The Sunday Forum: November 24--The Faces of Jesus

The Faces of Jesus

Last week in the Sunday Forum Tony Hatch stretched our faith as he showed us several different contemporary icons of Jesus.  We were stretched because he challenged some of our traditional assumptions.  A brown complexioned Jesus challenged our Northern European Caucasian assumption.  A Native American Jesus challenged our assumption of a privileged status as those who have bequeathed the faith to benighted souls of lesser strain.  An Arab Jesus challenged us to think that the Muslim people, even the radical Islamist, is loved by God as much we ourselves. 

But then Jesus has always challenged the world’s assumptions about him and about itself.  And Tony went on to show a Jesus whose life and words inspired others to take him seriously and live again his ageless challenge to the domination systems of every age.  In our time the gross inequalities in power (wealth), nutrition, and health between the haves and have-nots of the world cry out for sanity, equity, balance: simple fairness. 

In the many faces of Jesus we touch the deep concerns of people far and wide who have found in Jesus a space where “the hopes and fears and of all the years” have been met. 

The 20^th century has seen Jesus as Liberator, and “Liberation Theology” born in Central and South American favelas energized Christian thinking far beyond its homelands.  Much earlier a similar result of the Gospel’s hope preached and sung in Christ-communities among slaves in the American south was a contributing energy to the subtle ground swell that became the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s.  In the words of Richard Niebuhr the Christ of Culture was finally able to break through his cultural restraints and become the Christ who transforms the culture that proclaims him.

This Sunday (Nov. 24) we are going to look at some of the Christological titles found in the Christian Bible in order to see how the first followers of Jesus understood him.  This is important because the way he is understood was the way he is preached and taught.

How are we to preach and teach Jesus in our day?  Does it differ from the way he was preached and taught in the first century?   In subsequent centuries?  If so, why? And how?