"He comes among us as One unknown, without a name,

as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those who knew him not.

He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!"

and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time.

He commands. And to those who obey him,

whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself

in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings

which they shall pass through in His fellowship,

and, as an ineffable mystery,

they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."

-Albert Schweitzer

Several years ago a friend of mine who was also a UCC minister and had been a classmate of mine in Seminary told me the following anecdote.

A seminary professor, who taught New Testament, was lecturing one day about the life and teachings of Jesus. He took the class through the accounts familiar to all of us in the canonical gospels and attempted to summarize all the things that Jesus had said and done during his ministry. When he was finished he asked if there were any questions. A gentleman in the back row raised his hand. Everybody turned to look and see who is was. Lo and behold, it was Jesus. He stood up and said, "Excuse me, but that's not the way it happened. That's not what I said."

The professor, realizing that he wasn't going to win this argument in front of his students, said, "Let's talk outside."

They go outside and Jesus says to the professor, "With all due respect, sir, you're getting things wrong. Allow me to tell you what really happened."

Before Jesus could say anything the professor chimed in, "With all due respect, Jesus, what really happened doesn't really matter."

Here the story ends. My friend said to me that he agreed with the professor. He didn't think that what actually happened mattered. What really mattered was what the church has been teaching over the centuries about the meaning of it all. And good history or bad history, Christianity wasn't based on the historical Jesus but on the doctrine and teaching of the Church. I disagreed with him, and we had an interesting, but friendly, debate about this.

John's gospel reminds me of this story because John's Jesus is so different from the Jesus of Mark, Matthew and Luke that in this gospel we have obviously left history behind and are looking at a mythological figure; a cosmic Christ. For John, what actually happened didn't really seem to matter the way it would to a modern-day historian.

This story also seems relevant today with Tom's focus on Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer advocated for a radical separation between historical Jesus scholarship and Christian theology. He believed that in the final analysis who and what Jesus actually was is irrelevant to what he considered to be the central truth of Christianity which is the experience of the living spiritual reality of Christ. So Schweitzer would have probably agreed with the point my friend was making with his story.

I believe that history does matter and the fact that we will never know all there is to know about the historical Jesus does not negate our efforts to discover as much as we can. Even if our conclusions must always be tentative and ambiguous, an educated guess is better than an uneducated certainty.

I have to admit that I sometimes find myself in a sort-of "Love-Hate" relationship with the Gospel of John. Whenever I hear a conservative Christian minister interviewed on the news and they start to explain their position and validate it with something from the gospels they inevitably end up quoting from John. They quote Jesus as saying something about himself that most scholars today believe he actually never said. Usually, they end-up saying that Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to God except through me." No serious biblical-critical New Testament scholar today believes that Jesus actually said those words. Those words were put in his mouth by the author of the gospel of John. We are as sure of this as we are of anything in Biblical scholarship. To hear someone today say that Jesus said this can really get my goat, it's just bad scholarship.

Yet, I am really glad that John's gospel made it into the canon. Without John it might seem that Mark, Matthew and Luke were presenting us with the same Jesus. While this is not actually the case, the differences between these three gospels are more subtle than they are when you add John into the discussion. With John in the mix it is clear that these four gospels have much different interpretations of who Jesus was, and we are richer and wiser for this diversity.

Here in John, in the first chapter of the gospel, immediately following the poetic prologue, we hear John the Baptist testifying to the divine nature of Jesus as God's son and Lamb of God who does away with the sin of the world. Indeed, the entire first chapter contains a host of metaphors and images to describe Jesus: The logos, or word, of God (also translated as "The divine word and wisdom" ); the light of the world; God incarnate; God's only son; the Anointed (also translated as "Messiah" ); and King of Israel. All that in one chapter!

