By Reverend Laurie DeMott

For many of us, this is the way we feel about Jesus: he is someone we have known all of our lives and yet he is still a mystery to us. If we met him at a party and struck up a conversation with him, what would he say? What would he be like? Would he be charming and effervescent or stern and somber? Could he talk football with you or would he be interested only in discussing weighty theological matters? And should you decide to engage him in theology, what would most make his eyes sparkle? A discussion of ethics? Health Care reform? Your personal prayer life? The wages of sin?

We celebrated his birth. We sang lullabies at his cradle. Who now has he grown to be?

In the 1800s, biblical scholars decided to apply the new rationalism of the Enlightenment to their study of Jesus and they began to write what they called more "realistic biographies" of Jesus than those found in our gospels. Using archaelogical evidence and literary criticism, these scholars stripped the gospels of any miraculous references and pared down any teachings that they felt were more likely to have come from the early church than Jesus, to create what they considered a more accurate portrait of Jesus. Unfortunately, after decades of effort, biblical scholars were no closer to agreement on the character of the "real Jesus" than they were before they started. One theologian said, "it became alarmingly and terrifyingly evident how inevitably each author brought the spirit of his own age into his presentation of the figure of Jesus."

More recently, a group called the Jesus Seminar renewed this quest to find the true historical Jesus and claimed that they had devised a system to eliminate the personal bias that plagued the earlier work. The Jesus Seminar would create their "authentic biography of Jesus" by polling the opinions of lots of scholars and color coding the results. Consequently, about 150 biblical scholars meet twice a year to debate various stories and sayings attributed to Jesus and then using colored beads they vote on how historically accurate they believe the material to be. A red bead means the voter believed the gospel was, in this case, historically accurate. A pink bead means it was probably close to accurate. Grey means that it's probably not historically accurate but it is at least in line with Jesus' ideas. Black means, "No way did Jesus say or do that."

The Jesus Seminar hoped that their color-coded bible would provide a clearer picture of the historical Jesus -- the real man who lived in Galilee two thousand years ago -- but all the color-coded bible really does is provide a snapshot of the current opinion of a cross-section of biblical scholars. If the Jesus Seminar had gathered fifty years ago, the color coding of the resulting bible would have been much different and fifty years in the future a similar Seminar will yield even a different bible. Biblical scholars have been trying to describe the real Jesus for centuries. And, over the centuries the picture of Jesus that has resulted has changed according to the times. Sometimes the scholars have described Jesus primarily as a great ethical teacher, sometimes as an itinerant healer, and sometimes, as a social reformer who overturned societal laws in his defense of the poor and oppressed.

So who was Jesus really? Was Jesus a healer, social reformer, or an ethical teacher? Will the real Jesus please stand up? We have committed ourselves to this man, even staked our lives on him; it would be helpful to know who he really was.

The gospel writer Mark takes a definitive position on this issue. In the first chapter of the gospel Mark introduces Jesus to us through a series of short vignettes. Jesus tangles with Satan in the wilderness. He heals Peter's mother-in-law. He teaches in the synagogue with authority. He casts out a demon, and he restores a leper to a place in a society where the leper was once outcast. Is Jesus a healer, social reformer, or teacher? Mark answers resoundingly, "Yes!" He is all of these things. Mark's description of Jesus comes not out of an intellectual study of ancient manuscripts but out of his belief in Jesus as God's Messiah. If Jesus is God's Messiah as the first witnesses to Jesus proclaimed and as Mark believes, then Jesus must carry in his life all of the authority of God. Saints and prophets, teachers and preachers had arisen in Judaism before and each had revealed to the people a partial glimpse of the nature of God; but Jesus was different from all of these. Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, God's anointed one and beloved son. As such, the revelation we have of God through Jesus cannot be incomplete but must be a full expression of the divine nature. Jesus must be a social reformer because Jesus is the son of the God who has consistently defended the poor and the oppressed against injustice. Jesus must be a great ethical teacher because he speaks with the authority of the God who carved the ten commandments into rock. And Jesus must be a healer because he represents the merciful life-changing presence of a God who's love is unending. To emphasize any one part of Jesus at the expense of the other is to dismiss the all-encompassing authority Jesus has over your life. Bill Keane, the cartoonist who draws "Family Circus" told this story: "I was penciling one of my Family Circus cartoons and [my little son] Jeffy said, `Daddy, how do you know what to draw?' I said, `God tells me.' Jeffy said, `Then why do you keep erasing parts of it?'"

