Journey with Jesus

Encountering Christ in his Birth, Baptism, Death, and Resurrection

Brookhart

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498280747
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Do you want your life to be a vigorous, purposeful, and liberated journey? That is exactly what an encounter with Jesus Christ offers. This book presents a way to engage Christ through a detailed yet accessible look at the four major events of his life and provides suggestions about living out the implications of those events on a daily and practical level.

Chapter 1

What in the World!

Imagine you have purchased tickets to a play and are now sitting in your seat. The theater darkens and the red curtain parts. The scene before you shows various kinds of people walking up and down an imaginary street. One of the characters steps out the scene, walks to the edge of the stage, and addresses the audience.

He is shabbily dressed and nervous, and he begins to weep. “I used to have a great job, but my position was eliminated. I have been desperately looking for work for more than a year, and I can find nothing. I cannot support my family. I am so ashamed. I am a failure every day.” He wipes his face and steps back into the street scene.

Next a teenager steps forward. He gives all of his attention to his phone as he taps out text message after text message. He looks up and appears to be surprised that an audience is watching him. “I text all the time, and I get hundreds of texts a day. It’s the only fun thing in my life.” He pauses and adds, “But I feel lonely most of the time.” He continues typing and he turns and rejoins the street scene.

Then a middle-aged woman steps to the front. She is wearing an expensive business suite and her earrings, watch, and necklace gleam with gold. “I am successful, you know. Being a woman has not stopped me for a minute. I am going places. I just hope that people notice my work and my success. I hope I can generate some respect, maybe even a little love.” She crisply spins around and goes back to the street scene.

I suspect that most people have little difficulty in identifying with these characters. We know about shame, failure, and the aching desire to be noticed and loved. This imagined drama takes place not only on a stage but in our lives as well.

Most of us seek to find some glimmer of light in the darkness. We try hard to avoid the human tragedies that always seem close at hand, if not inevitable. We long for forgiveness, purpose, hope, love, and a modicum of beauty and justice. This is who we are. This is how we live. This is what we long for.

The question posed by this state of affairs is: what kind of world do we live in. Should we simply learn to accept that our story will be gray, wearisome, and worry-filled? Or could there possibly be a story, an alternative narrative, another reality that would lead us into meaning, hope, and forgiveness?

We begin with the possibility of that alternative narrative. We begin our odyssey.

Enter Jesus. Most of us love Christmas. It is hands-down my favorite holiday. Sunday schools sometimes celebrate is as the birthday of Jesus, but in a deeper sense it asks us to consider the fact of the incarnation. That latinate word proclaims the God who took on flesh, became human, and dwelt among us.

All of the Bible stories we hear in the Christmas season declare the fact of the incarnation, each in its own way. In the gospel of John, for instance, we are told, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) “Word” refers to Jesus, who is the message, the word that God wishes to speak to the world, the story God desires to tell the whole creation. Incidentally, this verse is such a clear, bold, and important declaration of the incarnation that it holds the honor of being the gospel reading for the main service on Christmas day.

The most familiar Christmas account can be found in the second chapter of Luke’s gospel. In that narrative the angel assigns important names to the new born child: Savior, Christ, and Lord. The original readers of this gospel would have recognized “Lord” as the traditional title for God in the Old Testament. Born to you this day in the city of David is . . . God incarnate.

Finally, the gospel according to Matthew narrates the story of Jesus birth with an eye to how it fulfills Old Testament prophecy. The evangelist quotes the prophet Isaiah, who wrote, “And they shall name him Emmanuel,” (Isa 7:14), and then adds that the name means “God is with us.” (Matt 1:23) Again we encounter the incarnation.

When I was growing up I was taught that the two candles on the altar of the church represented the divine and human natures of Christ. This made me wonder, because even at ten or twelve years old I sensed that we were describing a mystery that was beyond my grasp. Years later in seminary I read about the early ecumenical councils of the church and the conflicts involved in trying to describe this mystery of the union of the divine and human by using the categories of Greek philosophy. Both the history of those councils and their deliberations can be at times virtually incomprehensible because the vocabulary they used is unfamiliar to us today. If you want to sample the complexities and sophistication of these early leaders of the church, Google the “Definition of the Union of the Divine and Human Natures in the Person of Christ” from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. These councils and their teaching remain authoritative for the church even today. In their unique way they remind us again that we are dealing with a great mystery.

