I have told the story before of how I was raised in the Southern Baptist church; I remember particularly the church I attended from the time I was 8 until about the age of 13, in Midland, Texas, where my family had moved. The church was small and white-framed, just a few blocks from my home and just a few more blocks from the junior high school I attended.

The pastor, I remember, was young. But he was fiery. Every Sunday morning, I practically had to sit on my hands to resist the urge to come down to the front during the altar call, almost always sung to the song, “Just as I am, without one flaw.” But the message was that I was flawed and I needed to come down to be saved. I had already been saved once, when I was nine, dunked in the baptismal in a ceremony which included my mother, sister and brother—it had that once-and-for-all feeling. But then I had to be saved again when I was 10. I could only guess that it hadn't taken—I still felt sinful, guilty and in need of strong forgiveness.

So, I would be baptized again, and I would still feel sinful every Sunday morning. Eventually, I would leave this church because I realized that no amount of dunking would cure the sins this literal church saw in my parents, who had each been divorced before marrying each other and bringing our families together—divorce and then remarriage was considered adultery. The hypocrisy I saw in a Methodist church where I would go for two more years, when I was 14 and 15, tilted me outside the religious world altogether, until, like some of you, I became an adult with children of my own.

Each month this year I have preached on a different major religious figure. It is much easier to preach on Buddha or Abraham or Lao Tse or Mohammad—to preach from outside a tradition, looking in, rather than to preach from within a tradition looking out, then trying to look back in.

But Easter seems like the right time to do a sermon on Jesus—Easter and Holy Week are the most important Christian holidays, and it is at Easter that Jesus became Christ, the one who had arisen, three days after being crucified on a cross, a particularly cruel form of Roman punishment used against those who were considered political threats or traitors to the Roman Empire.

Who was Jesus? Would he ever have envisioned a religion which told 10-year-olds that they were sinners, needing to be saved over and over, guilty and destined to hell without some kind of divine intervention? Teaching love and compassion, sitting and eating with women and prostitutes and tax collectors, healing lepers and cripples and the demonically possessed, teaching that goodness lies within, listening to children, would he have condemned my parents, giving good church-going folk the opportunity to shun them?

Many of you would have your own questions, other experiences that drove you out of the churches of your childhoods and younger days. For those of us who have it, though, let’s set aside our baggage for a few minutes and re-imagine together what Jesus was really like—who was he? What’s underneath 2000 years of Christian doctrine and dogma, creed and orthodoxy?

Conveniently for today (Easter), scholar Marcus Borg divides knowledge of Jesus between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus—the earliest things we know about Jesus as a teacher and prophet, the pre-Easter Jesus, and the glorification of the son of God that came primarily after his death and then his resurrection on Easter, the post-Easter Jesus. Borg is an organizer of the Jesus Seminar which literally votes on passages within the gospels of the New Testament to determine if scholars believe Jesus actually said or did what’s written (a red ball), whether it sounds like something Jesus might have done or said (a pink ball), whether it sounds like something that’s been modified along the way by the Christian community (a grey ball), whether it’s an addition of a later Christian writer or community and Jesus, in all likelihood, did not do it or say it (a black ball). Most of the book of John is black, not only because it is the newest written gospel, probably written around 100 C.E. at the earliest, at least 70 years after Jesus’ death, but also because it is clearly written from a post-Easter Jesus perspective. Almost everything in the book of John sees Jesus as the son of God or God on earth, a view that developed almost exclusively after Jesus’ death on the cross. The earliest possibility that Jesus could have been seen as God before his death was when John the Baptist baptized Jesus, as told in Mark, the earliest written gospel. As Jesus was coming out of the water, according to the story, Jesus saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descended like a dove on him and a voice from heaven said, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The Jesus of the pre-Easter Jesus, however, does not call himself the son of God in the way that this has come to mean the literal son of God in Christian tradition, Borg says. And the idea of being God’s son, as Jesus heard it when he was baptized, was probably meant and heard by Jesus in the more generic way that was common usage in Jesus’ Jewish culture: as in we are all children of God.

