Looking to Jesus as The Archetype and Fulfillment of Our Trust in God

I am often led to be frustratingly saddened by how much the Christian ability to understand our own scriptures have been diminished over the centuries by either our ignorant or our unwilling failure to embrace the very Jewish foundations on which those scriptures were composed. All the people who made up the earliest “church” - and even Jesus himself - were all Jews. It never ceases to amaze me how often I hear Christians speak as if this was not foundationally true. Therefore, it behooves us to remember that every word of the so-called “New” Testament is a product of Jewish consciousness originating in Jewish scripture and understanding. With the possible exception of whoever wrote Luke and Acts (long held to be have been written by the same hand), nothing in the Christian scriptures are the product of non-Jewish, Gentile minds. Even when Jesus himself becomes, as he does in New Testament writings, an image of God, this rises out of the perceptive hearts and minds of people deeply steeped in Jewish thought and practice. We run the risk of great misunderstanding if we remove ourselves from that cultural and historic milieu.

When we contemplate the image of Jesus as God, and particularly as it finds expression in the “I AM” statements attributed to Jesus in John’s Gospel, we should feel compelled to see and understand them in the light of the first biblical image we considered in this series, the YHWH, the One who will be whoever and whatever God is free to be and, thus, will find resonance in a plethora of imagery which, at times, can even seem contradictory. These images, however, are never just about Jesus per se, just as all the preceding biblical images of God were never just about God. Instead, all these images are primarily reflective of very-real, this-worldly experiences that people claimed to have had of God presence and activity and that presence in Jesus. All of these experiences continuously prompt a response from us wherein we become “response-able” agents of and for God in the world, in our lives, with and for one another and the world as well. All of the images for Jesus in the Christian scripture draw heavily on this and are, for that reason, best understood in such a light. This is particularly evident when we are presented with images which seem to double back against themselves. It is essential to see these as acknowledgements of the God who will be whatever this God will be.

Consider, for instance, the way reference is made to Jesus as both the Shepherd of the Sheep and, yet again, as the Lamb of God. Not either/or but both/and. The Book of Revelation boldly asserts this in its claim that the Lamb in the midst of us is our Shepherd. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, is the Holy One in our midst taking us by the hand and leading us into God’s already-present future.

Consider, also, how in the Gospel of John, Jesus gathers on the night before his death with his disciples and, instead of anything resembling the Last Supper found in the other Gospel accounts, Jesus engages his disciples in a foot washing ceremony and encouragingly delivers a lengthy farewell speech of sorts. Among other things, Jesus gives voice to how a seed, unless it first “dies” and is buried, will remain just a seed, merely a shell of what it could otherwise and is intended to become. This image, of dying in order to become more fully ourselves, is all over Christian scripture. “Whoever desires to save their self,” Jesus claims, “will lose such; but whoever loses their self, will find it.” Now as Jewish consciousness is primarily about this-worldly experiences of the presence and activity of God among us, these references have far less to do with what follows our physical death than it has to do with all the little, and not so little, ways in which we die throughout our lives, all the ways we let go of our former selves to become new selves on the other side of whatever has “died.”.

Paul, throughout his letters, also brings this image to bear on what were the earliest developing practices and understandings of Christian baptism. Baptism symbolizes our having been buried with Christ in his death (It is worth noting that baptism does not accomplish this. Baptism is a sign pointing to a reality which already is. As such, baptism, arguably, accomplishes nothing except point to the road already opened before us. To understand it as anything more than that would be equivalent to mistaking the green aluminum sign on Interstate 90 welcoming us to “Chicago” for the reality of Chicago itself.). It is in our having been embraced by God in Christ’s dying that we share in the life of the resurrection, the life which is the driving force infusing the aeons of time and history, the life of all ages.

In the Letter to the Hebrews we are implored to fix our gaze on Jesus as (in most English translations) as “the pioneer and perfecter” of our trust in God. The actual Greek words carry a richer significance and deeper overtones than commonly translated. They give voice to Jesus as both the original archetypal blueprint of existence and being itself as well as the intended fulfilling goal of it all. To trust God in Jesus is to trust that wherever we may go in this life and beyond, Jesus has not only covered that territory before us, Jesus is in the very DNA of that territory, God in Christ is in the very DNA of all time and space and whatever lies beyond them. It is not so much that we trust God in Christ because of being the One who has gone before us, we are called to maintain the gaze of our trust on the One who remains ever-continually present in the reality of where we have been, where we are, and wherever we may going…