ReDiscovery: Jesus the Word
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Intro:
Intro:
The five ReDiscoveries are:
A bigger Gospel - saved into a community under Jesus called to live the life of the future now
Jesus the Word - Reading Scripture through a Jesus lens - God looks like Jesus and so all Scripture is properly read through a Jesus lens.
Our relationship with power - how is evil overcome?
A clarified purpose and empowerment - joining God in the reconciling of all things
A new approach to disagreement - shared centre vs the lines we draw
Last week, we began with the Gospel - the good news of Jesus Christ. And we examined how the gospel is sometimes impoverished because of the way we limit it to being personal salvation. While the gospel invitation is deeply personal, it also means belonging to a community under Jesus called to join Him in the renewal of all things!
Today, we will look at what it means to Discover and ReDiscover that Jesus is the Word. That Jesus is how we know who God is and what God is like. That Jesus is the One revealed by the Scriptures AND that Jesus is the lens through which we can interpret the Scriptures. In fact, that Jesus is the lens through which we MUST interpret the Scriptures.
Sermon:
Sermon:
Reading?
Reading?
1 In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
2 The Word was with God in the beginning.
3 Everything came into being through the Word,
and without the Word
nothing came into being.
What came into being
4 through the Word was life,
and the life was the light for all people.
5 The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness doesn’t
extinguish the light.
6 A man named John was sent from God. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning the light, so that through him everyone would believe in the light.
8 He himself wasn’t the light, but his mission was to testify concerning the light.
9 The true light that shines on all people
was coming into the world.
10 The light was in the world,
and the world came into being
through the light,
but the world
didn’t recognize the light.
11 The light came to his own people,
and his own people didn’t welcome him.
12 But those who did welcome him,
those who believed in his name,
he authorized to become God’s children,
13 born not from blood
nor from human desire or passion,
but born from God.
14 The Word became flesh
and made his home among us.
We have seen his glory,
glory like that of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.
15 John testified about him, crying out, “This is the one of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is greater than me because he existed before me.’ ”
16 From his fullness we have all received
grace upon grace;
17 as the Law was given through Moses,
so grace and truth came into being
through Jesus Christ.
18 No one has ever seen God.
God the only Son,
who is at the Father’s side,
has made God known.
Have you ever had an idea about someone that you eventually realize was wrong?
Maybe you’ve listened to a radio personality for years and when you finally see what they look like, you realize you have had a mental image of what you thought they would look like that is not at all congruent with the person standing in front of you.
Or, maybe you remember in our Zoom days during the pandemic. We met together during those months, people who knew each other in our face to face lives, and simply translated those relationships as best we could into meeting virtually. But perhaps, like me, you also met people during that time. I began my time as a Jesus Collective Partner in
Lego
Lego
Or what about this pile of Lego? What do you think it could make?
What could it be? (so many possibilities)
What should it be? (oh the debates I could have with myself - and with all of you!)
How are we supposed to know?
What if our image of God is similar? After all, the way we see God will impact the way we see ourselves and everything else.
How do we know who God is and what God is like?
How do we figure out when what we think of God is off-base?
What is our “quality control” on that?
Issues of projection and interpretation
angry “smiter” - think Zeus?
doting grandfather, a bit dense, and frankly not really paying attention
deadbeat Dad - absent and unpredictable
Santa Claus - he keeps track of everything we do, we sit on his lap once a year at most and ask for what we want and may or may not get it. (this one is a bit like the Genie God)
When it comes to Jesus. We end up combining who we experience Jesus to be, but often we maintain one or more of these wrong projections.
If we keep the first one, the angry “smiter” God, we make Jesus the ‘soft side’ or the ‘nice side’ of a God who is brooding and prone to lashing out in anger at any moment. Jesus placates this angry God (even by dying) so that this God who doesn’t like us very much can stand to be in our presence.
Sound familiar? I’ve thought these things. I’ve heard these things. And I’ve been impacted in how I view myself and others by holding onto these kinds of ideas.
Dangerous ideas here. Where we have added Jesus into a gross mis-representation of who God is.
Any of these, when combined with the Jesus we encounter ends up skewing our image of God. And thus our image of ourselves and of creation.
You might be asking yourself, why doesn’t she just tell us to read the scripture so that everything will become clear?
Great question.
But it turns out that the scripture has to be not only read but interpreted. So we need an “interpretive key”… so what is that key?
To put it another way, we cannot just read scripture. We are always reading through sets of lens. Sometimes multiple lenses. And we have to learn to see the lenses for what they are.
Lens of interpretation - ancient languages to modern ones, translation teams that have theological assumptions AND sometimes theological or ideological goals
Lens of history - butt dial vs booty call? (Can I?)
