Who Is This Jesus? And Who Am I?

One of my all-time favorite quotes is the opening line from John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. It reads, "Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." Calvin thinks the two sorts of wisdom deeply intertwined, as most religious folk likely do. Insomuch as this is so, our lives get distorted from what they should be whenever we misapprehend who we are or who God is.

Another quote I've used often comes from Mahatma Gandhi. "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." But how could this be? If Christians are those who have been transformed by being joined to Christ, who have become a new sort of human because they have come to know both God and humanity in Jesus, then how can it be that Gandhi observed such a disconnect between what he saw in Christ and what he saw in Christians?

Today's gospel reading contains the famous story of Jesus stilling a storm on the Sea of Galilee. It ends with a question from the stunned disciples. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Mark's gospel is terribly interested in this question, one that cannot really be answered short of the cross. But despite Mark and other gospel writers addressing this question of who Jesus is, it seems we're still struggling to answer it. How else to explain the experience Gandhi has, not to mention all the different and contradictory images of Jesus that are presented by those who claim to be the "body of Christ."

Thinking of this problem from Calvin's perspective, I wonder if it arises more from faulty knowledge of God, faulty knowledge of self, or perhaps from a misunderstanding regarding how the two relate and where we get such knowledge.

On the question of where we get such knowledge, we run into a significant problem, one that seems particularly acute in 21st Century America. We are prone not to trust any source of knowledge that does not accord with what we already feel or think. Thus we are inclined not to accept knowledge about God that is contrary to our existing ideas about how a god should be and act. To an even greater degree we are inclined not to accept any outside critique that suggests we have misunderstood what it means to be human. And the more captive we are to such inclinations, the more we will know a god of our own construction and a self validated by this self-serving god.

I suspect that the reason Gandhi found the Christians he met so unlike the Christ he read of in the Bible was that so many of us, despite our professions of faith, refuse to let Jesus redefine our notions of God or our notions of self. Instead we try to shoe-horn Jesus into faulty images of God and self that we will not abandon, not even for Jesus.

And so it seems to me critically important that those of us who in some way claim the name "Christian" to continue wrestling with the question the disciples raise for us today, and that we be open to that redefining who we think God is, as well as who we think we are.

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