Sermon: In Search of the Historical Jesus

Seeing Jesus Sermon #2 Cynthia O’Brien
In Search of the Historical Jesus April 17, 2005


ISA 53:1 Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

ISA 53:2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

ISA 53:3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.


Mark 6:1-6

MK 6:1 Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. 2 When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.
"Where did this man get these things?" they asked. "What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! 3 Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him.

MK 6:4 Jesus said to them, "Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor." 5 He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. 6 And he was amazed at their lack of faith.


What was Jesus really like?
Tall? Short? Overweight?
Handsome? Maybe, but maybe not. Isaiah 53, which the Bible seems to indicate describes Jesus, says “He had no beauty or majesty, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”
You see a lot of pictures of Jesus with blue eyes and sandy hair. But Jesus was thoroughly Jewish. What if he looked more like someone from Iraq or Saudi Arabia? Would that bother you?

Philip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew writes that someone in the 16th century forged a document under the name of Publius Lentulus, the Roman governor who succeeded Pontius Pilate, which contained this description of Jesus:

"He is a tall man, well shaped and of an amiable and reverend aspect; his hair is of a color that can hardly be matched, falling into graceful curls... parted on the crown of his head, running as a stream to the front after the fashion of the Nazarites; his forehead high, large and imposing; his cheeks without spot or wrinkle, beautiful with a lovely red; his nose and mouth formed with exquisite symmetry; his beard, and of a color suitable to his hair, reaching below his chin and parted in the middle like a fork; his eyes bright blue, clear and serene...

Yancey continues: "I recognize that Jesus from the oil paintings hanging on the concrete-block walls of my childhood church. The forger gave himself away, however, with his next sentence: No man has seen him laugh."

Some movies about Jesus have given us that very image, where he is portrayed as having an otherworldly quality. But in the gospels, we see that Jesus was a person of humor. See him performing his first miracle at a wedding, giving playful nicknames to his disciples, and gaining a reputation as a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber..." (Yancey, p. 86)

There’s much we don’t know about Jesus. But for a long time scholars have been asking the question, who was the historical Jesus? Who was the pre-Easter Jesus? What did he say? What did he really do? What did he know and when did he know it?

In Mark, there’s much that we learn in these few short verses.

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. 2 When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.
"Where did this man get these things?" they asked. "What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! 3 Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him.

MK 6:4 Jesus said to them, "Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor." 5 He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. 6 And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

He was amazed. Surprised. Truly.

We often ascribe to Jesus total omniscience, as if he knew everything that was going to happen. But if he was fully human, how could he know?

Maybe you can think of a time you were successful…

but when you came home…

Imagine if the Gresham Gophers won three away games in a row, then came back for a home game, and started to play an amazing game but people didn’t cheer.

Or like, remember last year, Josh, when your Gresham High School choir traveled to New York and won the national choral competition, what would it have been like if you came home, did your home concert and people said, “Oh, it’s just Josh Taylor and his friends, we know him, that competition must not have been as hard as we thought."

Jesus had just returned to his hometown from a very successful string of events. (Mark 5) He healed someone of a long term illness, he had shown power over a demon, and he had even raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead.

He then returns to his home town.

Maybe you’ve had this experience, when you went away to college and gained valuable education and skills and grew in wisdom, only to have people not appreciate it.

At my 10 year high school reunion, a group of us were commenting on how radically some people had changed. Then Linda, who looked exactly the same as she had 10 years before, pointed around the circle and said “You’re the same, you’re the same, you’re the same” and to me “you’re the same.”

I wasn’t the same!

I remember before I came here, looking for a pastoral position, and the way the Presbyterians do it, churches and pastors are free to contact each other and choose whomever they want as long as the final choice is approved by the presbytery. In addition to that, we have a kind of computer dating. A pastor seeking a church will put his or her resume in the system, then all the churches seeking pastors put their resumes in the system, and there’s a computer matching based on certain qualifications and interests.

If a pastor sends a resume to the church, you probably should acknowledge it, but if the computer dating gives you a pastor’s name, you don’t have to contact that pastor.

So I was surprised to get a terse letter from my home church, the church where I was a high schooler and on the leadership team in the college group, where I taught young adult Bible study and sang in the adult choir and directed the Spanish speaking choir, and the letter said, we have received your resume for Associate Pastor and we’re sorry but your gifts don’t meet our needs at this time. (which is how they usually say that Puerto Vallarta will freeze over before they'll consider you.)

I couldn’t understand why they would bother, until I read the signature of the chair of the associate pastor seeking committee – it was the sister of one of my classmates.

Then all my teenage stuff came back to me and I thought, even though this church trained me for the ministry, they could never see me as one of their pastors.

This is not all that hard to believe.

Would you want to go to a church where your son or daughter was the pastor? Probably not.

I do know of an exception. Last year you might remember we did the 40 Days of Purpose and studied the book The Purpose Driven Life, and I was working with Pastor Reed Mueller from Columbia Ridge church in Troutdale. I had a few conversations with a woman from that church, Dawn is her name, and about the second or third time we talked, she said, “You may not know that I’m Reed’s mother.”

I said, “You go to church where your son is the pastor?”

Well it turns out that Reed and his family had been attending that church for a while, and he had stepped up out of the congregation to become the pastor. And Dawn loved Reed’s teaching and thought he was a great pastor and had no problem with it.

This is how it should have been for Jesus. The people who knew Jesus best should have been the first to follow him. But they asked, “Whose son is this?” And it may just have been an insult. They were scandalized by his human origins.

The truth is that this happens in families all the time we may be highly skilled in solving all kinds of problems, but we can’t fix our own families. And we’re very familiar with the idea of a prophet being without honor in his or her hometown.

So the question will be: Will Jesus’ family believe? Will those who already have social ties to Jesus, will they believe?

And will you and I, who have such close ties to Jesus already, when God is doing a new thing, will we believe?