Spiritual Hiccups - Who Is This?

It's one of those Bible Stories I learned as a child.  Jesus and his disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee one evening when a gale arises and begins to swamp the boat.  But Jesus is asleep.  When the panicked disciples awake him, Jesus speaks to the storm and quiets it, then chastises the disciples' lack of faith.  The stunned disciples say to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"

Who is this Jesus?  That's still a fundamental faith question isn't it?  And it's a question with lots of different answers.  The fact that the Bible contains four different gospels seems to suggest that no one answer is sufficient.  And I wonder if it is really necessary to decide on a single, correct answer.

There are certainly answers that I think are wrong, that cannot be reconciled with any biblical portrait of Jesus.  One popular image I find disturbing is that of the resurrected Jesus returning as an avenging warrior.  Those who embrace this image sometimes claim it is drawn from Revelation.  But a close reading of that book will find its main picture of Jesus as a lamb that is slain.

But as troubling as such distorted pictures of Jesus are, I think a more pressing problem for many of us is settling for an incomplete picture of Jesus.  For example, we can claim Jesus as Savior and simply stop there.  But of course the earliest Christian profession of faith said, "Jesus is Lord."  He is the one whose voice we are to obey, the one whose voice is to replace our own desire and will, the one who we are to give control of every facet of our lives, not just the "religious" part.

I wonder if many of us wouldn't do well to be more open to hearing additional answers to the question, Who is this Jesus?  Rather than trying to distill a single, neat answer, we might become more open to varied images and facets of Jesus revealed to us in Scripture.  Granted this will require us to become a bit more comfortable with ambiguity, but as Richard Rohr says in his devotion today, "Adult spirituality begins when you start learning to live with ambiguity, rather than insisting on absolute certitude every step of the way.  Why do you think we call it 'faith'?"

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