Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Church history shows how often Christians have failed to recognize their hour. Then a door closed and did not open again so quickly. Jesus had exactly the same experience: the majority of the people of God in his time did not recognize the crucial hour of God’s action. The consequences were horrible. Zealots and fanatics shaped the program for the next decades in Jewish history. Jerusalem was destroyed. It was a historical moment not grasped, one that would have demanded wisdom and the highest degree of readiness from the people of God of that time!

Should Jesus not have spoken of such a danger of failing in his own objective? Should he not have warned against it? The fact that aid and tolerance are important does not exclude the reality that there is a judgment, one that we create for ourselves. Those who are called to follow Jesus cannot remain behind for the sake of others who do not want to go with them. They must go out—precisely so that the new ingathering under the reign of God may come to pass in the world.

There are numerous texts in the gospels that signal a parting of the ways. They have been off-putting to a whole generation of churchgoers and reveal the degree to which many theologians have forgotten the church—or else they unlock what is crucially Christian and call people to discipleship anew. One such text is this parable about the foolish and wise young women. It is like a sharp sword. No one can understand this parable unless she or he thinks of sin in terms of the history of the people of God, its crises, dangers, and decisions.

Romano Guardini once asked, in one of his university sermons: What does that mean, exactly—looking at Jesus? How can I see him? How can I encounter him? And Guardini continues: oddly enough, here we find repeated in almost the same way what was true of the religions’ search for the hidden God: just as there have been many images of God, so also there are many images of Jesus. And as people have sought to take control of God, so also they try to take control of Jesus.⁹

Therefore, says Guardini, today especially the question becomes as urgent as it can possibly be: who can protect Jesus from us? Who will keep him free of the cunning and violence of our own ego, which does everything to avoid really following Jesus? His answer: the encounter with Jesus must not be left to subjective religious experience; “rather, there is a place assigned for it that is built correctly, in which he can be seen rightly and listened to, and that is the church.”

This is the crucial point. We need only to add that the “place” that is the church that protects Jesus from our own interests is not something that has been prepared for him after the fact; it surrounds him from the outset. It is around him as the space belonging to the people of God, into which Jesus was born and in which he grew up, in which one day he followed the Baptizer to the Jordan to be baptized. Jesus comes out of Israel, and without the traditions of Israel he is unthinkable and cannot be understood.

But the place of the people of God, namely, the newly gathered, eschatological people of God, also surrounds what Christians have said about Jesus since Easter and Pentecost. The very first words of Jesus that were handed on, and the first accounts and stories that told what Jesus had done, were shaped within the “space” of the church. The Jesus tradition is grounded in the interpretive community that is “church.”

It could not be otherwise, for we have seen that there is no such thing as a pure fact. Every fact that is told is already interpretation. Without interpretation, no event in our world can be understood. And when we are talking about the history between God and the world—still more, when the subject is the culminating point of that history, the fidelity of Jesus to his mission even to death, which set in motion a history of freedom that overturns everything—how could such an event be grasped and told without interpretation? We could also say: how could it be grasped and understood without faith?

A Radical Process of Division

But at this very point another objection arises, and we dare not evade it: I quoted Romano Guardini’s question: who will protect Jesus from us? Who will preserve him from the “cunning… of our own ego,” which does everything to avoid really following Jesus? And his answer was: the encounter with Jesus must not be left to subjective religious experience; a place is appointed for Jesus, one that is built in such a way that he can be rightly seen and listened to—and that place is the church.

Lovely, and quite right! But is it so simple, “the church”? Have there not been some totally different interpretations of Jesus within the church itself, interpretations that were mutually exclusive? We only have to think of the great christological battles that led to the councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451).