As It Was in the Beginning (of the Jesus Way) Part 2
Ian Harris offers a reflection on the path that the Ephesus group in Wellington has taken and could take in the future..
Walking forward looking back . . .
Maori have a proverb Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: Muri, backward; mua, forward. So "I walk backwards into the future, with my eyes fixed on the past." For Maori, past, present and future are intertwined, so you look to the wisdom of the past as you move into new situations and challenges.
Ideally that’s what should also be true of the churches, looking back to gain inspiration to move forwards. But all too often in their institutional life they look back and get stuck there. And they’re all too sluggish in recognising that while they are faithfully preserving their institutional traditions the world has changed around them. In the past 400 years a huge expansion of knowledge in physics, geology, astronomy, biology, anthropology, psychology – our whole basic understanding of nature and of life itself – demands a wholesale rethinking of faith and its place in the life of the world.
Given all that, how do we move forward?
First, in line with the Maori proverb, we’ll look back. Right back. Back beyond when most of us grew up within our own denomination, back beyond Wesley and Knox and Henry VIII, back beyond Luther and the Reformation, back beyond the high days of Christendom in the Middle Ages, back beyond Constantine when the newly universal church gradually took on the trappings of a fading Roman Empire, back beyond the bitter doctrinal wars of the 3rd and 4th centuries, right back to the earliest years of the Jesus movement – or rather Jesus movements – that sprang up in the light of Jesus’ life and ministry, his death and the resurrection experiences of his earliest Jewish followers. In other words, After Jesus, Before Christianity.
That’s the title of a book produced by 22 scholars of the Westar Institute in the US after combing through everything they could find relating to the first 200 years of the Christian era. I want to pick up a few salient points from the book to reflect on. It would help if you approached this by doing three simple things:
Turn down the volume of your logical left brain;
Dial up the energy of your imaginative right brain;
And make a real imaginative effort to enter into the minds of those very first people who had known Jesus and found themselves re-orienting their lives around him. That’s going to be tricky, so here are a few aids from After Jesus, Before Christianity.
■ First, you are Jews thoroughly immersed in your Jewish faith, and you interpret your whole experience of Jesus in light of your Jewish heritage. That doesn’t make you Christians – you’re good Jews, it’s just that you’ve begun to see Jesus as fulfilling the Law and the Prophets, and you’re teasing out the implications of that for your own life and your Jewish religious community. It was much later, after Rome destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70, that rabbinic Jews and the Jesus faction drifted further and further apart, and in time their ways parted.
■ Second, you get together in small groups in homes or shops or wherever you can, to focus on the meaning of Jesus for you. It’s just one of many similar groups, clubs, communities, gatherings – but in those early years you certainly don’t think of yourselves as “churches”. You have no scriptures beyond the Old Testament, no shared creed or hierarchy to organise you. Every group is doing its own thing in its own way.
■ Third, you’re aware all the time that you live under the domination of the Roman empire and its supreme god, the emperor. As Jews you’re allowed a degree of freedom in your religion as long as you toe Rome’s political line, but it grates that the emperor is being proclaimed as Son of God, Saviour of the world, Lord, Redeemer, harbinger of peace. As a good Jew you mutter “Not for me!”, and you’re building an alternative model inspired by Jesus.
■ You don’t call yourselves “Christian” – that didn’t come till much later. So what do you call yourselves? The answer tells us a lot about where the emphasis lay. You and your friends use labels centring on Jesus as the Anointed One, that is the one who is their messiah, and in your Jewish tradition the messiah is associated with high priests, prophets and kings. So in these early days you call yourselves Believers of the Anointed One, Friends of the Anointed One, Sisters and Brothers of the Anointed One, Confidants of the Anointed One or in Greek, of the Christ. And when you think of Jesus as the messiah or Christ, you are actually challenging a central tenet of the Roman empire. You’re saying Jesus the Christ, not the emperor, is king in the basileia or kingship of God. He, not the emperor, is Saviour of the world, Son of God, and all the rest. A very different kind of rule, obviously, but you have chosen to be sisters and brothers of the Anointed One. Politically, that’s subversive stuff.
■ But what do you and your friends do when they meet? You remember Jesus, what he said, what he did. You talk about connections you see between him and key events, concepts, people, symbols, festivals in your Jewish religious heritage. You mull over the cruel horror of his death. You find it appropriate to draw Jesus into the way you worship God. In our own day many people have sidelined or even dismissed terms like messiah or Christ because of all the supernatural barnacles that have attached to them in later centuries. But if we’re to enter into the imaginations of people living after Jesus, before Christianity, we have to find a way to re-engage with them, only in a manner more appropriate to our time.
