ICCC Bible Study - Going Deeper
This is where you'll find additional materials to expand your study, reflection, and discussion of the topic and text printed in the Christian Community.
Going deeper with Study No 1: "Who Do You Say That I Am?" The focal point of all four Gospels and an important concern of every epistle in the New Testament (N.T.) is the question: Who is Jesus? Let’s look at the ways some of the N.T. writers approach the question, based first of all on how they choose to begin their Gospel accounts.
Mark, probably the first written Gospel still in existence, addresses and answers that question in the opening sentence. Read it and you’ll see that Mark leaves no doubt from the start who Jesus is. Note that the first person Mark introduces us to is not the Gospel’s main character Jesus, but John the Baptizer, a man of unquestioned importance and veracity (martyred for his tenacious adherence to his mission and massage from God). He vouches for Jesus, clearly establishing Jesus as someone powerful, authoritative, and able to baptize with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan. Mark tells us that at his baptism the testimony about Jesus’ identity and authenticity comes not just from John, but also by way of a voice from heaven – not specified as the Voice of God, but who else’s voice could it have been? (Compare the story of Jesus’ baptism in Mark 1, with those in the 3rd chapters of Matthew and Luke. What things are similar? What differences do you see? Don’t bother looking for the baptism of Jesus in John’s Gospel; it isn’t there. But in John 1:20-34 you can read what John proclaims about Jesus. More about that later.) It would be pushing beyond the evidence Mark gives us to say that this baptismal moment is the exact moment when Jesus became God’s Son, or that it was the first time God had ever disclosed this information to Jesus. A well-explored issue among biblical scholars is the issue of “The Messianic Consciousness of Jesus” namely: what was Jesus’ own understanding of his identity as Messiah, and when did he become aware of that; was it from birth, was it an awareness that developed through the course of his ministry, was it a final realization in the Upper Room or in Gethsemane or on the Cross? But for Mark, what happens at his baptism is the first thing about Jesus worth telling us. The nature of his birth, its location, his parentage, his lineage, his pre-natal connection to or origin in God, these are not addressed by Mark. Mark’s narrative isn’t much use to us on Christmas Eve: no angels, shepherds, or wise men; no star or manger; no Virgin Birth – in fact no birth narrative at all. Either Mark never heard of it or wasn’t interested. By the way, neither was any other New Testament writer. John is interested in Jesus’ divine origin, but no other New Testament writer thinks that important to explore or proclaim.
Matthew & Luke
The link between Jesus identity and his origin is an important issue for Matthew, Luke, and John. Because John’s concerns and his proclamation are so distinctive from those of Matthew and Luke, and so heavily couched in “cosmic” and “pre-existent” imagery, it is probably accurate to say that his sense of the significance of Jesus’ origin is really not quite the same as those of Matthew and Luke. More about that later (had I already mentioned that?) Matthew and Luke share a concern for outlining and defining Jesus’ human, historical origins while at the same time affirming that his birth as a human being is rooted in the activity of God’s Holy Spirit in a significant and special way. Both Matthew and Luke make a point of telling us that the special nature and significance of Jesus’ birth was revealed ahead of time to his earthly parents. As you read the two different annunciation stories (Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-38) take note of their similarities and differences: Who does the announcing? To whom is the announcement given? Does either of them have any choice in the matter? Mary specifically says, (in other words) “O.K., I’m in!” Does Joseph ever say “Yes” in words? Does Joseph ever say anything in words? Mary says a lot of words (only in Luke, she’s referred to in Matthew, but her thoughts and responses are not disclosed.) Mary proclaims the significance of Jesus’ birth to her kinswoman Elizabeth (in biblical literature it is rare for a woman to prophesy to a man – thus the extraordinary observations to Jesus by the Woman at the Well in John 4.)
Matthew and Luke both bother to recount the genealogy of Jesus, so his place in human history is important to them. Don’t dismiss those genealogies as just more tedious “begats” like the ones we always skip over in the Old Testament. There are several reasons to give them attention, and maybe even a close reading. First of all, they are a series of “begats,” which immediately ties the Gospel account to the scriptures of the Old Testament (the only scriptures there were when Matthew and Luke wrote.) Readers in their day would have recognized the implication that just as the O.T. recounts the salvation history of God’s people, these Gospels are going to continue the same story. God has done a new thing, but it’s directly connected to the ancient things God has been doing all along. Compare the two genealogies; even a cursory reading shows that one moves “oldest to newest” and the other moves “newest to oldest.” Matthew starts with Abraham (the first one God made Covenant with) and moves toward the fulfillment of the Covenant in Jesus. Luke starts with naming Joseph, whose son* Jesus is, and traces the line back through Israel’s history and pre-history, through the common ancestry of all human history, all the way back to Adam “the son of God.” This affirms Jesus’ lineage as son of Israel, son of humankind, and son of God. It also says we all share that lineage, in one way or another. (*Jesus is fully Joseph’s son by adoption, if not by birth—this was accepted thinking among the people of Jesus’ time and place; an “adopted” son became as much a part of the family line as a “biological” son.) So we can see slightly different emphases- Matthew affirms Jesus’ “legitimacy” as a bar mitzvah (son of the Covenant.) Luke moves beyond that to affirm Jesus as a full-fledged member of the human family, and claims his doubly authentic status as “son of God,” both through his Holy Spirit empowered birth, and through his full membership in the human family. In a sense, Luke also affirms that we all are sons and daughters of God by birthright, and Jesus is also Son of God in another way, particular to him (and, perhaps, to all who are “born of the Spirit’)
A closer study of the genealogies would be interesting, especially with the help of a commentary or Bible Dictionary that could tell you just who all of these people were and what they did in their own lives; of special note is that Luke’s genealogy includes women, which just wasn’t done in those days, and some people of rather questionable repute.
John’s Gospel is very concerned with Jesus’ origin, but doesn’t bother with Jesus' place in the human family or in the history of Israel. John opens his story in eternity. The first character he introduces is not precisely “Jesus,” but rather “The Logos” (The Word), who exists before the origin of the universe, who creates the universe, and who is God. (The Greek language, in which the N.T. is written, does not rely on word order for meaning in the same way modern English does. The actual Greek word order in John 1:1 is “…the Word was with God and God was the Word.” Is that any different than saying “The Word was God”?) The Word became flesh v. 14 (spend some time exploring what THAT means! “Flesh” – the N.T. word is sarx – which is mortal, limited, corruptible, etc. The text doesn’t say that The Word entered into flesh, unchanged by its fallible, mortal “housing.” The Word became flesh. Like I said, spend some time with that idea.)
John the Baptizer appears in the Gospel prologue of Chapter 1 (or rather, is named in it, and assigned his important-but-subordinate role). John does not (apparently) baptize Jesus. But the Gospel writer reports the testimony of John the Baptizer about Jesus. Review it alongside Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The 4th Gospel introduces into the testimony of the Baptizer the idea that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” a concept that doesn’t appear on the lips of the Baptizer in the other three accounts, but is at least echoed in the annunciation to Joseph in Matthew 1:21.
