mankind is really the most important thing in the cosmos and that Jesus is of little importance?
To make this more clear let’s go back and talk about the Scribes and Pharisees who insisted that Jesus was not from God which will be as fun as it sounds. Now, of course we know that they were wrong, but we should not necessarily impugn their motivation. They felt that they were protectors of Judaism and as protectors they could not just allow anyone to come and have revelations. If they did they would soon find themselves with hundred, if not thousands of would be messiahs going in different directions. They believed that there was an order to the universe and it had been revealed to the Jewish people and anyone altering such a view was doing it from a human centered point of view and this could not be tolerated. I was an English major, so you have to pardon me when I occasionally bring in references to poetry, but in W.B Yeats’ The Second Coming we hear his terrifying vision of a world where everyone can choose their own revelation. He writes, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” In a man centered world things do ultimately fall apart since there is no center, because everyone is a center.
We look at the world these days and are often frustrated and a large part of that frustration is the bitter divisions that exist, but I would have to add that we really should not be surprised. If man has been exalted to the highest form of being in the cosmos then why wouldn’t there be factions? Because after all the question becomes which man is it that you are supposed to be following. There are a lot of them, something like seven billion the last time I checked. The economist Edgar Fiedler once said, “Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.” That is pretty much how humans are. We have lots of opinions about the ways in which things are supposed to work. And in some ways that is not a terrible thing, except if you forget to put God first. We can have squabbles about what we should put on our pizza or color of your new countertops but not when it comes to who brings order to the universe. Humanity is simply not equipped to take on this much responsibility. I don’t want to get off on too much of a tangent, but have you ever noticed how many utopian projects that begin centered on a man or an idea that a man has cooked up end in bloodshed. It happened on large scales like The Soviet Union or Cambodia and on smaller scales like Jonestown or the Manson Family. But let’s get off this and get back to Jesus.
We are getting very close to Easter and getting to the answer of who Jesus is. And the thing with all of this is we have to decide if we are going to put Christ above everything. Jesus puts it rather clearly today when he states, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” And so the question that comes to us is are we willing to lose our life for the sake of Jesus? Are we willing to submit our wills to his perfect will? Are we willing to make Jesus of infinite importance? Too often we treat Jesus as Lord when it is convenient, but that is not what Jesus says to us today. We are to lose our life; that is to have it totally consumed by him.
Sometimes in all of the squabbles and troubles of this life we forget to put Jesus first – to serve and to follow him. It is infinitely important and not something we do when we are in the mood. The world is arranged from the top down and Jesus is our link to the God who has ordered all. We must submit ourselves to him freely and fully so that we may be his both now and forevermore.