■ A central feature of the gatherings you attend is that when you meet, you eat together. You share a meal and conversation in a space where everyone is treated as equals and with dignity and respect, man and woman, rich and poor, artisan and peasant, young and old.
■ Occasionally you may bathe together in the manner of the day. Rome had built public baths where people could do that. They’re venues not only for bathing but also for socialising. The Greek word for bathe is baptizo. In time baptism became a ritual where you become a full part of a Jesus community, and bathing was central to it.
In After Jesus, Before Christianity the scholars paint a detailed picture of what life was like for “the party of the Anointed One”. But they do very little to explain why and how they became so gripped by this new Jesus strand in the Jewish religious experience. To my mind it’s the pivotal question: What exactly was it that impelled them to make Jesus central, vital, to their faith experience?
What now?
I’ll sketch three possible explanations for you to consider. There’ve been many more out there, but these three are current today:
■ They experienced the power of the presence of the human Jesus among them, even after his death. They felt they had somehow inherited his Spirit, and somehow his Spirit was also God’s Spirit. For them he was everything that the Jews had ever hoped and prayed for, and they determined to follow his Way.
That’s the conclusion of a South African Catholic priest, Albert Nolan, in a book called Jesus Before Christianity. Nolan says, and I quote: “The faith which Jesus awakens in us is at the same time faith in him and faith in his divinity. This was the experience of Jesus’ followers. This was the kind of impact he had on them.” I was struck that in in his final chapter he doesn’t once mention Christ. That departs from the experience of those earliest followers. They were “the party of the Anointed One”, the party of Christ.
■ The second living option is the one that took centre stage in later centuries as the imagination of the church honoured and glorified the significance of Jesus. In creeds, doctrines and the way many people thought of him his divinity waxed and his humanity waned till Jesus and God became pretty much identical, the ultimate supernatural entity. Jesus and Christ fused into interchangeable terms, talk of one and it’s assumed you’re talking about the other.
I once asked Shirley Murray how she decided which word to use in her hymns, and she said when she needed two syllables, she used Jesus, when only one syllable Christ. Sorry Shirley, there’s a bit more to it than that. Paul is sometimes accused of being responsible for this exaltation of a divine Christ at the expense of the human Jesus, but that is to misread him.
■ In our own day, a reversal has been taking place – this is the third option. The Christ has been downplayed or even dismissed (except where a single syllable is needed in a hymn), and the human Jesus has been disinterred – you could say resurrected – to become the prime focus of theological interest, as with the Jesus Seminar.
But also in our own day a brand-new tool for exploring faith has been delivered unto us, in the seminal psychology of Carl Jung.
For him, religion has its rightful place within the psychic reality of the right brain. That reality carries the currency of dreams, myths and symbols, and those symbols have power. They channel psychic energy. For Jung God is not real in the way we usually use the term, yet is certainly “for real”: God or Godness is experienced in the brain as a source and symbol of totality, of the interconnectedness of all that is, imprinted deep in the psyche. God is one of those symbolic images or patterns or dramas experienced in cultures all round the world, and taking shape in myths.
There are other universal images, such as the mother, the father, the hero, the jester, each in Jungian language an archetype of a quality or character that affects us. And for Christians, I suggest, it’s Christ, who figures as the inner dynamic of Christian experience, just as the Buddha within is the inner dynamic of Buddhism. Two thousand years earlier Paul latched on to the same basic idea with his concept of Christ as the archetype of love, grace and transformation – “Christ in you and you in Christ,” he says. It would be going too far to call him the first Jungian, but in this regard he foreshadows what Jung was on about.
So Paul takes us squarely back into the first two centuries and, as I see it, into the experience of those belonging to “the party of the Anointed One”. I’m going to be provocative and suggest that their pivotal experience was not of Jesus as a supremely good man, a clever teacher, a wise sage, a moral guide, true as all those are. It was of resurrection – not of the human Jesus, but of the Christ as archetype of love, grace and transformation, gathering up all that Jesus meant to them, but now a dynamic within, a dynamic to live out in daily life.
That’s what excited them. That’s what they carried into their synagogues as they proclaimed Jesus as the Christ, fulfilment of the promise of their Jewish scriptures. That’s what held them steadfast in their faith. That’s what Paul was on about.
And as Jung has shown, the experience is completely valid in a modern psychological understanding, without recourse to anything supernatural. And it all takes place within the human brain.
Ian Harris