It’s hard to sort out the pre-Easter from the post-Easter Jesus from simply the standpoint of the stories in the Bible—it takes what the scholars call a historical critical eye to see how the gospels were put together, this means knowing history, Roman, Greek and Jewish, at the beginning of the first millennium and knowing a lot about the Jewish religion and its traditions and history. Most scholars think that the writers of Matthew and Luke had Mark in their hands along with other sources as they wrote their gospel stories. Mark does not have the virgin birth or the star or the wise men or the shepherds—these are all in Matthew or Luke, and even their accounts are quite different from one another. This is because, Borg and others believe, that the communities that Matthew and Luke were responding to by the time they wrote their gospels were asking questions and needing answers about who this now literal Son of God was and how he came to walk among us, if even for only 34 years.

Some think there may have been rumors that Jesus’ father was not known, making him a less than likely candidate for godship in those days; others think that it was necessary to imagine a virgin birth because that was the story of how other gods in ancient times came to be on the earth. Whatever the need was to make up this story, the way it is told in both Matthew and Luke makes it clear that Jesus is being established as a prophesied Jewish Messiah, descending from the son of David, the son of Abraham, as Matthew writes; and Luke traces Jesus’ lineage all the way back through David and Abraham to the son of Adam, son of God. This is important because the writers of Matthew and Luke are clearly reconstructing the story of Jesus and describing it for their new Christian communities, who have emerged primarily from Jewish backgrounds, and they need to know that this new prophet is like the prophets of old, even greater, and so could only have come from the lineage of prophets.

The parts in the gospel where higher Jewish officials play an active hand in the death of Jesus, also, is part of these later additions and elaborations, Borg believes, for even if true, that Jesus was also seen as a threat by the ruling Jewish elite, who acted as puppets of the Romans over their own people, the stories are meant to emphasize that the new Christians weren’t Jewish. This was necessary because in 70 C.E. there was a major uprising in Jerusalem and the temple was destroyed, and the Roman armies routed the Jewish insurgents, ending in the deadly massacre at Masada. The new Christians, also persecuted, no longer wanted to be associated with the Jewish radicals. This is how the so-called historical critical eye sees how history helped shape the development of the gospels and the tradition after the death of Jesus, creating the post-Easter Jesus, the son of God, being the one and the same substance as God.

For those who wonder at the hairsplitting of the early Christian counsels when these definitions were hammered out into the still existing Nicene creed and others, Borg explains that it was necessary for the Christians to maintain their monotheism which had been inherited from the Jewish tradition, also keeping intact the important Jewish lineages. So they developed the trinity, the father, son and holy ghost, as being one to stay monotheistic. Other religious readers, some from Islam, for example, which didn’t make Mohammad the same as God, or the son of God, simply think Christians worship three gods.

And within the Christian tradition, we have always had those who were unitarian—the belief in only one God—believing that Jesus was a human, a super human, but not God on earth; these are people who also have always put more stock in the pre-Easter Jesus, as Borg calls him. So, who was the pre-Easter Jesus? I should note that Borg and other Christian scholars take pains to add that the pre-Easter Jesus shouldn’t be viewed as the real Jesus over a less-than-real, more mythical post-Easter Jesus. Both are valid because the power of Jesus and his message made him experienced as real even after his death, in the same way that Christians still experience Jesus or Christ as real today—this kind of experience is the essence of almost any mystical or spiritual tradition—to experience god as real.

In his classic search for the historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer found that Jesus was almost exclusively an apocalyptic prophet predicting the end of times soon—the coming of the Kingdom of God soon—this is because Jesus lived in a time of Jewish unrest, poor and peasant Jewish unrest, and the seeds of the disastrous rebellion were already present in the years he taught, maybe only from the years 27 to 30 of the common era. And, as I have already indicated, in the history of the times, the Jewish people and their religion gives much substance to this claim— that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet of the end times.

But as we know, the world did not come to an end, Jesus did not save the Jewish people, the Temple was destroyed, and in the horror of his early crucifixion and this later defeat, the early Christians should have floundered, even given up. Why didn’t they?

Jesus was much more than a later-day Jewish prophet or an apocalyptic figure or simply a Jewish mystic. If we strip away some of the myths and stories and metaphors written about him in the gospels—not too much different than stripping away some of the same kinds of myths and stories about Buddha or Mohammad—then we get to what else Jesus said and what else Jesus appeared to be, including some points of view that have been almost ignored by the Christian church. Although much of what I’m about to say about who Jesus was comes from Marcus Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time—I agree with him.

