2-1 Images Of Jesus
It becomes apparent from any reading of the Gospels that the Lord
Jesus sought (and seeks) to radically re-orient the thinking of His
followers to be centred around Him as a person. They are to see Him as
their leader, the one they follow, the light of their world. All that
they have seen and know of Him is to be the centre of their lives and
very consciousness as human beings. The only foundation for spiritual
life is the man Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 3:11). To be like Him is to the
aim of our lives to which all else is bent: “Until we all reach...to
the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ...to grow in every
way into him which is the head, that is, into Christ” (Eph. 4:12-16).
The most essential error, practically or doctrinally, is to “lose
connection to the head [Jesus], from whom the whole body, nourished and
knit together...grows” (Col. 2:19). The Lord Himself taught that what
Paul called 'growing up into Him who is the head'. He commented that
the end goal for His disciples was that "every one [i.e. disciple, in
the context] when he is perfected shall be as his master", i.e. Himself
(Lk. 6:40). This was why Paul can speak of "Jesus who is our hope" (1
Tim. 1:1), all we hope to ever become. Later, the Lord spoke of
following Him as being like a man ploughing by keeping his eye
constantly and unswervingly on an end point- and that point is Him as a
person (Lk. 9:61,62). The account of Peter starting to drown
exemplifies all this- when he took his gaze off the Lord personally, in
order to notice how the wind was so strongly blowing some object
[perhaps back on the boat], then his walk to Jesus started to come to
an end (Mt. 14:30).
In the parable of the sower, the
seed is surely Jesus (Jn. 12:24)- our eternal destiny is decided upon
our response to Him and His teaching. We are bidden believe in or into
Jesus. Belief involves the heart; it doesn't mean to merely give mental
assent to some propositions. It must in the end involve believing in a
person, with all the feelings and emotions this involves. We are
married unto the Lord Jesus, in order that we might bring forth fruit
unto God (Rom. 7:4). All spiritual fruit is therefore an offspring, an
outcome, of a living, daily relationship with the Lord Jesus. This is
how crucial it is to know Him. To believe in Him is described by John
as a ‘work’ that has to be laboured at- with even more effort than that
expended by the crowds who walked around the lake to get to Jesus and
the free bread He appeared to be offering (Jn. 6:27; 2 Jn. 8). It is
this ‘labour’, this hard mental effort to know Him and believe in Him,
which will have a ‘full reward’ (2 Jn. 8). John here is alluding to the
LXX of Ruth 2:12, where a ‘full reward’ is given to Ruth for working
hard all day gleaning in the fields. It may be that this allusion was
because “the elect lady” addressed by John was in fact a proselyte
widow, like Ruth. But the point is, we have to labour, as
much as one might work hard walking around a lake or gleaning in the
field, in order to know the Lord Jesus Christ.
The blind
man asked about Jesus: “Who is he, that I may believe on him?” (Jn.
9:36). True belief depends upon having the true image of Jesus. The
goal of conversion to Him is love from a pure heart (1 Pet. 1:22). To
know Him properly leads to love within us. 1 Jn. 3:22 brackets together
believing in His Name and loving one another. Again and again we say:
images and understanding of Jesus matter. As John Newton put it:
To try both your faith and your scheme:
You cannot be right in the rest
Unless you think rightly of him.
Two of the twentieth century's greatest theologians in the field of Christology [the study of Christ] were Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann. At the risk of all too crudely summing up the large corpus of research and writing which they left behind, I'd say that Schweitzer presented Jesus as a man of action, calling people to works; whilst Bultmann's writings present Jesus as a man of words and ideas, who urged people to think differently. Thus the two men held different images of Jesus. Schweitzer's images of Jesus led him to be a medical missionary; Bultmann's led him to write "A New Testament Theology". Our images of the Lord Jesus, our understandings of Him, affect our lives in practice.
Who Then Is Jesus?
All
this, then, throws up a question of fundamental importance: Who then is
Jesus? What is our image of Him as a person? Do we actually know Him as a person? Or is He to us a mere piece of theology, an idea in our brains, a black box that we call 'Jesus' every time we pray... and not somebody whom we can say we know?
