Article published in The Mennonite [13.12 (December 2010), 12-15].
Jesus is pretty amazing. He’s an ancient character in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire. He barely made it to his 30s and then joined countless other expendable people who the Empire considered worth executing.
Yet, in his afterlife, he became surely the most famous human being in world history. Certainly, the story of Jesus has been twisted and turned, exploited for evil purposes, corrupted almost beyond recognition—but somehow sprouts keep shooting up through the rubble, bringing forth flowers, revealing something of the beauty of the original vision of this person who history can’t let go of.
We still must ask, though, why do we pay attention to Jesus?
Once upon a time, there was a brilliant young German scholar and musician who paid attention to Jesus. The seriousness with which he paid attention to Jesus led Albert Schweitzer to abandon a career that combined being a professor of religion with being a world-renowned organist. He returned to school, earned a medical doctorate and spent the rest of his long life as a medical missionary in Africa and gained enough renown to be named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work.
Schweitzer’s most important scholarly work was about Jesus. In his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he surveyed attempts by European scholars in the 19th century to produce a purely objective, historically accurate portrayal of Jesus and get behind the obvious biases of the gospel writers to the supposed bedrock of fact.
Schweitzer scorned these efforts. He concluded his book with the famous image of various scholars peering deep into the wells of history looking for the face of the historical Jesus. They don’t realize that the face they see looking up at them is actually their own. They are not really looking at Jesus but only at a reflecting pool of water.
This image makes an undeniable, and very important, point. We all look at Jesus through our own perspective. We all look for stuff that matters to us and that speaks to our world. None of us can be objective about Jesus. We all run the risk of turning Jesus simply into a caricature of our own values and our own culture.
One impact of Schweitzer’s cutting insight, though, has been to serve as a kind of cynical debunking tool. It’s a way to mock attempts to take Jesus seriously: Ah, you’re just projecting your own interests onto Jesus and calling them his.
When we look at what people say about Jesus we see such incredible diversity and contradictions and self-justifications. I have two recent books that focus on how Americans have presented Jesus—one’s called American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004) by Stephen Prothero, the other Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession (HarperOne, 2005) by Richard Wightman Fox. These books make it clear how so many in our culture have confused a reflection of themselves for a picture of Jesus.
And yet….
There just may be something we could call revelatory in this cacophony of images of Jesus humans have generated these past 2,000 years. Maybe we do see something truthful in the sum of what humans, Christian and non-Christian, rich and poor, religious and secular, young and old, westerner and easterner, say about Jesus.
Peace Theology 