If we go back to Jesus’ baptism, and think about how Jesus saw the heavens split open, Jesus saw the dove of peace, Jesus heard the voice of God saying that he was well pleased, we should realize that Jesus was a “spirit person,” as Borg says, a spirit person who had profound mystical experiences, whether he was the literal son of God or not. He had a spiritual aura like Buddha or St. Francis or like some believe the Dalai Lama has today. People followed him because he was a person of spirit, who spoke great wisdom.

Borg and many other scholars note that Jesus also was Wisdom, God as Wisdom, Sophia, the Greek word for Wisdom, on earth, almost always seen as a female incarnation of God. So, Jesus was not only a prophet but a carrier of the wisdom tradition of Judaism as well. Jesus as Sophia or Wisdom taught and acted against conventional wisdom. He taught against the conventional wisdom of the three A’s as Borg calls them: achievement, affluence and acceptance. He taught of a transforming wisdom that would bring you closer to Spirit—he taught through parables and aphorisms, pithy comments that were designed to make you rethink what you think you know:
Leave the dead to bury the dead. You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. No one can serve two masters. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. Can a blind person lead a blind person? Will they not fall into a pit? The Kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Consider the birds of the air—they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. Do to others as you would have them do to you. Be compassionate as God is compassionate.

Conventional wisdom, especially within Judaism, also consisted of a holiness code, an acceptable way of behaving, a way to act, who to eat and drink with, who to socialize with and work with. Jesus ignored all this and taught, instead, of a deeper love and compassion for your neighbor, whoever they were, which made him not only a spirit person, and a speaker of wisdom, but a social prophet as well. Our story about the wedding this morning is only one of many in which Jesus taught to be humble and accepting of all guests, effectively ignoring your own reward or honor. Jesus literally scandalized his followers with his acceptance of women, as only one example, into his midst and company. In his day, women simply did not dine or eat with men, unless they were concubines.

Women and children were chaetal, but Jesus welcomed them and insisted upon helping them, hearing them and healing them. He also crossed racial, ethnic and cultural barriers, not to mention ignoring the distinction of those who were believed unclean, the mentally ill, lepers, cripples, all signs of loss of God’s grace in those days.

Jesus, Borg says, must have been a great healer, but even if we don’t believe in the miracle of healing, the stories are important because it shows us Jesus’ overwhelming compassion for all people, his radical acceptance of those who are different. As a social prophet, I have no doubt that Jesus would be equally accepting and loving toward those who are considered different today or outcasts today—those who are gay or lesbian, bi-sexual or transgendered, for example. Jesus would have had little patience with our legacy of slavery—he considered slaves and masters equal, if not the slave over the master even in his time—he would, I know, be a speaker against sexism or racism or any other ism that afflicts our society.

If we heard his crazy wisdom, his social prophetic voice, we would find a compassionate friend far more controversial and disturbing, I believe, than much of what goes for Christianity today. If we add in the pre-Easter Jesus, the speaker of wisdom, the healer, the teacher, the social prophet, the radical acceptor of difference, all based in a theology of overwhelming, holy compassion, then we have someone who was truly as great a religious figure as any who had gone before.

If we understand the purpose of religious myth and story, the legacy of the Jewish tradition to include and re-myth great prophets with those of old to tell stories that emphasized greatness, not necessarily literal scientific, provable history, then the post-Easter Jesus doesn’t have to be such a difficult affront to our rational minds. The resurrection, the story of Easter itself, even the virgin birth are all stories, religious stories and spiritual metaphors which we could listen to the same way we listen to the Native American storyteller who usually begins his sacred story by saying, “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true ....”

Like any major religious figure of the past, we cannot really ever know who Jesus was, or even, as some suggest, if he was. But what remains important is that he was radical enough to die young in a brutal way. His words and power were strong enough to heal lives in his days and transform lives after his days. His story has captured the imagination of our culture, and his words and acts, if we truly listen, are still profound and revolutionary today.

That’s a lot to celebrate on an Easter morning. A real confrontation with the Jesus woven into scripture, I believe, would give us a true resurrection of a dream—the dream of a compassionate humanity living in a just and peaceful world. AMEN