This question is crucial, utterly crucial. Perhaps the greatest and
easiest mistake in the Christian life is to think of Jesus as a figure
in a book, as someone who existed in history, and whose work we recount
in terms of academic statements about the atonement. We can be so
understandably concerned about finding the true interpretations of the
Bible, in a religious world so sadly mistaken in their views, that we
can actually forget the essence of what it means to be Christian
disciples- to be learners of Him, of this man, this more than man, whom
having not seen we love. Yet we can't truly love a person we don't
know. It concerns me, it really does worry me, that so many of us seem
to lack a sense of knowing the man Jesus as their personal Lord and
instructor. One wonders whether our hymns of praise to Jesus are really
appreciated by us for what they are and for what they say. Indeed,
it’s our very presumption of familiarity with Jesus that is so often
the basis of our unfamiliarity with Him.
We are no longer
under Moses' law; but under " the law of Christ" . I cannot understand
this as meaning that the 613 commands of Moses have been replaced by a
set of laws given by Jesus. For the antithesis between law and grace to
which the New Testament constantly draws our attention would then be
meaningless. The law of Christ surely means the law which is Christ; to
be and speak and think and do as He would do. This must be our law, a
principle far more comprehensive and intrusive into our lives than mere
legalism. 'What would Jesus do?' is surely our law. To walk even as He
walked (1 Jn. 2:6), to do as He did (Jn. 13:15), love as He loved (Jn.
13:34; 15:12; Eph. 5:2), forgive as He forgave (Col. 3:13), have the
mind which was in Him (Phil. 2:5), give our lives for our brethren as
He did (1 Jn. 3:16). Gal. 6:2 defines fulfilling the law of Christ as
'bearing one another's burdens'. He bore the burden of our sin on the
cross. The essential law of Christ, the law of being like Christ, is to
likewise play our part in leading others towards the forgiveness of
their sins. This is why preaching to others in whatever form is such a
basic and necessary part of our response to His bearing of our sins on
the cross. But if ‘What would Jesus do?’ is the golden rule of the
Christian life, this of course assumes that we have a clear
understanding of Jesus, and what He would do! To be able to live
according to the ‘What would Jesus do?’ rule, we need to know Him, and
know Him in a way which means we have a clear picture of how He would
live in our current human situation.
The New Testament
speaks in challenging terms of how real is to be our relationship with
the Lord Jesus. The Lord’s enigmatic words of Jn. 16:16 indicate just how
close the Comforter was to make Him come to His people once He was in
Heaven: “Yet a little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a
little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father”. I
suggest that the “little while” in each clause is one and the same. In
“a little while” they would not see Him physically, but exactly because
He would be with the Father, He would send the Comforter, and enable
His people to ‘see’ Him in the sense that John usually speaks of in his
Gospel. This ‘seeing’ of Jesus, this perception of Him, is effectively
a ‘seeing’ of the Father. 2 Cor. 3 speaks of our beholding the glory of
the Lord Jesus in a mirror; and this process slowly transforms us into
that same image of Him which we see. The “glory” of God was revealed to
Moses at Sinai in Ex. 34 as the declaration of His character. In this
sense, the Lord Jesus could speak of having in His mortal life “that
glory which was with [the Father]” when the [Jewish] world came into
existence at Sinai (Jn. 17:5 Ethiopic and Western Text). It was that
same glory which, like Moses, He reflected to men. But according to 2
Cor. 3:18, the very experience of gazing upon the glory of His
character will change us into a reflection of it. There is something
transforming about the very personality of Jesus. And perhaps this is
why we have such a psychological barrier to thinking about Him deeply.
