Jesus was a real person.
Yes, this may be something you have known to be true for a long time, maybe even something you have spent time thinking about. However, I believe we are all at risk of letting our ideas about God, and specifically that way we think about and envision Jesus, get conflated with our self-image, our cultural norms, or many other aspects of life. Like I said Sunday,
Our image of God forms both our relationship with God and our worship of God.
Therefore, it is good for us – regardless of how familiar we are with the historical information we have about who Jesus was and what that teaches us about how we can know God – to spend time reflecting on our ideas, our understandings, our images of God. Here are two brief examples.
Scripture teaches that God is our “heavenly Father.” That is the way Jesus taught his disciples to address God in prayer (Matthew 6:9). For those of us who have had the gift of a healthy relationship with a good father here on earth, it is a good and beautiful thing to imagine God being our heavenly Father. How much better must that heavenly Father be! However, for any who have been hurt or mistreated by their earthly father – whether through the injury of words and harmful actions, or the injury of neglect and absence – it is easy to let those painful and negative experiences form the way we think about God. The wounds of our interaction with humans can become – sometimes intentionally, oftentimes without our even being aware – our basis for thinking about God.
As another example, there are many different personality tests and inventories available today. As a staff here at church, we have worked with the Enneagram, Strengths Finder, and Emergenetics to name just a few. I am betting many of you have interacted with one of these in your place of work or any number of other contexts. For us, it is really valuable to understand the differences in personality between different people. This can help us better relate to, interact with, and work with one another. While scripture teaches that God is a person, we can sometimes confuse what we know about human personality to over influence our understanding of God. I think it is fair to say that Jesus had a unique personality, however it would be unhelpful to conclude that there is one human personality that best characterizes who God is.
The point of it all is this, as we approach Easter Sunday, let’s remember to spend time reflecting on our image of God.
What images come to your mind during prayer?
What assumptions do you have when you think about your relationship with God?
Have you spend time thinking about Jesus as a real person?
Are you letting anything from your own life or world unhelpfully form your ideas about God?
Here are a few thoughts from biblical scholars to round out this little exploration. You can find a number of recommendations below for books that dive even deeper into questions about the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, God’s messiah.
The overarching feel is that [scripture] is written as a sort of drama that is meant to be acted out. Or, rather, it’s part of a play, the much larger play which consists of the whole Bible. The heaven-and earth story, the story of God and the world, creation and covenant, creation spoiled and covenant broken and then covenant renewed and creation restored. The New Testament is the book where all this comes in to land and it lands in the form of an invitation: this can be and should by your story, my story, the story which makes sense of us, which restores us to sense after the nonsense of our lives, the story which breathes hope into a world of chaos, and love into cold hearts and lives.
The whole New Testament is written, not exactly to create the new world and the new-covenant relationship – God has done that in Jesus and is doing it in the spirit – but to tell the story of that new world, that new relationships, in such a way that we, the readers, are drawn into that relationship and into that world.”
The New Testament in its World, N.T. Wright and Michael Bird, 40-42.
I shared this during the sermon a couple weeks ago, but it bears repeating. The big idea for the sake of this newsletter is to realize that all of the “actors” in the Great Drama of God’s kingdom are real people. That is the only kind of character God ever uses in this drama called creation and covenant and restoration.
Craig Blomberg devoted much of his academic career to the question of the historical reliability of the gospels – and of the New Testament more broadly. At the end of his book on the topic, he concludes,
“The gospels much be subjected to the same type of historical scrutiny given to other writings of antiquity, but they can stand up to such scrutiny admirably.”
The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, Craig Blomberg.
To say it in another way, there is ample reason to believe that Jesus was a real person who really said and did the things that the gospels report he said and did.
A final thought from a much older author. Thomas Acquinas, the Dominican Friar and theologian who lived during the thirteenth century, famously said,
“[Humans] naturally come to the unseen by way of the seen.”
Summa Theologia, Thomas Acquinas.
If we are going to form a right understanding of who God is and what it means to know and love and worship him, it is a critical starting place to rightly understand who Jesus was, the real person. Looking around and seeing and studying the world around us, learning the historical basis for the events of the new testament, even studying things like neuroscience and sociology – all things that can be “seen” – are powerful and important ways for us to rightly understand God.
I pray that this Easter, you might come to know God more fully and rightly each day.