Jesus Before Christianity (Part 8 - "Jesus, God in Sandals"*)

The final chapter of Jesus Before Christianity is so wonderful that I would love to quote the entire chapter! After concentrating on looking at Jesus' humanity in all of the preceding chapters (1-18), Albert Nolan focuses his final chapter on Jesus' divinity and the implications of His being God.

There are two primary implications to Jesus being God that the author proposes:
1) We must allow Him to define what God is like (i.e., the way Jesus lived shows us exactly what God is like).
2) Acknowledgement that Jesus is God and Truth means to live like He lived, understanding the world and times that we live in just as He understood the world and times that He lived in.

Speaking of the early church's response to Jesus after his life and death and resurrection, Nolan says, "The movement was pluriform, indeed amorphous and haphazard. Its only unity or point of cohesion was the personality of Jesus himself...Everyone felt that despite his death Jesus was still leading, guiding and inspiring them...Jesus remained present and active through the presence and activity of his Spirit...Jesus was everything...Their admiration and veneration for him knew no bounds. He was in every way the ultimate, the only criterion of good and evil and of truth and falsehood, the only hope for the future, the only power which could transform the world...Jesus was experienced as the breakthrough in the history of humanity. He transcended everything that had ever been said and done before. He was in every way the ultimate, the last word. He was on a par with God. His word was God's word. His Spirit was God's Spirit. His feelings were God's feelings...

"To believe in Jesus today is to agree with this assessment of him...To believe that Jesus is divine is to choose to make him and what he stands for your God...By his words and his praxis, Jesus himself changed the content of the word 'God.' If we do not allow him to change our image of God, we will not be able to say that he is our Lord and our God. To choose him as our God is to make him the source of our information about divinity and to refuse to superimpose upon him our own ideas of divinity...Jesus reveals God to us, God does not reveal Jesus to us...if we accept Jesus as divine, we must reinterpret the Old Testament from Jesus' point of view and we must try to understand the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the way in which Jesus did..."

The author masterfully sums up the implications of Jesus being God: "We have seen what Jesus was like. If we now wish to treat him as our God, we would have to conclude that our God does not want to be served by us, but wants to serve us; God does not want to be given the highest possible rank and status in our society, but wants to take the lowest place and to be without any rank and status; God does not want to be feared and obeyed, but wants to be recognized in the sufferings of the poor and the weak; God is not supremely indifferent and detached, but is irrevocably committed to the liberation of humankind, for God has chosen to be identified with all people in a spirit of solidarity and compassion. If this is not a true picture of God, then Jesus is not divine. If this is a true picture of God, then God is more truly human, more thoroughly humane, than any human being...

"Jesus was immeasurably more human than other human beings, and that is what we value above all other things when we recognize him as divine, when we acknowledge him as our Lord and our God."

If we accept that Jesus is God then the way He lived His life on earth is how we must live ours: "In the last analysis faith is not a way of speaking or a way of thinking, it is a way of living and can only be adequately articulated in a living praxis...The beginning of faith in Jesus is the attempt to read the signs of our times as Jesus read the signs of his times...we can begin to analyze our times in the same spirit as he analyzed his times. We would have to begin, as Jesus did, with compassion - for the starving millions, for those who are humiliated and rejected, and for the billions of the future who will suffer because of the way we live today...

"Searching for the signs of the times in the spirit of Jesus, then, will mean recognizing all the forces that are working against humanity as the forces of evil...We shall have to try to understand the structures of evil in the world as it is today. How much have we been basing ourselves upon the worldly values of money, possessions, prestige, status, privilege, power and upon the group solidarities of family, race, class, party, religion and nationalism? To make these our supreme values is to have nothing in common with Jesus."

Nolan concludes his book with one final challenge: "There is an incentive that can mobilize the world, enable the 'haves' to lower their standard of living and make us only too willing to redistribute the world's wealth and its population. It is the same drive and incentive that motivated Jesus: compassion and faith...With this kind of approach to the problems of our time one will surely come to recognize the impending catastrophe as a unique opportunity for the coming of the 'kingdom.'...God is speaking to us in a new way today. Jesus can help us to understand the voice of Truth..."





*I took the phrase "Jesus, God in Sandals" from Rachel Held Evans' book, Evolving in Monkey Town, which I highly recommend for anyone with doubts or questions about their faith.