We know that it has the power to transform and intrude into our
innermost darkness. I have given reason elsewhere for believing that
the Gospel records are in fact transcripts of the Gospel message
preached by the four evangelists. The 'Gospel according to Matthew' is
therefore the Gospel message which he usually preached. And it's
significant that at least three of them start and end where many of us
would- starting with the promises to the Jewish fathers, and concluding
with an appeal for baptism. Actually John's Gospel does this too, if
you decode the language he uses. This is surely the explanation of the
Lord's otherwise strange remark that wherever the Gospel is preached,
the anointing of His feet by Mary would be part of that message. And
this is one of the few incidents that all four Gospel writers each
mention. What this shows is that the Gospel message is in its
quintessence, the account of the man Christ Jesus- with all that
involves. It has truly been commented that " the central message of the
gospels is not the teaching of Jesus but Jesus himself" . This is true
insofar as Jesus is the word made flesh.
Images of
Jesus matter. He will say to many in the last day that He has never
known them, for they never knew Him- for all their pure doctrine and
good works. Life eternal is about knowing God and Jesus (Jn. 17:3)- and
the Greek word here doesn't mean to merely know in an academic sense,
but to know intimately and personally. Only if we really see
/ perceive the Son will we be saved; " ye have seen me and yet believe
not" the Lord told the Jews, warning them that only those who see the
Son and believe in Him will have eternal life (Jn. 6:36, 40).
If we really know the Son then we will likewise know His love and
sacrifice is enough to truly grant us the life eternal. If we truly see
the Son and believe in Him, then we will know that we (will have)
eternal life- because His grace, His love, His desire to save will be
so clearly evident to us through the study and knowledge of His
personality. If we know Him, we will be sure of our salvation. Knowing
Him, coming to know Him, is this important. We will be humbly confident
that in the very, final end- we will be there. There is therefore the
factual, doctrinal 'knowledge' or 'seeing' which by grace has been
granted us. But beyond that there is the true seeing and believing into
the Man Jesus, with the definite Hope which that brings. If we truly know Him we will count literally all else as loss (Phil. 3:8).
1
Jn. 3:14 states that “We know that we have passed from death unto life,
because we love the brethren”. But this is John taking his converts
further in appreciating something he had earlier preached to them in
his Gospel: “He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me,
hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of
death into life” (Jn. 5:24). To hear the word of Christ and believe the
Gospel of God must issue, if it is valid and credible, in
something practical- loving our brethren. It is only John who records
the Lord speaking of “my word” [logos]. To hear Christ’s word or logos
is not merely to believe that the Bible was written by Divine
inspiration, or to intellectually assent to doctrinal truth; it is to
discern Him, to know Him as a person in truth [which will
involve correct doctrinal perception, of course]. And this simply has
to lead to loving the brethren. This is the real result of knowing
Christ.
I am convinced from talking to people that for
many, their childhood image of Jesus remains intact into adulthood. If
you were raised thinking of Him as a pale faced man with a halo round
His head, effectively non-human, this tends to continue. Yet because
Christianity is based around the man Christ Jesus, this means that ones
image of Christian life will reflect their image of Jesus. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer truly wrote that " Christianity without the living Christ is
inevitably Christianity without discipleship" (1). Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus
(2) shows how most students of Jesus Christ had simply worked through
the New Testament evidence to find support for the picture of Jesus
which they already had in their subconscious. And we can do the same,
even if we may not consider ourselves scholars. Reading the pages of
the New Testament should reveal to us the real Christ who confronts and
challenges us, whether or not we are comfortable with what we see and
hear from Him there. Indeed, we could say that we have to rescue Christ
from Christianity And actually we have to rescue [if I may use the term
in this context] the true understanding of God Himself from religion /
theology as a whole. Bonhoeffer had this in mind when he spoke of “the
startling paradox of a non-religious understanding of God”(3). That’s a
phrase I can go with. That Bonhoeffer came to that conclusion as he
awaited his death in a Nazi prison, with all the clarity of thinking
which impending death brings with it… is to me significant. To teach
and preach that is not to preach atheism, nor even an end to ‘theism’.
In plainer terms, it means to preach God as He is, without all the
trappings of mere religion, even if those trappings have been created
by men who believed in God. Images of Jesus matter in the same way as
images of God matter. In my few discussions with pure atheists which
have got to grips with the real issues, it’s become apparent to me that
the God they are so passionately tilting against, the God they say they
can no way accept as real… is in fact an image of God which they hold
in their minds. The true image of God, like the true image of Jesus,
encourages faith rather than discourages it.
