From the Gospel According to Internet: Jesus and Satan were having an ongoing argument about who was better on his computer. They had been going at it for days, and God was tired of hearing all of the bickering. So finally God said, "Cool it. I am going to set up a test that will run two hours and I will judge who does the better job."
So down Satan and Jesus sat at the keyboards and typed away - they moused. They did spreadsheets. They wrote reports. They sent faxes. They sent e-mail. They sent out e-mail with attachments. They downloaded. They did some genealogy reports. They made cards. They did every known job.
But ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, the rain poured and, of course, the electricity went off. Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.
Jesus just sighed. The electricity finally flickered back on, and each of them restarted their computers. Satan started searching frantically, screaming "It's gone! It's all gone! I lost everything when the power went out."
Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours. Satan observed this and became irate. "Wait! He cheated. How did he do it?"
God shrugged and said, "Jesus saves."
On this Easter morning hundreds of millions of Christians will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus with a supreme confidence in his saving power. Born-again, or mainline, they believe in salvation through the risen Christ. But saved from what or to what? From the fiery furnace of Hell? From the travails of this world? Saved for heavenly bliss? Saved for a transformed life? Many questions; many answers.
Easter reminds me that I have been born again and again and again with the advent of each new day. I have no fear of Hell, an archaic concept that has meaning for me only as it symbolizes earthly problems of our own making. I don't want to be saved from the glories and blessings of this life. Salvation, which at its root means wholeness, is what I try to experience each day.
I wonder - is "saving" an adjective form describing Jesus, or a verb form implying we have to save him? Save him from what? Isn't he supposed to save us? My concern this Easter Sunday is not about Jesus saving us, but about our responsibility for saving Jesus.
In seminary Bible class I was warned about remaking Jesus in our image - replacing the historic Palestinian Jew with a concept that better fits our personal need. Paul was the earliest Christian theologian to do this. Never having met Jesus in the flesh, he claimed to have met him in the spirit on the road to Damascus, leading to his conversion from persecutor to champion of Christianity. Saved by faith, Paul can be credited with transforming the Jesus of history into the Christ of faith.
One of the earliest Christian debates about Jesus set the stage for Unitarianism. At the Council of Nicea in 325 of the Common Era, a theologian named Arius proclaimed that Jesus was more man than God. He lost that debate to Athanasius who believed Jesus and God were of the same substance, thus paving the way for the Trinity - a concept about which Jesus had no knowledge whatsoever. It was invented by people of good faith who created the kind of God they felt they needed. Arianism was the early name given to theological unitarians.
And so the simple bare-footed peasant/prophet of Israel was transformed into a theological icon, the second person of the Trinity. The struggle between the religion of Jesus - his ethical and spiritual teachings - and the religion about Jesus - his saving power - between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith - has marked the history of Western Christianity.
One of the most gripping scenes in that drama is "The Grand Inquisitor" from Fyodor Doestoevski's novel The Brothers Karamazov.[1] Through the vivid imagination of the author we are transported into the 15th century Spanish Inquisition to witness a dramatic encounter between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor. We behold the stark contrast between the Christ of the creeds and the Jesus of history - dogma and authority pitted against love and justice. The simple humanity of Jesus is an affront to the Grand Inquisitor, who in the end condemns Jesus to death as a heretic: "I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if any one has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. Tomorrow I shall burn thee."[2] The Grand Inquisitor had created a picture of Jesus far removed from the gentle Jew from Nazareth. We need to save Jesus from that kind of inquisition - as even the Pope is now suggesting with his remarkable apology for sins of the Catholic Church.
Remaking Jesus into a congenial image has taken new form in our day. Recently, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claimed that Jesus was a vegetarian. The evidence for this is spotty and controversial, though some of us would find it a positive thing.
Some among us believe that he championed the poor. The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States contended in their letter on economic justice that he taught a preferential option for the poor. Now I read that Jesus' emphasis was more on warning the rich about the corruptions of wealth than on rallying the poor in the struggle for justice. You remember - it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.
But the re-invention of Jesus is even more apparent in popular culture. Take the weird world of professional sports, in which Jesus presumably has a great interest. New York Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte defended himself for his participation in a bench-clearing brawl one of his teammates was hit intentionally - a beanball. His justification for this eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a beanball for a beanball? "The Lord doesn't want me to be a wimp. . . . You have to take a stand sometimes."
And what about the morality of his own beanball pitches? Should a follower of Christ be pitching inside and risking hitting opposing batters? Pettitte: "The Lord wants me to do my job on the mound to the best of my ability, . . . I'm not trying to hit anybody, but sometimes when you pitch inside you're going to hit someone. . . . Pettitte says he prays only that he will "not do anything to let his testimony for Jesus down." So much for the gentlemanly game of baseball, now that Jesus apparently approves of violence on the diamond.[3]
Andy Pettitte, perhaps in all innocence, represents the trivialization of Jesus. I confess I am a little tired of athletes invoking the name of Jesus in their victory speeches. As if Jesus cared or would care. Our task is to save Jesus from trivialization.