Remember that in the Gospel of Mark Jesus's identity is treated as a secret, something that is not to be revealed to everyone. Often referred to as the messianic secret, this is very different from John's approach. In Mark's gospel after Jesus performs a healing he usually instructs the newly healed individual not to tell anyone about what he had just done. Of course, the individual disobeys and Jesus' reputation spreads. This "secret" becomes most overt when we get to Mark 8:27-30 where;

Matthew and Luke both copied Marks' account, although they each added some material that gave the story a little different spin. I find it very interesting that Thomas has a similar story, though it's told in a very different way. In Thomas 13,

What a bizarre and interesting twist on this story! All of this is to show that the authors of these gospels were wrestling with their ideas of who Jesus was and what his life and ministry meant - and they were reaching different conclusions.

One of the new insights that has come out of the new quest for the historical Jesus involves the turning upside down of what had been an almost forgone conclusion from earlier historical Jesus scholarship, namely, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Schweitzer was one twentieth century scholar who held to that view and his work carried a great deal of influence. It has only been recently, in the last twenty years or so, that many scholars have come to reexamine this and some now believe that Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet. They believe that the apocalyptic sayings were later additions put into Jesus' mouth by a community, or communities, in conflict with the world around them.

But for me, there is an even bigger and more important contribution historical Jesus scholarship is adding to our discussion today, and this is the realization that Jesus did not place the emphasis on himself, on who he was, but on his vision of the Kindom of God and the community's capacity to live within this vision. To paraphrase Westar scholar Joe Bessler-Northcutt, Jesus' significance is not in himself but in our capacity for the spiritual rebirth and life in the Kindom of God that he pointed to and embodied in parable and practice. (The Jesus Seminar, THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION, p. 57)

I think, and with all my heart I hope, that in the church today we are coming to rediscover that Christian faith is not necessarily limited to doctrinal belief statements about Jesus (like those we find in the gospel of John in such abundance). Rather, Christian faith can be centered in the movement towards personal and social transformation that Jesus called the Kindom of God. This is much more difficult and challenging than simply giving your consent to a particular creedal statement. This is a way of life that nurtures growth and change. It requires a deep and abiding trust in one's own capacity for transformation and wholeness. It invites us into a daily dying and rising again.

Creedal statements, in my opinion, actually take us away from a lived experience of Spirit. They take us away from the demands of the Kindom of God in which all receive their daily bread, the outcast are included, the oppressed are liberated, the broken find their inherent wholeness. They take us away from the discomfort of having our purity codes challenged, our conceptions of shame and honor undermined, our prejudices rebuked. They take us away from the hard work of living as if the God of love and justice, of peace and compassion, really was in charge right here and now.

Perhaps it is not only Jesus who, in Schweitzer's words, "comes among us as one unknown," but the Kindom of God that exists within us and between us as something unknown and unrevealed until we choose to make it manifest in acts of love and justice.

The next day John sees Jesus approaching and says, "Look, the lamb of God, who does away with the sin of the world. This is the one I was talking about when I said, 'Someone is coming after me who is actually my superior, because he was there before me.' I didn't know who he was, although I came baptizing with water so he would be revealed to Israel."

And John continued to testify: "I have seen the spirit coming down like a dove out of the sky, and it hovered over him. I wouldn't have recognized him, but the very one who sent me to baptize with water told me, 'When you see the spirit come down and hover over someone, that's the one who baptizes with holy spirit.' I have seen this and I have certified: This is God's son."

The next day John was standing there again with two of his disciples. When he noticed Jesus walking by, he says, "Look, the lamb of God."

His disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. Jesus turned around, saw them following, and says to them, "What are you looking for?"

They said to him, "Rabbi" (which means Teacher), "where are you staying?"

He says to them, "Come and see."

They went and saw where he was staying and spent the day with him. It was about four in the afternoon.

Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of the two who followed Jesus after hearing John speak about him. First he goes and finds his brother Simon and tells him, "We have found the Messiah" (which is translated, Anointed), and he took him to Jesus.