Any
biographer tends to interpret the great person of whom they write
through the lens of their own personality; in a way, they create
another person who is related to their own image and worldview. Yet if
we read the Gospels properly, we are confronted there by the real
Christ. We are asked to study His character, indeed to make this the
most vital pursuit of our lives. But in seeking to reconstruct His
personality, we are to allow Him as He was and as He is to be accepted
by us just as He is, and not re-interpreted by us to make Him somehow
more convenient or palatable or easier to handle.
Of
course we need a correct image of Jesus if we are to follow Him. He,
Himself, is the way in which we are to walk. When we read of being and
acting and thinking " in Christ" , this surely refers to our way of
life being based around Him as a person, reflecting His image into our
own. The believer works and rejoices " in Christ" , speaks and
admonishes in Him, shows hospitality in Him, marries in Him, is a slave
in Him... We can only do these things in Him if we have an image of who
He is. And my concern is that some of us admit to having a very hazy
image of Him; or, in fact, hardly having one at all. God forbid that we
should have merely accepted certain doctrinal principles and been
baptized as mere members of a church. We must know Christ. If
there was no meaning in the words used about Jesus in our formative
years, our later Christianity can likewise be empty and void. For
example, I think I knew Jesus was " born of the virgin Mary" well
before I knew what a virgin was. And this empty image of Jesus as a
mere 'Heavenly' idea that can't be practically related to can continue
all our lives, unless we truly know and meet Him for ourselves. All I
can do is to present to you my own understanding of the person of
Jesus; and invite you to contribute or at least develop your own.
John
writes that he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God will be thus
empowered to overcome the world (1 Jn. 5:5). It’s unusual for the Lord
of glory to be referred to merely as “Jesus” by the apostles. Perhaps
what John is saying is that if we perceive how the real, human Jesus,
the man from Nazareth, was so much more than that, He was Son of God-
we too will find strength from the fact of His humanity to overcome the
world. Thus later John writes that to confess Jesus Christ as having
come in the flesh, to acknowledge His true humanity, is related to
walking after His commandments (2 Jn. 6,7). And this perhaps is why
John can say that it is a sin, a “transgression”, to abide not in the
doctrine of a human Jesus (2 Jn. 9). Why should it be ‘sinful’ to hold
a theological misunderstanding? Surely God cannot hold people morally
culpable for genuine misinterpretation? Perhaps the answer lies in
looking at it from a different angle. The purpose of doctrine is to
elicit a Godly way of life. To refuse to believe in the real, human
Jesus is actually a way of justifying our wrong behaviour, of hiding
away from the challenge that His humanity is to us
as His fellow human beings- to transform our personalities after the
pattern of His. To believe the doctrine of a human Jesus who was
nonetheless God manifest in human flesh empowers us not to sin; through
this real and human Christ we have forgiveness and inspiration in the
life that is in Him. This is why doctrine about Him matters- because if
believed properly, it empowers a Christ-like life. This perspective
helps us likewise understand what is fundamental doctrine, and what
isn’t. Any idea or theory or interpretation that doesn’t have the
potential to change our lives in practice just… isn’t worth arguing
about.
Real prayer and Bible study as God intends-
exciting, life-changing prayer and Bible reading- must surely be rooted
in a correct image of Jesus Himself. Even as non-trinitarians, we have
so often muted the stark challenge of the real, genuinely human Jesus.
We have done this by abstracting Jesus into theological terms which
obscure the exciting, compelling human being which Jesus was. If we
aren't careful, we end up doing in essence what the Catholics and
Orthodox churches have done by reducing this awesome Man to a mere
stained-glass figure. Caught up as we inevitably are in this world, in
careers, child care and worldly worries, we must think afresh through
the issues of what allegiance to this Man mean in practice. The
substance and structure of our lives, and indeed of the whole world
around us, need to be thought through in the light of the unique
achievement of the man Jesus. And we must then go on to be for this
world what Jesus was for the Israel of His day. So to search for a
reconstruction in our own hearts and minds of who Jesus was is a
solemn, non- negotiable duty for each true believer. Some degree of
recovery of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth is not beyond the
reach of any serious believer. And only in this way will we find the
power to be renewed in our personal discipleship, and our community to
be renewed in its sense of mission in this world. Indeed, our view of
God depends totally upon our understanding of Jesus- for He has
revealed the invisible God, not only to those who met Him, but to those
who read and learn of Him through the inspired records of Him (Jn.
