The historical Jesus and the living Christ

The recent documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, gained a large television audience, as well as considerable criticism from Bible scholars and archaeologists. With this film as a conversation starting point, I explored the practical meaning of Jesus’ teachings with three prominent Christians in the Boston area.

When I met with Reverend William Rich in Trinity Church’s newly built offices, I asked how important the historical Jesus is to him. He shot back (in good humor), “That’s reminiscent of an ordination exam question!” In that exam, he was asked to distinguish between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The historical Jesus, he explained, is central to Episcopalians’ faith. Rev. Rich serves as Senior Associate Rector of this historic Episcopalian (Anglican) church on Copley Square, just a few blocks from The Mother Church.

“Jesus knew what it was to be hungry,” Rev. Rich continued. “His own experience with life included the downsides of life—hunger, thirst, aloneness, illness ... death.... And we take all that very seriously and say, ‘Well, the Biblical record gives us evidence that he lived a full human life in all of its ups and downs.’ One of the theologians who was important in the 20th century and in Christian theology, Karl Barth, said that Jesus lived his whole life, though he was not himself sinful, in the realm of sin—meaning he spent his whole life encountering sin and what it causes. He didn’t hold back from that.”

For Rev. Rich, anything that sheds light on that sinless life of Jesus, including archaeology, is valuable—such as the book he pointed to on his desk, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’ Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom, by John Crossan and Jonathan Reed, which he said draws substantially on archaeology, on findings that “we simply didn’t know a hundred years ago that we now know. For instance, [the book explains] that Christian and Jewish communities were clearly competing for converts as Paul was doing his work, because we can see that synagogues and churches were meeting in the same areas .... [But] my faith is also beyond the historical realm, and so I don’t depend just on science or just on history or just on archaeology.”

According to Rev. Rich, science is embraced by reason, and reason plays a key role in the faith of Episcopalians. The definition of science he prefers is an older one that “encompasses the whole of the human spirit’s ability to think and experience life.... I believe in that sense that Scripture is science. Scripture is a witness.... The scientific evidence that I have ... is not just written words but the livability of faith. Billions of human beings down through the ages have lived this faith and have found it true in their living of it. You know, if it were a hoax, it couldn’t have been lived. It wouldn’t have stood up to all the vagaries of human existence. I take that to be scientific evidence.

“So I wouldn’t want to restrict [science] just to archaeology or textual discoveries. I would want to say, I have scientific evidence.... People have lived this faith in many, many different ways, and yet it has held for them.” To Rev. Rich, that fact gives scientific proof of Christianity’s truthfulness.

Reverend Harold Sparrow knows well what it means to prove a living faith. As Executive Director of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston, representing more than 80 faith-based and community-based organizations, Rev. Sparrow helps African American congregations in greater Boston obtain resources and training to more effectively serve those in need. It’s his way of showing that Jesus and his teachings answer the toughest social problems of African American families.

During our recent conversation, Rev. Sparrow emphasized the Scriptural message in Luke, where Jesus reads a passage from Isaiah that sets the tone for his ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Rev. Sparrow’s work in community development and programming has earned him awards for excellence, including the Mayor of Boston’s African American Achievement Award in 2002. His pure desire to fulfill even more fully the two great commands—to love God and to love others as we love ourselves—pushes that work forward. For this Christian minister, the spirit of Jesus has a tremendous attraction as a source of peace and purpose, and a model of compassion and mercy. Rev. Sparrow finds in Jesus the grace and truth that the Gospels say he brought to the world.

But how do we live that grace and truth in the 21st century, in a world characterized by increased mobility and a freer exchange of ideas made possible through the Internet and other technologies? And what practical meaning do Jesus’ teachings have for those living in multifaith and multicultural societies?

Victor Kazanjian speaks directly to those questions in his ministry. As Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Dean Kazanjian heads a chaplaincy team that provides spiritual and religious care to a community composed mostly of women from many countries and cultures. The college’s program includes chaplains, advisors, and student leaders from a broad range of Christian groups, and from Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Native African, Native American, pagan, Sikh, and Zoroastrian communities.

Kazanjian’s own view of Jesus has been shaped by a broad, inclusive understanding of Christianity that his Episcopalian faith gives, and also by his grandparents, who survived the hate and intolerance of the 1915–1918 Armenian genocide. As a boy, he listened to their stories of hardship, loss, and escape.

According to Kazanjian, Jesus consistently stepped away from “institutionally mediated structures of life” and related to people with a law higher than any institution, the law of love. Jesus didn’t see his role as judging people, but had the humility to leave that to God.

Just back from five months of giving classes in India on the social impact of increased religious diversity, Kazanjian teaches that tolerance cannot build community. “Tolerance,” he observes, “is a great harness applied to the destructive forces of ignorance, fear, and prejudice.... At best, it is a glass wall where protected people can see one another going about parallel lives.”

Christianity, as Kazanjian practices it, includes the willingness to be changed by how someone of another faith expresses spirituality. He cultivates what I would call a radical openness to those who express their spirituality differently from the way he expresses his. He finds that this practice broadens his sense of loving God with all one’s heart, mind, and soul, and loving another as oneself. Striving to understand the religious and spiritual experiences of others has enriched his understanding of what it means to follow Jesus, and has helped him see more fully the universality of the Christian teaching to humbly love.

Rev. Rich of Trinity Church believes that Christianity’s relationship to other faiths resides in the fact that “the Gospels call us to try to see where God is in any experience that we have, and that includes the experience of others who are other, in the sense of being a different religion or no religion. And that the primary call of the Gospels ... is to hear where there’s already ‘good news’ in them and to confirm it in them. And then to see where there’s brokenness in them and to see if there is some way in which we can participate together in the healing of brokenness and the coming of ‘good news’ into the brokenness that they already know about.”

Like these three Boston-area Christians, I also have heard a call to follow Jesus’ ministry of healing the brokenhearted. For me, beyond just saying, “You have a different religion. I’m a big person so I can tolerate that,” Jesus’ command to follow him through the work of healing people spiritually demands that I see the Divine in others, however it’s expressed.

Living in Boston these last three years and looking for the Divine—the innate spirituality that everyone has as a reflection of the God who is Spirit—has been a particular privilege. The many individuals and groups I’ve come to know, working in wonderfully varied ways to improve the lives of others, have often touched and uplifted me.

Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” There’s great comfort in knowing that although no one Christian may have all the answers, the Christ (or “the living Truth,” as Mary Baker Eddy once described Christ) is here, available to all, pointing us to God’s eternal laws of good. This divine influence is guiding and shaping—and bringing healing to—individuals, groups, and whole denominations.

Lyle Young is a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and has served as First Reader of The Mother Church since June 2004.

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