Who is Jesus?

Part of my Christian Basics series.

You will remember that last week, we spoke of the question of how to be saved. The expert in the law tested Jesus about this and they agreed, that we must love God completely and love our neighbors as ourselves. But why should we take Jesus’ word as better than anyone else’s word?

Brian Boley’s Christian Basics series is a series of sermons and posts that explain core Christian ideas. The series is designed not only to teach a beginning Christian directly, but to give instruction to mature Christians so they can better answer questions from people they meet and converse with. You are invited to subscribe for free (no charge) or perhaps support this series with your paid subscription.

King David, the greatest king of Israel, wrote many of our Psalms. and had his own advice about how to be saved. About a thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, David wrote these words in Psalm 15.

Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent?
Who may live on your holy mountain?

² The one whose walk is blameless,
who does what is righteous,
who speaks the truth from their heart;
³ whose tongue utters no slander,
who does no wrong to a neighbor,
and casts no slur on others;
⁴ who despises a vile person
but honors those who fear the Lord;
who keeps an oath even when it hurts,
and does not change their mind;
⁵ who lends money to the poor without interest;
who does not accept a bribe against the innocent.

Whoever does these things
will never be shaken.

How do we do this? How do we get to the point where we always follow these ideas? We’ll come back to that later…

Almost 4000 years ago, sometime around 1800 BC, there was a man from lower Iraq named Abram. God spoke to Abram and told him to leave Iraq and journey up the Euphrates River to a town called Haran, which was a few miles from the oldest known temple complex in the world, Gobekli Tepe, and near the modern city of Sanliurfa, Turkey, just north of the modern Syrian border. The name Abram means “exalted father”. When he was 75 years old, he led his family to the middle of what is today the West Bank and Israel.

Almost 25 years later, when Abram was 99 years old, God declared to Abram that his name would now be Abraham – “father of many nations”. A few months later, in a story told on Genesis 18, we find Abraham was sitting at the entrance to his tent near the great terebinth, or oak trees of Mamre. (One of these trees is still holding on. It collapsed in 2019, but a young sprig has been growing next to the old trunk.)

Three men came near. Abraham addressed one as “Lord”, and quickly had his wife Sarah bake some bread, and had a calf butchered. He served them curds and milk and then the veal and bread. Notice that Abraham was very hospitable to his visitors.

They asked him where his wife Sarah was. He told them she was in the tent.

One of them said, “I will return to you about this time next year and Sarah will have a son.”

Now remember that Abraham was about 99 or 100 years old and Sarah was almost as old. Yet, a year later, Abraham had a son, whom he named Isaac.

But after leaving Abraham, the three men went down into the Jordan Valley and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

Who were these three men?

The traditional interpretation is that they were two angels, and the leader was the Angel of the Lord – God the Son made flesh who appeared before Jesus upon the earth. In other words, this man was God appearing in the flesh.

Traditionally, there have been several appearances of The Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament, as well as other situations where a man is seen and addressed as Lord. This is one; another is the appearance of The Angel of the Lord to Joshua before he attacks Jericho. You see, the Angel of the Lord is the Christ - Jesus, walking the earth before He was born of Mary. He is God the Son, walking on the earth.

Is that idea new to you? It is a very old idea, very established by the greatest Christian theologians of the last 2,000 years.

One of the most difficult parts for many people to understand about Jesus is that Jesus is not just a wise teacher, or a charismatic speaker. The New Testament – particularly the Gospel of John – is focused around the idea that Jesus is actually God Incarnate – God in the flesh, walking upon the earth. (“Incarnate” is from the Latin for “flesh”. We see this in modern Spanish when we speak of “carne” as “meat.”)

As Jesus taught around the Holy Land, there were many times when He used language which His listeners understood as claiming to be co-equal to God. Let’s take a look at some of these words.

In the Gospel of John, he famously says, “I am” seven different times. You may think, “So what?” But devout Jews of the time – indeed, devout Jews today – did not use the name of God. They preferred to use names that referred to God without naming God. But in Exodus Chapter 3, Moses asked the talking, burning bush what the name of the god who was speaking to Him was. The bush replied, “I AM THAT I AM”. In other words, I don’t need a name – everything else needs a name, but I just AM. The name was written in the Hebrew letters as YHWH – or what we would pronounce as Yahweh.

Jews did not pronounce the name because it was too holy. So when Jesus said “I AM”, he was claiming to be God and his audience often picked up stones to stone him to death for blasphemy – claiming to be God.

Jesus also plainly said, “I and the Father are one” in John 10:30, and once again the Jews watching picked up stones to stone Him to death for blasphemy. They understood what Jesus was very clearly saying.

And with his Resurrection after his death on the cross, it became clear that God endorsed Jesus, for God would not have resurrected a liar.

By the time the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians, about fifteen years after the crucifixion, the apostles had settled the issue. Notice what Paul has to say about Jesus in Chapter One, beginning in Verse 15.

¹⁵ The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. ¹⁶ For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.

The Apostle John makes this even more clearly when he calls Jesus the Word of God,

1 ¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind… ¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

¹⁵ (John [the Baptist] testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) ¹⁶ Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Both John and Paul told us that Jesus is God on the earth, and has existed since before time began. Paul continues:

¹⁷ He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. ¹⁹ For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰ and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.” Jesus is not a lesser God than God the Father. Everything of any importance is in Jesus. They are both fully God. Jesus is also fully human. If God the Father is the creating power of the Universe, Jesus as the wisdom and Word of God directs that creating power.