1:18).
Images of Jesus matter because the believer
consciously seeks to mould his or her personality into the image of
Jesus which they have. Who He is and was becomes vital in deciding who we
become. We are changed into that same image, from glory to glory, by
the Lord the Spirit. And psychological analysis of Christians by L.J.
Francis and J. Astley has concluded that they “shape a self-concept
that corresponds… to some extent and in some sense to his or her image
of Jesus” (4).
They interviewed 473 secondary school students, 317 older students and
398 adult churchgoers in the UK using the “Revised Eysenck Personality
Questionnaire” and concluded that their data “exhibit significant
correlations between the respondents’ personality and their images of
Jesus”.
An Eye For Jesus
The
Lord Jesus likens Himself to a candle that has been lit and displayed
publicly, giving light to us. He then continues that imagery in some
rather difficult words. He says that in our lives, the eye is "the
light of the body"- a good eye lets light and vision in, thus totally
and fundamentally affecting how we are inside us, as persons. But if
the eye is faulty, then there is darkness within. But when the eye is
good and functioning, the whole person is "full of light, as when the
bright shining of a candle gives you light" (Lk. 11:33-36). But
earlier, He's defined Himself as the candle which gives light. He seems
to be saying that our "eye", our perception of Him, is vital. And this
is exactly the context of this passage- He's been lamenting how Israel
haven't perceived Him for who He is. If we perceive Him rightly, if our
"eye" is good, then our whole body will be filled with the light which
comes from Him. But it all depends upon our image / perception of / eye
for Jesus. Hence the vital and ultimate importance of understanding and
perceiving Him correctly. The subject we're now studying actually
couldn't be more important; for the correct perception of Him will fill
our whole lives with light, totally affect our internal world-views,
granting us an ability to understand and make sense of all around us
and within us in the light of the person of Jesus. And if we don't
perceive Him aright, our inner lives will be dark and formless,
whatever external trappings of culture and knowledge we may have.
And
so I have sought to show that images of Jesus matter. We each have a
solemn duty to reconstruct our own personal image of the Lord, based on
Scripture. On one hand, the details don't matter. If you imagine Him
with a long beard, well it doesn't ultimately matter if this wasn't how
He was. But we need to have an imagination, an imaging, of how He
essentially was in thinking and behaviour in situations so that we can
seek to replicate that image. It is clear enough that the four Gospel
writers, under inspiration, were each struck by different aspects of
this incredible man. Thus Luke pays more attention that the others to
the prayers of Jesus; this is what struck him so deeply. John makes
little mention of the phrase " Gospel of the Kingdom" - unlike Matthew.
And this, perhaps, is how the body of Christ as a whole potentially has
the complete vision of Him- for we each see different aspects of Him.
Comparing the Gospel records, it is apparent that different people saw
different things in Jesus. According to Mark's record, Jesus never
openly proclaimed His identity; whereas John shows how in fact Jesus
did so very clearly. John proclaims Jesus as the Jewish Messiah,
whereas Mark almost implies that His Messiahship was some sort of
secret throughout the ministry. And so it will be with us- my
perception of Jesus may not quite be yours. Indeed, this is the very
unique thing about Jesus- that He is the very personal Lord and
representative of each of His followers, uniquely able to relate to
them in an intimate way.
Notes
(1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost Of Discipleship (London: S.C.M., 1964 ed.), p. 50.
(2) Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: A. and C. Black, 1910).
(3) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters And Papers From Prison (London: Macmillan, 1953) p. 124.
(4)
L.J. Francis and J. Astley, ‘The Quest for the Psychological Jesus:
Influences of Personality on Images of Jesus’, Journal of Psychology and Christianity Vol. 16 No. 3 (1997) p. 248.