Lens of culture, gender and socioeconomic place in society & the world - reading from the margins is very different than reading with academics or social elites or politically powerful
The second question is how do encounter Jesus? How do we meet Jesus?
Two main ways: “in our hearts” and “in the Gospels” (or in the text)
This is why we give Scripture such an important place in our individual lives and in our life as a community of faith.
And so we have statements like the one that the Arab Baptist Theological School (that I’ll be visiting later this week!) made this last week in an article:
Arab Baptist Theological School article
Our Lord Jesus Christ is the eternal incarnate Word of God, and since we encounter Jesus Christ in the Bible it is of great importance that every human being has access to the Bible, so that [they] can encounter and keep encountering Jesus Christ. The goal of translation, according to Christian thought, is to deliver the good news in a clear way to every person, everywhere, and in all languages to bear witness to the richness of God’s love and his redemption for the whole world in Christ.
Or this beautiful section of The Baptist Union of Great Britain, in their “Declaration of Principle” says it this way…
That our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, is the sole and absolute authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and that each Church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to interpret and administer His laws.
Jesus is the Word.
Jesus shows us who God is and what God is like.
God came in person to set the record straight. (After all, the OT is full of God’s people having weird ideas about who God is and what God is like.) In Jesus, God comes in person to say, “That is not who I am.” He came to make God known to us. Jesus the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us - moved into the neighbourhood - to make God known to us.
Not some aspect of God. Not the nice side of God. Not even just to reveal the Son to us.
But God. The triune God, in all the divine fullness is revealed in Jesus.
How do I know this? Because this book says so!
19 Because all the fullness of God
was pleased to live in him,
Hebrews 1:3 (CEB)
3 The Son is the light of God’s glory and the imprint of God’s being.
We cannot know God on our own. We need God to reveal what God is like to us. And the Christian story says that it is the light of Jesus that shines and illuminates and reveals who God really is and what God is really like.
And THIS. This centering on Jesus also impacts then how we read the Scriptures.
Jesus is given the “interpretive priority”… Jesus is the lens through which we read the text.
And so to go back to the Lego image from the beginning…
“Reading the Bible without centering everything on [Jesus] is a bit like sorting through a jumbled pile of Legos on the floor. Each individual piece has its own particular form. But the pieces can be combined and connected to form an almost infinite number of shapes. There would be no real way to know that any shape was truer than the rest.
But meeting Jesus, the Word made flesh, is like glimpsing the outside of the box. For the first time we see the image of how things look when all the pieces are properly arranged. We see the design God intended. Each individual piece is authoritative as it takes its proper place in the Word’s defining portrait of God and God’s desires.”
We centre on Jesus. We make Jesus our lens.
And we experience Jesus in our lives - or in our hearts, some might say.
Brad Jersak reminds us that Jesus is a life-giver and not a death-dealer
Therefore, when we encounter a text or an event in our own lives in which God is seen to be death-dealing, we have to stop and look at it through the lens of Jesus. What’s going on? Is this really what God is like? Is this a result of what Pete Enns describes “God letting his children tell the story?” And what do we do when our image of God doesn’t square with the person of Jesus? Both the Jesus of the Gospels AND the Jesus we encounter in our own hearts and lives? But we also see Him revealed in the Gospels. And when the two differ - well, then we have to ask some questions, don’t we?!
When my experience of Jesus doesn’t square with the Jesus in the gospels, I have to look for places where I might be projecting some other image of God. (angry smiter, or deadbeat dad or santa?)
When I read the gospels and they don’t square with how I experience Jesus, I have to ask about my interpretation. What gets priority? What lenses am I looking through that I might be unaware of?
Because God is like Jesus. Always.
And when it doesn’t seem that God is like Jesus, that’s a perspective issue, not a God issue.
God always looks like Jesus.
And all Scripture must be read through Him.
This is what we see Jesus doing … and the gospel writers notice it too…post-resurrection brings a perspective and a-ha
cf Luke 24 and the Emmaus Road encounter
27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
and with his disciples after his resurrection
44 He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.
39 You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
Questions?
Do you refuse to come to Jesus to have life?
Do you need Jesus to open your mind and eyes to be able to see Him in the Scriptures?
To be able to see Him in your day to day life? In your “heart”?
Do you year n to follow where Jesus is leading?
Do you hear the competing voices? Does your vision of God get clouded by these fables and fancies - God as an angry smiter, as a deadbeat Dad, as a Santa figure…
Do you need to see Jesus once again. Clearly revealing to us the FULLNESS of God.
Do you want to ask God to do this for you?