Jesus is also fully human because of his earthly mother Mary.

And because of that human nature, his sacrifice upon the cross was a real sacrifice – a human choosing to die instead of any other human so we would be reconciled to God.

Paul makes the point clearly:

²¹ Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. ²² But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— ²³ if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.

In the Old Testament, animals and grain were sacrificed to apologize to God for our evil behavior, our sins. It was necessary to make things right with God when we hurt other people or disobeyed God. We incurred a debt every time we sinned. And so we had to give up our valuable livestock and our valuable food – appropriate in a land where livestock meant wealth and food was directly the result of hard work. And farmers grow close to their livestock, their cattle, their sheep, their lambs. It was truly a sacrifice when a farmer brought a lamb to the Temple in Jerusalem to be sacrificed because of the things that the farmer had done wrong. Ask any 4H member who has raised a critter, feeding it, taking care of it, and loving it what it means to sell that animal at the fair to be butchered.

Jesus’ death on the cross cleared all of our sin debt to God. And the only reasons it worked was because Jesus was God on the earth and supremely valuable, but Jesus was also human so He could stand in for all people. He was God on the earth - so His words are of great importance. And He showed His love for us through His sacrifice - so we can trust that His words are for our benefit.

And so we come to our Gospel reading for today.

Jesus and his disciples were headed to Jerusalem. Just before you go over the Mount of Olives, there is a small village called Bethany. In Bethany lived Martha and Mary and Lazarus, three siblings who ran an inn. Jesus and his disciples liked to stay there when they went to Jerusalem for the great festivals.

With more than a dozen guests arriving, Martha was hard at work preparing dinner, making sure the rooms had clean linen, and getting the tables set. It was holiday and many guests were coming into her home. The eggs needed to be collected, washed, and boiled. The pita bread needed to be made from scratch. The vegetables needed to be brought in from the garden and cooked, and the cow needed to be milked. Remember – there was no refrigeration and no canning. Everything was fresh – but that meant lots of work.

But Martha was up to the task. Yet, she was getting older and suddenly she noticed that her younger sister Mary was just sitting around Jesus’ feet hanging on his every word. Her best lieutenant was goofing off! And so Martha had HAD it!

She marched up to Jesus and said, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

You can just see Jesus smile at her red, sweaty face.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed – or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

And for just a couple of seconds, you can see the frustration on Martha’s face. And then she turns angrily and goes back to work.

What do we learn from this?

In our lives, we get focused upon the urgent, the demanded, letting our calendar control us, our to-do list drives up our blood pressure, the annoyances of the day raise our heart rate. We serve and we serve and we serve others – but more importantly, we serve things we have chosen to do.

We have kids to drive to tennis practice, another one to swim practice, still a third needs picked up from soccer, while we made an appointment with the plumber for 2 pm and a friend for 3 pm and the car needs an oil change today and the in-laws are coming over tonight at 6 but we have to stop by Giant Eagle and get some spaghetti sauce and hamburger. And then, in the middle of everything a tire goes flat and the whole schedule is lost.

But look what Jesus said. “You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed – or indeed only one.”

The reality is that children were successful in life before there were tennis teams, swim teams, or soccer teams. Your friend will understand if you can’t visit today. If you don’t go driving so much, the car won’t need an oil change, and your in-laws can eat the Spam, eggs, and rice you have in the cupboard.

Following Jesus’ advice, many CEO’s of companies have learned that they are trying to do too many things. Instead, they have learned that if we do one truly important thing a day, then we will have accomplished 365 truly important things every year.

Our problem is that we let the urgent, the demanded and our calendar take control of us instead of doing one important thing each day. We have lost our focus on what is important.

And what is important?

According to Jesus: It is to learn what God wants of you. It is to hang on His every word, study His words, and do what He says to do.

• Mary was learning that from God Himself walking upon the earth. Martha was learning that the hens didn’t lay well that day.

• Mary was learning what would save her immortal soul. Martha was learning that the napkins still had soup stains from last week.

• Mary was talking with the greatest man every to walk upon the earth. Martha was learning that the figs weren’t ripe yet.

Today, you’ve learned that Jesus was God walking on the earth and therefore everything He said carries the weight of God speaking.

Or, you could have been watching videos of cats riding automatic vacuum cleaners and wealthy young women telling you how they’d saved two hundred dollars on their handbags by buying at a particular store or you could have read someone complaining because we don’t have a Dave and Buster’s in Marietta yet.

I recognize that you can’t always make it to church every Sunday morning, so I send out my sermons to my email list later in the week. But I also recognize that what you do with your time is a choice, just as it was with Martha and Mary.

If you want to join us next Sunday, I’ll be preaching and teaching at Mt Pleasant Church at 9:30 am, 5 miles NE of Stanleyville, OH, just past the intersection with Moss Run Road. And beginning August 3rd, I’ll also be at Lower Salem Global Methodist Church on the hill above Lower Salem, OH at 11 am. Both churches are a few miles NE of Marietta, OH.

God asks us to spend time with Him. How much time? As much as we can spare – to learn and then to teach others about Him. One thing is important. Mary chose what is better. Will you chose or will you let your calendar run your day?

To help you, almost every week, I send out sermons and inspirational stories to my Substack email list. You can sign up by going to brianboley.substack.com and putting in your email. Select “none” for a free subscription or you can choose to support these writings financially by selecting a monthly, annual, or founding subscription.

Jesus was and is God walking upon the earth. He has been God since before time began and has the fullness of God within Him. His words are therefore very, very important to understand. Like Mary - choose what is important.