A century ago, Albert Schweitzer, in his classic Quest for the Historical Jesus warned us of the danger of trying to remaking Jesus in our image. Unless we are very careful and very honest, the search for Jesus "can be like gazing into a dark well. . . . the face we see shimmering back up at us may be nothing more than our own."[4]
One of our Unitarian Universalist ancestors, Thomas Jefferson, made an honest attempt to come to terms with "saving Jesus." Jesus for him was no Saviour but a moral reformer. For this and other heresies, he was accused of being an atheist. Little known is the fact that he spent considerable time in the White House compiling what is popularly, but erroneously called "The Jefferson Bible," The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth[5], created by cutting and pasting the four Gospels, excluding the miraculous and unbelievable, but leaving the basic narrative and teachings of Jesus, thus illuminating what he called "a diamond in a dunghill."[6]
"I have made a wee little book which I call The Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them in a certain order of time and subject. A more beautiful or more precious morsel of ethics I have never seen, it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from [those] who call me infidel and themselves Christians. . . They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer . . . were he to return to earth would not recognize one feature."[7] Jefferson's Jesus is definitely worth saving - a celebration of the simply human.
As we celebrate Easter today, what might be worthy of saving?
I think of Jesus as one of the prophets of the human spirit - not a prophet who predicts the future, but a prophet of righteousness who drops an ethical plumbline over our lives and judges the real by the ideal. "Forgive, and you'll be forgiven." "Why do you notice the sliver in your friend's eye, but overlook the timber in your own? . . . You phony, first take the timber out of your own eye, and then you'll see well enough to remove the sliver in your friend's eye."
But this is not a forgiving time. The popularity of capital punishment among the American people, including Christians, suggests a vengeful, not a forgiving people. On a more common level we know good people, including ourselves, who are too easy to anger and strike out against others. There is plenty of lip service to Jesus, but an almost equally plentiful hypocrisy. Even in our own lives we know the temptations to be judgmental - how good it feels to think we are morally superior to the other - how easy to neglect the hard work of self-examination and forgiveness. How easy to exaggerate life's smaller problems and ignore the larger injustices.
When Jesus blesses the poor I am with him; when he says to forgive our enemy I am with him. "If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? After all, even sinners love those who love them. But love your enemies." "When someone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other as well. When someone takes away your coat, don't prevent that person from taking your shirt along with it." Like it or not, the spirit of non-violence is in him - the spirit that inspired Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi and King.
But as Henry David Thoreau, one of our own Unitarian Universalist sages, pointed out - the hard teachings of Jesus - intended perhaps for the coming Kingdom of God more than the present Kingdom of Earth - are upsetting. They stretch our moral imagination and credulity. Think of repeating these things to an American audience! Who, without hypocrisy, can read them aloud and not go out of the meeting house?
One wonders, with all the talk of salvation through Jesus in the air, if they have been read and heard and taken seriously by those who claim to be saved. Taken seriously, Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth, is one who disturbs our peace, who afflicts our comfort; who makes us uneasy; who challenges us to do more, to be more. That is a Jesus worth saving.
I think of Jesus as one of the master poets of the human spirit. We do not really know very much about what he actually said, but his followers at least were poets, giving us some of the most sublime literature imaginable. And literature, we have been reminded, "is news that stays news."[8]
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a metaphor for the worst and best in human nature. As the wounded traveler lies by the road in obvious need; the pillars of religious society, the priest and the levite, pass by on the other side of the road. It is the Samaritan, hated foreigner to the Jews, who stopped to help. This parable of Jesus is first and foremost a teaching text - one that illuminates and provokes our own thought and action. As has been said, "While many have been put to death for not believing in the Apostle's Creed, no one has ever been put to death for not following the Golden Rule."[9] Jesus, the man for others, is a Jesus worth saving.
But when we have learned what we can from the seemingly unworkable ethic of Jesus; when we have learned what we can from the apparently impossible teachings; we can learn still more. The stories of his life are archetypal - full of the temptations, the triumphs and the failures that beset all of us. When we give up the Christ of the creeds, the Trinitarian Son of God, the risen Christ, we still have left a human being - the story of one who really lived, with whom we can identify. In something of an understatement, he constitutes what Mark Twain calls "the annoyance of a good example.
We wonder about his courage in presuming to reform the corrupted Judaism of his day. We marvel at his challenge to the political and religious powers that be. We are stirred by his teachings. We are made uncomfortable by the demands he placed on his followers. We are intrigued that this Mediterranean peasant - who was but a blip on the radar screen of the first century - still informs and inspires our world. He provides a kind of interior road map that helps us find our way.
And we consider our lives and what we will leave behind. No resurrection awaits us, as far as I can tell. No, our salvation is in what of us we leave behind. "What survives of us is love."[10] And so our task is in saving Jesus - saving him from trivialization, saving him from exploitation, saving him from being used to exclude and divide. Our task is to save Jesus the human being, for in doing that we will help save ourselves and our world.
I have been to Israel twice in the last decade. Mine was not a pilgrimage to holy places, though I did visit them. It was not a sojourn to a holy land, though the air was heavy with history. I walked where Jesus is said to have walked; I talked where Jesus was said to have talked. While in Nazareth, Jesus' home town, I picked up two simple mementos - a wooden cross and a wooden crucifix made of native olive wood trees. They are simple, inexpensive trinkets - not the grand and expensive souvenirs so plentiful in that place. I bought them to remind me of a man - a simple man of lofty vision, high purpose and uncommon courage - a man worth saving.
I hope he'll be remembered. Obscured by centuries of violence; clouded by countless creeds, dissected by a thousand scholars, preached from a million pulpits, mouthed by a billion lips, crucified by willful distortion and innocent ignorance. I hope he'll be remembered in simple, unadorned humanity. That is a Jesus worth saving.
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