Who Is Jesus? (Mark 8:27-30)

“Who is Jesus?”

It seems such a strange question.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been hearing stories about Jesus. Jesus being born in a manger. Jesus welcoming the children. Jesus making blind people see. Jesus telling parables. Jesus dying on the cross. Jesus coming back to life.

I don’t remember ever not knowing who Jesus is.

So it seems strange to ask, “Who is Jesus?”

It’s even stranger when Jesus himself asks the question.

“Who do people say I am?”

“Well, some say this, some say that, some say something else…”

As I grew and matured, read the Bible and went to seminary, I realized that people have very different ideas of who Jesus is.

Some say he’s strong and powerful; others say he’s gentle and humble.

Some say he comes in judgment; others say he comes in love.

Some say he directs our attention to a world yet to come; others say he directs our attention to this world, and its need for transformation.

Who is Jesus?

Somewhere around the year 4 BCE, a baby was born to a young couple named Mary and Joseph. We celebrate that birth every Christmas, but the first people to write about Jesus didn’t say anything about his birth.

The apostle Paul’s writings are the oldest writings we have about Jesus, even though they appear after the gospels in our Bible. Yet Paul never said anything about Jesus’s birth.

Of the gospels, Mark’s is the first to have been written down, yet Mark never said anything about Jesus’s birth.

For Paul and Mark, apparently there was nothing extraordinary about Jesus’s birth, nothing worth writing down.

The two stories we do have about Jesus’s birth were written later, by writers we know today as Matthew and Luke. But these stories are very different from one another. Neither one is history. They can’t be. There are too many contradictions.

So why did they write the stories they did?

When Matthew looked at Jesus, he saw a connection to Moses, who God used to rescue God’s people from slavery in Egypt. So Matthew wrote a birth story that connected Jesus to Moses. In Matthew’s story, there is a people in need of deliverance. There is an evil king, who kills babies. There is the baby, whose life is saved by fleeing to Egypt. All these things happen in the story of Moses, and so Matthew writes them into the story of Jesus.

Luke doesn’t have any of those things.

When Luke looked at Jesus, he saw a king. A new king, for a new kingdom, a kingdom blessed by God. So instead of making a connection to Moses, Luke makes a connection to David, the greatest king in Israel’s history.

In Luke’s gospel, when Mary finds out she’s pregnant, she sings a song. But anyone familiar with the ancient scriptures would recognize that it is actually a song Hannah sang many centuries earlier, when she gave birth to Samuel, the one who would anoint David king.

There are other differences between Matthew and Luke, differences that cannot be reconciled. Does it mean that at least one, if not both, of these authors are liars?

Actually, what it means is that they each had something profound to say about Jesus, about his favored status with God, and they knew that the best way to explain something is with a story. Think of them as parables if you like; stories that do have their beginnings in historical fact, but which have as their primary purpose the conveying of a deep spiritual truth. Historical fact is not their primary purpose; their purpose is to convey – through the use of story – deep spiritual truth.

By the way, none of these stories give a date for Jesus’s birth. We celebrate it December 25, but no one really knows. There are some who say Jesus was born in September, in which case let me say to you: “Merry Christmas!” No one really knows, though. The early church picked December 25 because it was near the winter solstice, and wanted to emphasize how Jesus brings light into a darkened world. So even the date of Jesus’s birth is meant to reflect a spiritual truth, rather than historical fact.

Who is Jesus? For people of faith, this is not a question of history, even though we so often get caught up in history.

If someone asks, “Who is Abraham Lincoln?” we give a historical answer: “Abraham Lincoln was the 16^th president of the United States who ended slavery, won the Civil War, and was assassinated in Ford’s Theater.”

But the Bible, as we have already seen, does not give historical answers.

Who is Jesus?

He is Moses, come to deliver his people.

He is David, come to establish a new kingdom.

He is the light shining in the darkness.

These are not historical answers.

You want a historical answer? There is a group of scholars who have devoted their lives to uncovering the Jesus of history. They have studied and examined the scriptures as well as other documents and archaeological evidence in order to answer the question: What is historical fact, and what is historical fiction?

One of those scholars is Marcus Borg, who died earlier this year. According to him, two words stand out when it comes to describing Jesus:

Spirit and compassion.

Jesus was a spirit person, a holy man. This is very clear in the stories that the gospels tell about him. It’s true even from a historical perspective. It’s hard to know, historically, the details of what Jesus did, but it is clear that huge crowds of people saw something special in him, something holy, something spiritual.

And, Jesus had great compassion for people. He especially had compassion on those who were mistreated by others, especially those who were mistreated by the government and the religious leaders aligned with the government. Which is why he confronted those religious leaders and the government on the way they treat the people. Which led to his crucifixion.

We also know that, historically, Jesus was a Jew. He was very smart and eloquent, and taught and interpreted and reinterpreted the Jewish scriptures in a way that made those who listened to him go, “Wowww.”

For example, the ancient Jewish scriptures command Jews to “be holy as God is holy.” In Jesus’s time, this was being taught to mean “be pure, be perfect.” [Leviticus 19:2]

But Jesus, inspired by the Spirit, realized that this isn’t quite what God intended. So when Jesus taught this verse, he modified it, and said, “be compassionate as God is compassionate.” [Luke 6:36]

Even today, there are people who see Jesus as demanding purity and perfection, and others who see Jesus as demanding compassion.

In the stories that the Bible tells about Jesus, what do you hear? Is it about purity, or compassion?

How do you see Jesus portrayed in the media? Is that different than the Jesus portrayed by the stories of scripture?

What difference does it make as far as how you live your life as a Christian? How would following a Jesus of compassion be different from following a Jesus of purity?

Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, claims to follow a Jesus of purity. I don’t know if she’s actually said that, but it’s clear by her actions. To her, Jesus demands nothing less than perfection and blamelessness.

Does that image of Jesus seem consistent with the stories you know of Jesus?

In the gospel of Luke, which presents Jesus as a new king for a new kingdom, the angels announce his birth. If you were writing the story, where would you have that announcement made?

If you understand Jesus as a messiah of purity and perfection, you’d probably have the angels make that announcement in the most pure, most holy, most perfect place you can imagine… which, obviously, would be the temple in Jerusalem.

But Luke did not want to portray a messiah of purity and perfection. That’s not how he understood Jesus.

So instead, Luke had the angels make their announcement to the people most in need of compassion: shepherds out in the field. Shepherds, a group of people who most definitely were not pure. Society had declared shepherds to be unclean and unpure, and they were, in fact, a group of people a little rough around the edges.

After all, what kind of a person makes his living out in the fields, away from everyone else? They were society’s outcasts. The county clerk in ancient Jerusalem would no doubt have turned them away.

The shepherds were in need of compassion.

The best way to show that this newly born messiah was a messiah of compassion would be to write a story in which they, the shepherds, receive the angels’ announcement.

Is it historically true? I don’t know! I wasn’t there.

But it is true in the way that matters. This story helps me understand who Jesus is, that he is a messiah of compassion who cares for those who have been mistreated by society.

And knowing this about him makes a huge difference in how I live out my life as a follower of Jesus.