Jesus and Christ

IT WAS REFLECTION ON JESUS THAT GAVE RISE TO THE TITLE “CHRIST”

IN the subeditors’ section of the old Auckland Star newspaper, taped strategically to a pillar, there used to be a photographic blow-up of a text from the New Testament letter to the Hebrews: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and for ever.” Needless to say, it was not a token of the subeditors’ piety – of exasperation, rather.

In point of fact, over the past 2000 years Jesus Christ has not been “the same yesterday and today and for ever”. Though always central in the Christian tradition, he has not always been central in quite the same way. Interpretations of him have varied widely.

In everyday usage, even in the churches, the words Jesus and Christ are run together almost as if Jesus was the Christian name (what else?) and Christ the surname.

Not so. Jesus is the Jewish name given him at birth, Christ the title bestowed on him after his death as those who had known him tried to make sense of what had happened to him – and to them.

The Jews had long held hopes for a messiah, one who would be God’s “anointed” (that’s what the word messiah means) to deliver them from foreign rule and restore the glory days of their past. Jesus’ followers came to believe that he fulfilled those hopes.

It became clear, however, that Jesus was not going to be the political messiah the Jews were expecting; so his followers reinterpreted the word to fit their experience of him. And when they wrote in Greek their accounts of him, the word they used for messiah was christos, which is Greek for “anointed”.

So Jesus was the man of his time, Christ the descriptive title of the anointed one. The fact that the movement which grew out of that obscure Jewish sect came to be known as “Christian” rather than “Jesusian” or something similar shows where the emphasis of the new faith lay.

Of Jesus himself remarkably little is known. The gospels paint a picture of a teacher, healer and sage of great insight and compassion, pithy utterance and compelling presence. The burden of his message was that the kingdom of God – God’s direct rule – was about to break in on the world. There love would be the touchstone, breaking down all the barriers and taboos which people habitually erect against one another – between sexes, classes and races, between natives and foreigners, between the healthy and the diseased, between the religiously pure and impure.

This message was social dynamite. Not surprisingly, it went down well with the poor and dispossessed. But it got a frosty reception from the religious establishment, and was open to misinterpretation by the Roman occupiers, who found all this kingdom talk subversive. So they joined forces to put him to death.

That should have been the end of Jesus. But his followers found him influencing them somehow more pervasively after his death than before it. They became convinced that Jesus had been “anointed” in an unprecedented way to be the human face of God. When they came to write about Jesus 40 to 70 years after his death, that was the aspect they concentrated on. The gospels are not objective reports of what happened so much as testimonies to the impact Jesus had on those around him.

The writers were convinced that he had opened up a dramatic new chapter in God’s dealings with men and women. They even said that he had met sin and death head-on and overcome them – and because Jesus had made the breakthrough, so could they. They were entering a quality of life which death could not extinguish.

Leading the way in developing these ideas was the apostle Paul. As his imagination took wing, he developed the figure of Christ the deliverer in highly creative ways to make this the heart and soul of the evolving religion – so much so that for much of the past 2000 years it has largely crowded out the human Jesus and his emphasis on God’s kingdom on earth.

Beginning with Christ in individual experience, Paul enlarged the concept in ever-widening circles to make it the vital principle in Christian communities, the centre of a new order of being, even the clue to the meaning of the universe. This all-encompassing vision has inspired hundreds of millions of Christians over the centuries, and still does.

The Christ figure has also been interpreted in widely different ways. Today it is desperately in need of a secular adaptation for a secular world.

April 5, 2005