I believe that the reason we keep erasing parts of the picture of Jesus is because of who we are, not because of who Jesus was or wasn't. One church historian pointed out that the quest to discover the historical Jesus has taught us more about the personalities and concerns of the biblical scholars than about Jesus himself. And, while none of us is a famous biblical scholar, all of us have a tendency to emphasize one part of Jesus over another as we strive to conform our lives to his. Some of you may passionately follow the Christ who reforms society and you are engaged in debate over children's health laws, welfare reform, or military expansion in third world countries but your devotional life is deficient because you find it hard to quiet your passion long enough to listen in motionless prayer. Or some of you may have a wonderful prayer life and have received the comfort of Christ on many dark troubled nights but you find it hard to become passionate about the poor or the hungry. Our different personalities lead us to find it easier to follow Jesus in some parts of our lives than in others, and we might ask, "What's wrong with saying that some of us are good at one thing and not at others?" After all, the apostle Paul reminded the church at Corinth that different people have different gifts. So why doesn't God just divvy up the tasks among us? -- Bruce can work on social reform, Betsy can do the praying, and Huburt will worry about his ethical standards. Why not have Christianity by committee?
Regardless of how efficient it might seem, Jesus never divvied up the tasks. He selected 12 disciples and he expected all 12 to learn to do and be all things: they were all to preach, all to teach, all to heal, and all to care for the oppressed. There is a priest in a city in Wisconsin who carries a business card which reads: "St. Mary's Church, Vincent J. Lynch, priest. Saints created, dragons slain, lost sheep found, pagans converted, crusades begun, pilgrimages arranged, wars ended, lions tamed, cathedrals built, seas parted." In a humorous way, this priest describes the breadth of the Christian call. The apostle Paul could talk about matching personality types with tasks because he was building the institutional church but Jesus was concerned about building lives and Jesus knew that there is no such thing as partial Christianity. It's an all or nothing deal. When we commit ourselves to follow Christ, we aren't signing up for a smorgasbord where we can pick and choose the places and times; we are committing ourselves in all things and in all parts of our lives.

Following Jesus is like snuggling under a warm blanket on a cold winter's night. You can cuddle under that blanket to warm your heart but if your foot is sticking out, that cold foot will chill your entire body. So too, you can try to follow the ethical teaching of Jesus and ignore the devotional, but the lack of attention to your prayer life will leave your ethical endeavors cold. Or you can piously read your Bible every morning while ignoring the needs of the world, but your faith will become chilly and self-absorbed with little power to lift you into the holy. Oswald Chambers says, "We [will] carry our religion as if it were a headache. There [will be] neither joy nor power nor inspiration in it, none of the grandeur of the unsearchable riches of Christ about it, none of the passion of the hilarious confidence in God."

History has taught us then that any question to discover the nature of the real Jesus of Nazareth will at best be incomplete and colored by the personality of the researchers. We can only begin then with a step of faith: we must trust the earliest witnesses to Jesus who saw in this man the Messiah of God, God's very representative on earth. Jesus was given authority by God to enter every area, every minute part of the fabric of human life, and lead us to wholeness. As we move from Christmas into an encounter with the fullness of the full grown Christ, we must ask, "Which Christ have I neglected -- the healer? the reformer? the man of prayer? Where in my life do I need to strengthen my commitment to Christ?"

Stretch out the blanket of faith until it covers every finger and toe so that the fullness that is Christ may envelope you.