Knowing Jesus #1: His Arms Are Open

How well do you know Jesus? It's an ongoing quest to understand who Jesus really was. Throughout the centuries, Christians have grappled with the person of Jesus.

How do we come to know him? Do we look inside our hearts? Do we search the pages of scripture? Do we look for him in the words & actions of others? Who was the real Jesus and how do we know him?

Some have wondered aloud if the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of the Bible are one and the same. Perhaps the Bible, they say, has irreparably distorted the true picture of Jesus.

Marcus Borg was a brilliant scholar. Before his premature death, he wrote prolifically for a large audience of scholars and Christians. Borg "re-imagined" Jesus for his readers. He in essence claimed that the Bible is a poor place to know Jesus without guidance from folks like him. The true Jesus, he said, is hidden behind the ancient texts which are warped and must be carefully sifted through.

In his book Preaching from Memory to Hope, the great preacher Tom Long summarizes the problem with Borg's approach: "Jesus historians start out gazing into the Gospels, but the written texts quickly turn into mirrors reflecting the needs, issues and faces of the scholars themselves." I agree totally with Long. We don't like what Borg is saying. We think he's wrong about how we can come to know Jesus.

It's my belief that we can't gain a more objective view of Jesus from any source other than the Bible. Yes, the Bible is written through the lens of faith. But faith is crucial to knowing Jesus! Any other so-called avenue for knowing Jesus grants us the illusion of magical powers to understand a secret Jesus. Those who reject the Bible's picture of Jesus end up remaking him in their own image, feeding their self-absorption and narcissism instead of following a biblical Jesus who challenges our lives and requires careful study.

In Luke 13:31-35, we read about a Jesus we'd like to know but who defies logic. He appears as both a prophet and a mother hen. On the one hand, he scolds Jewish leaders and scoffs at any threat from Herod. On the other, he shows great sorrow for the people of Judea and Jerusalem. "How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing" (Luke 13:34)!

How are we to understand a Jesus who announces both judgment and acceptance? Can we know a Jesus who banishes the proud and welcomes the broken? What does this Jesus say to us, a people who in one sense are among the proudest people on earth and yet also belong to a society filled with disillusioned, lonely and deeply wounded people?

Some students of scripture would at this point wave their magic wands and jump to Matthew's gospel in order to understand Luke's. They would say that, according to Matthew, Jesus has already been in Jerusalem for some time when he says these words (Matt 23:37-39). His words of judgment, therefore, are for those who rejected him while acceptance is for those who have received him.

But this method of "reading the gospel" prevents us from fully listening to Luke. As Luke the preacher tells it, Jesus first set his face toward Jerusalem in 9:51. The journey from there till 19:28 is exactly that: a journey to Jerusalem for the first time in his ministry. Luke appears to be demonstrating that there is still time to change the outcome. Just as the barren fig tree in 13:6-9 has one more chance to bear fruit, so too do the people Judea and Jerusalem have time to gather themselves under the welcoming embrace of Jesus. Yes, Jesus confronts the things that are wrong in our world and in our lives. But his arms are open. He judges. But he also welcomes.

This story presents us with a small, first step in knowing Jesus better. As we move toward Easter, I hope you'll join me on this 5-week study of listening carefully to a few of Luke's stories about Jesus.