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Sunday after Christmas 2013

Who was Jesus? New Testament Perspectives

1st Sunday after Christmas 2013

1. Christmas celebrates the moment when God became a human being and was born as a child. The New Testament writers have a challenge on their hands: how do you explain the mystery of Jesus who is at once God and man? Can anyone explain God? God is infinite, our minds and our language is finite, limited.. So how can anyone explain the un-explainable? They all tried anyway, each from their own perspective, each emphasizing the aspects that were most striking for them, each using explanations and images that served his own specific task/mission a. Matthews target audience were the Jews. His task was to convince the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. So he carefully linked Jesus to king David, and to Abraham. He explained Jesus actions and the events of his life by making references to the prophets. For Matthew all Judaism: the laws and the prophets were fulfilled by Jesus b. Lukes target audience were the Gentiles: non-Jews (Greeks, Romans, Turks, Egyptians) who were converting to Christianity. Luke placed Jesus within the context of human history. For Luke, Jesus was not merely the Jewish Messiah, but the savior of the whole world: Christianity was being spread by missionaries to every nation and every culture c. We also have Paul who wrote extensively about Jesus. Note that Paul did not try to write the story of Jesus. There is virtually no biographical information about Jesus in Paul letters. Paul preached to mixed audiences who come in part from Judaism and in part from Gentile backgrounds. He focused what Jesus accomplished through his life, death and resurrection: Jesus freed us from sin and made us adopted children of God. d. Finally, we just read the beginning of the Gospel of John. John was written later than the other Gospels. He did not repeat the biography of Jesus already described in 3 other Gospels, , but rather offered reflections on who Jesus was and what Jesus did. John was less of a story teller and more intellectual: he wrote for people who were steeped in Greek philosophy and Jewish wisdom literature.

1st Sunday after Christmas 2013

2. Today, I would like to comment briefly on how Paul and John explain Jesus in the 2 New Testament readings we just heard. Pauls letter to the Galatians is an explanation of Jesus, but from Paul's own peculiar perspective You have heard me talk before about the fact that Pauls mission was to convert the Gentiles, people who were not of Jewish extraction, and that he had a life-long argument with Jewish Christians who wanted everyone to convert to Judaism and accept the Jewish laws before making them Christians. Eventually Paul won the day, and today we would not even dream to convert to Judaism as a step towards Christianity. But in Pauls time, some held that if Christians observed Judaic laws they would achieve a higher degree of perfection. This ideology drove Paul mad. To subject oneself to Mosaic law for him was the equivalent of slavery: why try to keep 613 commandments? No one could succeed in doing that. No matter how hard you try, you will always be guilty of one transgression of another. For Paul, subjection to the Mosaic law was equivalent to slavery: we had been held slaves to the law until Jesus came: faith in Jesus is all that is now necessary to achieve justification, to be good (just) in the eyes of God. Jesus has redeemed us (freed us) from subjection to the law and through his life, death and resurrection, made us adoptive children of God. We no longer have any reason to fear God, and can now call God Abba daddy, as Jesus did. Baptism gives us the Holy Spirit, and even if we dont know how to pray to God, the Holy Spirit within us prays for us and makes our prayer worthy to be heard by God. Paul had been a Pharisee who felt unworthy and unloved by God because he could not keep all the laws of Moses. So for Paul, Jesus main contribution was that he had freed him from the subjection to the laws of Moses and enabled him to address God as our Father. Faith in Jesus frees us to love God and to be loved.

1st Sunday after Christmas 2013

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Johns perspective differs from Pauls perspective.

The book of Genesis starts with the words in the beginning God created the world Genesis was finalized during the Babylonian exile as the Jewish answer to the Babylonian myth of creation, which also started with the words, in the beginning John starts his Gospel with the words, in the beginning, and it is not by accident. The purpose of Johns Gospel was to show that Jesus is God, and so he placed Jesus right at the act of creation. John calls Jesus the word. This expression (word) is related to the Greek myth of the Logos and to the representation of Wisdom in the Bible. In Greek philosophy, the Logos (word, wisdom, revelation) flowed out from God, had in itself the blue print of all creatures to be created, and was the author of creation. In the Wisdom books of the Bible, Gods wisdom was present at creation and assisted God in the task of creation. John went beyond both Greek and Wisdom in stating that Jesus was with God before creation, Jesus was God, and that through Jesus all things came into being. So, while the other Gospels were so tied to Jewish monotheism that they never said that Jesus is God, John came right out in the first sentence and claimed divinity for Jesus. Eventually, Christians reflecting on this and other New Testament writings arrived at the notion that God is a Trinity, 3 persons in one: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. John is the beginning of the process. In Genesis, the first creature created by God was light (let there be light) in this passage from Johns Gospel, Jesus is called the light that shines in the dark. I am not going to go through the whole passage, but would like you to remember Jesus as God, the revelation of God who brings light into the world.

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Todays readings provide us 2 perspectives on who Jesus was and what he meant for Paul and John For Paul Jesus is the one who freed us from sin and legalism and made us children of God, enabling us to address God as father. If we believe in Jesus we are forgiven and loved. John reminds us that Jesus is truth and grace. Truth is to know Jesus is God, and to know God through Jesus. Grace is to be in a loving relationship with God and to be recipients of his love.