In the course of my preaching of the over years, then, I have found myself trying to speak of the incarnation in less philosophical ways. For example, I believe we can think of Jesus as the person who was perfectly and completely transparent to God. Or we can speak of Jesus as being totally integrated into God. Or we could say that Jesus is the window into the heart of God. These represent my humble, homiletical attempts to declare the mystery of the incarnation, but I know that they can in no way supplant the historic creeds nor are they adequate to bear the mystery of incarnation. The starting place for me has been to consider that those early disciples who had met and lived with Jesus must have said, “To be in the presence of Jesus is to be in the presence of God.” They listened to his teaching and witnessed his mighty acts, and must have concluded, “When he speaks he sounds like God, and when he acts he does those things only God can do.” These sorts of personal encounters with Jesus asked people then and now to consider who he is and how we might describe him. Thus arose the doctrine of incarnation, God with us in the flesh.

So far we have been using both metaphors and philosophical language, but now we turn to literary ways of thinking. This approach will open new perspectives for us. With this method the incarnation introduces us to the hero and to the setting of the story. As we move forward we will consider the two other basic elements of a story, plot and dramatic conflict. For example, think of a drawing of a square. At the corners we can write in four terms, hero, setting, plot, and dramatic conflict. That square forms the boundaries of story, and the four categories at the corners define the elements of any story.

To summarize our journey so far, we are seeking a story that serves as the glue of our lives, a story that interprets our existence so that we can live with hope and meaning. I have proposed that the story of Jesus is exactly that story, and that it unfolds in four chapters. The first is the incarnation. And using literary categories we are introduced to the main character, the hero, Jesus, as well as to the setting, our world of human thoughts, feelings, imagination, will, and activity.

At this point we need to get a richer and more detailed view of Jesus, and to do that we turn to the gospel according to Luke. The term incarnation introduces us to an intellectual way of meeting Jesus, and I have always found it a helpful code word that I can use to conjure up in my mind a set of stories from the Bible. The term helps me understand, but the stories grasp me and fire my imagination to such an extent that they become the places of living encounters with the divine. Is that not just the sort of story we long for?

Given that, let us look rather carefully at three stories from the New Testament that will usher us into a close encounter with our hero. We begin with what many people mean when they mention “the Christmas story.” Regular churchgoers can almost recite it from memory, and it is this narrative that Linus recites in the Peanuts Christmas special to explain the meaning of the holiday. I am referring, of course, to chapter two of the gospel according to Luke. Here it is in all its beauty and mystery.

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid: for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people; to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

Glory to God in the highest heaven,

And on earth peace among those whom he favors.

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with hast and found Mary and Joseph and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heart and seen, as it had been told them. (Luke 2:1–20)

To step back a bit the first chapter of Luke’s gospel reminds me of a scene from medieval stained glass. Beautifully written, they have a pleasing archaic quality. They are colorful and moving narratives, which begin what the evangelist calls on “orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us.” (Luke 1:1) We read about the announcements of the births of both Jesus and John the Baptist, the visit of the two pregnant mothers with each other, and the astonishing events surrounding the birth of John the Baptist. Now the stage is set for the appearance of Jesus.

The account begins with a remarkable set of statements that situate the birth of Jesus firmly in time and space. So we are not to understand this as an entertaining tale or another myth about the lives of the gods. This is history in a strict sense. The time is during the reign of Caesar Augustus (63 BC–14 AD), the first Roman emperor, the ruler who brought peace to the empire, and who even encouraged the worship of his “genius,” his divine spirit, at altars around the empire. Also mentioned is Quirinius, the appointed governor of the imperial province of Syria. Jesus, then, born in a period when Rome had become an empire, when the power of the state was growing, and when the emperor himself was seen as the deity who enjoyed the titles of “savior” and “lord.”

Nazareth, at that time, was a village in the northern part of the Holy Land, and Bethlehem, a few miles south of Jerusalem, serve as the setting for our story. Nazareth was a place of little account in those days, but Bethlehem was famed as the birth place of David, the great King who had led God’s people into an unsurpassed gold age about a millennium before Jesus’ birth. Furthermore, the ancient prophets foretold Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Messiah, the “anointed one,” whom people hoped would appear as a new David and lead them into a second gold age. In short, the town was fraught with history and divine possibility, even at a time whe...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What in the World!
• Chapter 2: Inhabiting the Incarnation
• Chapter 3: The Beloved
• Chapter 4: Swimming in God’s Love
• Chapter 5, Part One: Shock and Awe
• Chapter 5, Part Two: An Intermission
• Chapter 5, Part Three: Mighty Metaphors
• Chapter 5, Part Four: Analyzing Images
• Chapter 6: Seven Blessings of the Cross
• Chapter 7: Death’s Dominion Destroyed
• Chapter 8: Words of Life
• A Final Word