David Orendorff, Mark 1:1-11

You may not recognize today’s scripture as controversial, but it is, or rather, was. Mark is laying out the foundation of the good news of Jesus, mainly that Jesus is the son of God. Not all the early Christians agreed with his understanding. In fact, many of you may disagree.

We tend to assume that all the early Christians pretty much thought the same way. But the early church was not in agreement about several fundamental questions. One of those was how Jesus became God. Paul, Mark and John have one idea. Matthew and Luke have another. But please remember, and this is important, that though they may differ on how Jesus got to be God, there is absolutely no difference in believing that Jesus is God.

There was something so extraordinary about the man, Jesus, that from the beginning Christians identified him as the son of God. His message, his power, his presence all told the early followers that this man was more than other men. They experienced Jesus as God being with them. The authority of Jesus was never in question. The first believers had experienced and lived that authority. They knew Jesus to be God. What they were seeking was an explanation of Jesus being God, not proof of Jesus being God.

The early church had two primary ways of expressing the source of Jesus’ divinity.¹  Currently, the most popular answer is the explanation given by Matthew and Luke, the first and third gospels: that Jesus was born from the miraculous conception of Mary. God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, impregnates Mary and so is the father. This explanation of Jesus’ obvious divinity is romantic and filled with mystery. By his birth from the union of God and a virgin, Jesus is a divine man.

The idea that Jesus is a divine man (θεωσ ανερ) does not come from the Hebrew roots of our faith. There is no instance in what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, in which a child is conceived by God. But to the Greeks, Romans and the larger world, it was a rather common concept for great men. Three of the best known divine men of religion are Buddha, the founder of Buddhism; Bacchus, the founder of the Dionysian religion; and Krishna, a Christ-like figure of Hinduism. Divine men from early history also appear as great political figures. Alexander the Great and subsequent Roman Emperors were said to be divine men and were to be worshipped as a god.

There is a second explanation of the charismatic power of Jesus, which is earlier than the virgin birth explanation. It is the explanation that Paul writes of in his letters and that the gospels of Mark (the earliest gospel) and John (the last gospel) choose. Jesus is the Son of God because God chose Jesus to be his first real son. This is sometimes called the adoption of Jesus by God. Like the divine man explanation, the adoption of a human by a god explained the enormous charisma and power of the one adopted.

We see this divine selection most clearly in our Hebrew heritage. The list of those selected to act for God on earth is long and includes Moses, King David and the voices of the prophets. But the experience of the earliest followers of Jesus was that, though meeting Jesus was like meeting Moses or Elijah, it was also more than that; it was the experience of actually being with God.

In today’s scripture, the Baptism of Jesus, Mark explains “more” by having God adopt Jesus. The legal form of this adoption comes not from Judaism², but from Greek and Roman law. To be official the adoptive parent must make a public announcement that the chosen one is now a son and has the full power and privilege of being a member in the adopted family. One of the consequences of adoption was that when the adopted child was present or spoke, it was the same as the adoptive parent being present or speaking.

When Jesus comes out of the water he sees the heavens part, the Spirit descend like a dove on him, and a voice from heaven say, “You are my Son, The Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Jesus is adopted by God. When God speaks, “This is my son,” Jesus becomes in all ways the Son of God. When the adopted Jesus is present or speaks, it is the same as God being present and speaking.

From this historical background I want to once again point out that the early followers first experienced Jesus as God with them and only later attempted to explain that experience. We have generally reversed this sequence. Instead of first having the experience and then trying to describe it with reason, we seek to first have the reason before attempting the experience.

It is not surprising that this is so. Since we do not live in the time and place of Jesus we have not had the direct experience of the historical Jesus. And being modern and post-modern people we are somewhat skeptical and ask for the reason before we commit to the experience. We want it proved to us that Jesus is God before we seek the experience of Jesus as God. For the early followers the experience preceded the reason. For us the reason most often must precede our commitment to the experience.

I think the truth is that, to a skeptic, Jesus can never be reasonably proved to be God. There are always reasons for doubt. Only experience can conquer our doubt. The early church had it right. We really only know that being with Jesus is being with God when we have the experience. The experience precedes the reason. For the skeptic to believe in Jesus’ divinity, he or she must first be open to the experience of Jesus as the Son of God.

But how can we who live so very long after Jesus have the experience of Jesus as God with us? To answer this question is exactly why Mark wrote his gospel. He was writing to the third generation of Christians who, like us, did not know Jesus. By his gospel (and the same is true of all the writers of gospels), Mark wanted us to experience life with Jesus.

