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 20th
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?
