Nancy E. Petty

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church

February 3, 2008 – First Sunday in Lent

Texts: Exodus 24:12-18; Matthew 17:1-9

The Full Face of Jesus

Sometimes it feels like the religious world is split into two worlds when it comes to understanding and talking about Jesus. In one world, there are those who focus on Jesus, the man. We play up his humanity while downplaying his divinity. We talk about him as rabbi, wise sage, teacher, compassionate friend, social activist, and radical reformer. We try to emulate his good works. We point to his earthly life as we seek to do justice, love compassion, and walk humbly with God. We try to live by his teaching when practicing forgiveness, or loving our enemies, or welcoming the stranger. We study his lessons to know how to be a good neighbor and compassionate friend. We like this man Jesus because we can connect with him. We see him as a person with feelings who struggled with the realities of living and loving—just like us. The fact that he was fully human, a living and breathing person like us, connects us to him. And when the church tells us we should be like him, it seems more feasible if we are talking about Jesus the man—the human being.

But while half of the religious world is relating to Jesus, the man, the other half is talking about Jesus, the Christ. They play up his divinity while downplaying his humanity. For them, he is savior, king, Lord of all, messiah, the coming one, the one and only Son of God. He is the one who saves us from our sins, who brings us salvation and secures our place in heaven, who performs the miraculous, and who in God’s perfect plan was born of a virgin, lived on this earth, was crucified and then raised from the dead. We are like him but his divine nature makes him other than us.

You have probably noted by now in how I have introduced these two ways of understanding and talking about Jesus that I place myself into the former way thinking. Jesus, the man—the human being—has always felt more accessible to me. Even as a seminary student studying the complexities of Jesus, the Christ, I was left with too many unanswerable questions. As a result, like most good liberal Christians, I have chosen throughout my spiritual journey to focus on Jesus the human being—the wise teacher, compassionate friend, social activist and radical reformer. It is this Jesus that I could connect with in mind and spirit. It is this Jesus that I wanted to be like and who I still long to emulate in my living.

This week, I had an epiphany about these two ways of talking about and understanding Jesus. While listening to Marian Wright Edelman speak so eloquently about “justice for children” at the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant gathering in Atlanta and thinking about the transfiguration story, our text for today, it became clear to me that our world needs both faces of Jesus—the face of Jesus, the human and the face of Jesus, the Christ. I can’t tell you what Marian Wright Edelman was saying when this awareness so strongly enveloped me. But this is what I wrote on the paper I was holding.

Jesus the man—the human being—taught us what it means to be fully human.     He taught us how to love one another; how to forgive one another; how to love our enemies; how to be a good friend and neighbor; how to show mercy and kindness; how to live compassionately; and how to fully give of ourselves to the things that really matter to us. As a fully human being, he taught us that we don’t have to be perfect. As a fully human being he taught us to speak out against the principalities and powers that oppress any of God’s children. As a fully human being he inspired those around him to care for the poor, the prisoner, the sick, the homeless, the stranger—any who were and are considered to be “the least of these.”

But, it is Jesus, the Christ, who enables and empowers us to do these things. It is Jesus, the Christ, who gives us hope when we feel despair and hopelessness. It is Jesus, the Christ, who gives us dreams and visions for a more just world—who gives us passion to care for the “least of these” in our society. It is Jesus, the Christ, who sustains us to press on with courage and faith in the face of fear and destruction. It is the divine Christ, who in Maya Angelou words is “a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.”

Later, that night, when I reread what I had written it hit me that my own awareness was not unlike that of Peter, James and John as they saw Jesus transfigured before them on that high holy mountain. Before that moment, Jesus was simply their human friend and wise teacher. They knew he was special, but as unique and special as he was, to them he was still a human being just like them; a person who had walked on earth with them, who had felt love and compassion with them and like them. He was someone they could touch. But in that moment, up on a high mountain, as his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white, in the presence of Moses and Elijah, hearing that voice that said, “This is my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” the “otherness,” the divine nature of Jesus, became just as real to them as the humanness of Jesus.

The story tells us that when the disciples experienced this “otherness” of Jesus, “they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.” I will confess that when this awareness struck me—the awareness that I need, that our world needs, Jesus the man AND Jesus the Christ—I didn’t fall to the ground overcome by fear. Maybe it was because I was sitting in the Georgia World Congress Center with a bunch of Baptists rather than being on a holy high mountain. Nevertheless, I felt something move or shift within me. Deep within, in that moment of awareness, I felt the power of something larger than myself and other than myself, and it gave me new courage to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable in ways that I have been unwilling to do. As I allowed Jesus to be transfigured in my own thinking, I was able to accept that we can’t do this work to which we are called—justice work—by ourselves; that we do need a power larger and other than ourselves sustaining us and giving us hope.

I don’t know how the transfigured Jesus will continue to take shape in my life. I still have questions about Jesus, the Christ as presented by church history. But as I move forward seeking to follow Jesus, the human being, I do so with a new faith confession: that is my need and our world’s need for Jesus, the Christ. Not Christ the King or Christ the Lord, or Christ, God’s ONLY Son—we are all sons and daughters of God—or even Christ, our individual Savior. No, I need and our world needs Christ the Redeemer, the one who redeems the injustices of our world; Christ the Sustainer, the one who sustains our hope in times of despair; and Christ, the Transfigured, who in all mystery moves us into the unknown and the unknowable. Our world needs the full face of Jesus if we are going to be people of justice and people of hope. Jesus the human being taught us what it means to love and forgive and show compassion and fight for justice. But it is Jesus the Christ—that part of Jesus that is “other” than us and beyond us—that sustains our faith and our hope, even in the unknown and the unknowable. As we seek to be people of justice and people of hope, may we see the full face of Jesus.