In order to write this gospel, this experience of the good news of Jesus, Mark had to create a literary genre that had never before existed—the historical biographical novel. No one had written more than short stories of important lives before Mark committed Jesus’ life story to paper. With this unique writing Mark invites us to live in our imaginations with Jesus as the first followers lived with Jesus.

This path of faith from imagined experience to reason is true to my own developing discipleship. I was taught about Jesus from the earliest time I can remember. But I only came to believe and trust in Jesus by living with him among Christian friends and in my imagination.³ It wasn’t Mark’s gospel that began this imaginary relationship; it was a book by Nikos Kazantzakis, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” The book was so well written that I felt like I had for a time lived with Jesus. And by this experience I had the experience of being with God. I wanted to not only serve Jesus, I wanted my life to reflect and be like Jesus; he was my master and my God. Only gradually have I been able to reason or explain my experience to others. It was as if I too had been adopted by God.

Paul, in writing to the church in Rome, says of our adoption:

You did not (at your Baptism) receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…⁴.”

And being baptized and adopted, I gradually learned to be a faithful member of the family of God.

Besides the early church and my own path, I notice this same movement from experience to reason in others. Particularly influential among reasoning Christians has been C.S. Lewis. Like me, Lewis was raised in the church but, as a teenager, declared himself an atheist. It was reading the Christian novels of George McDonald that Lewis’ imagination was stimulated and he began to experience God. In Lewis’ book, “The Great Divorce,” the narrator, reflecting Lewis’ own thoughts, meets George McDonald in heaven and says:

…I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I had first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the new life.⁵”

The experiences of his imagination led C. S. Lewis to experiencing God in his unimagined life and then to his own confession of faith. Lewis was adopted by God. The Spirit descended on him, and the rest of his life was spent writing both fiction to stimulate the imagination of others to God and some of the most well-reasoned explanations of that experience.

The movement from experiencing Jesus, either by fact or imagination, as “God with us,” to giving words to our experience may not be the path to a growing faith for everyone. It may be that some good reasons can prepare us for risking the experience. But I offer to everyone who is wondering about faith in God the following profound advice, “Try it, you might like it.” Just as it is necessary to actually get in the car and test drive it, I am suggesting that by imagination is it necessary to test drive faith in Jesus. I am convinced that an honest testing of living faith will lead to the honest experience of faith. And I am convinced that a lifetime of living in faith will deepen and broaden our experience of God being with us.

It is the New Year. It is a time when we reflect on what our lives have been and what they might be: a time of resolutions. In this New Year I offer to you an opportunity to renew your resolution (or to make a first resolution) to live with Jesus by offering to you the chance to renew your baptism, to reclaim your adoption by God. After receiving Communion, anyone interested is invited to meet with me at the Baptismal water and ritually and imaginatively renew a life of experience with God.

If you have not previously been baptized and you are over 13, I invite you to be baptized today. But if not today, then arrange to meet with me and we will decide the day. I invite each of us to again imagine living with God in Jesus as a way to a deep faith and abundant life.

Amen and Shalom.

1. There were many explanations of Jesus’ divinity both within and outside the canonical texts. Within this sermon I am only focusing on the two primary explanations. [↩]
2. Yigal Levin, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Vol. 28, No. 4, 415-442 (2006): The authors of both the first and third Gospels, by insisting on both Jesus’ divine paternity and his Davidic descent, pose a conundrum: if Jesus was not Joseph’ biological son, in what sense is he the Davidic Messiah? Most modern scholars assume that Joseph must have adopted Jesus in some form or another, thus giving him Davidic status, and many even point to such adoption as a ‘Jewish custom’. This article examines this assumption and shows that adoption was unknown in Jewish law of the period. Furthermore, such adoption was well known in Roman law, especially among the aristocracy. In the case of such emperors as Augustus, whose adoptive fathers had been deified posthumously, this gave them the status of divifilius, ‘son of god’. The inclusion of such a Roman concept into the Gospels may be an indication of the Gentile, rather than Jewish, cultural backgrounds of the evangelists. [↩]
3. My imagination was stimulated not only by writings, but by the lives of Christians who I have been privileged to know. Unfortunately, this sermon does not time for this exploration as well. [↩]
4. Romans 8:15-17 [↩]
5. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, (Collins, 1946), 66-67 [↩]