Jesus is first the Word of God in the vivid experience of those who knew him in flesh and blood: walking the streets of Capernaum and the alleyways of Jerusalem, fishing at dawn on Galilee, dining in Bethany, or reading the scroll of Isaiah at the synagogue in Nazareth.
This is to say that Jesus is first known by and in the church, the people whom he called together as his disciples.
Jesus taught those who walked with him in the deserts and seaside villages to see him—this man who eats, drinks, and sleeps on the ground beside them—as one God with the God revealed in the experience of patriarchs, psalmists, and prophets, and in the deliverance of Israel from Egypt and Babylon.
And this is also to say that Jesus is first known by and in the church before the church, the people whom God called together as Israel.
Our God is a God of intimate, person-to-person encounter. The men and women who walked with Jesus to his cross, encountered him alive and enfleshed after his resurrection, and communed with him beyond his ascension *met* the living God of the yet-living Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the very human ways we meet anyone: late night conversations by candlelight, as they embraced him at the door to their homes in Cana, or felt the touch of his hand as he shared bread.
They beheld and heard and touched the Word of Life in all that he said and did to bring healing, deliverance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
And this encounter was unapologetically natural and involved the stuff of earth: wood, oil, water, sand, spit, blood, sweat, tears, bread, and wine.
This may all seem to go without saying but it's very important to remind ourselves that we know Jesus because others encountered him in the real world and then—and only well after—wrote about those encounters. The first Christians call this collective experience "the life of the Spirit of God in the church."
Day by day, Jesus guided his follower's reading of the Septuagint, the Greek translation and first-ever collection of the numerous Hebrew scrolls, the translation of the Old Testament most available in the civilized world at the time and the translation quoted throughout the subsequent writings of his apostles. He showed them how these ancient stories, poems, cries for help, and prophecies were really all the time about him.
So we will repeat ourselves: Jesus Christ is revealed not in the first instance by a collection of books—it is of vital importance that we get this!—but in and by those to whom he appeared, the witnesses who saw the Word of God in animate clay, who though they are dead are still one with us in Jesus Christ as yet-living members of his body.
This personal encounter was primary then and it is primary now. We see and hear Jesus still in his church. Everything that is not a first order experience is a sacred *record* of what happened (and happens still) among the people of God.
We converse with Jesus in the Prayers, we see and embrace Jesus in the Eucharist, we extol his glory in the liturgies of the church's worship, we serve Christ in the poor. And we read the Bible, as a record of the church's experiences of God, in the context of *all* of these first order experiences, in *concert* with which the Scriptures are also nothing less than a direct participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
By baptism, prayer, fellowship, sacrificial service on behalf of every person (including our enemies), teaching, and in the breaking of bread, we know and encounter the living Jesus Christ...just as his first followers knew him...just as everyone since has known him.
Jesus is himself simply the Word of God or as my friend Brian Zahnd likes to put it, Jesus is what God has to say.
Here it might be helpful to introduce a Greek word: anamnesis. When the church in her worship remembers Jesus and the saving events that bring salvation to all, we don't merely recall them, we relive them.
C.S. Lewis describes the place where God dwells as an Unbounded Now, where past present, and future are "available" all at once.
"Time, as we see it framing biblical narrative, is neither linear nor cyclical but perhaps more like a helix, and what it spirals around is the risen Christ." (Robert W. Jenson)
Remembrance [anamnesis] for Christians means that whenever and wherever two or more gather for baptism, teaching, Eucharist, prayer, sacred reading, and all of our imperfect acts of love, the Unbounded Now is present with us as Jesus Christ himself, the resurrected Lord of history.
Jesus shows up every time we gather in his name and he brings every moment of his incarnate life among us (only partially recorded by the Scriptures) with him as part and parcel of his personal presence.
This is why when Christians read the Bible we want to read it by two great lanterns—the church's liturgy and the apostles' teaching—because this is where we encounter the interpretation of Scripture: the Bible's interpretation is simply the yet-living Jesus himself, the only Word from the Father, standing in our midst by the Spirit.
We encounter the word of God in the pages of the Bible but the Bible is not the Word of God in the same way Jesus is the Word of God.
The Scriptures bear testimony to Jesus Christ, the Living God, who reveals himself without remainder in the incarnate person of the Son, the carpenter brushing sawdust from his forearms, whom if we have seen we have seen the Father, breathing eternal wisdom past his sun-parched lips by a selfsame Spirit, the new Adam who takes away the sin of the whole world, who's human blood has a better word to speak than the blood of Abel.
And we know all of this because those who first encountered him in this world he made good, who found him in the manger, now joined forever to us as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh at Bethlehem, wrote down their experiences with God and their writings are inspired and sacred and beautiful and effective because they serve a greater reality, a personal God that transcends the words on the page, who is with us always to the end of the world: beating heart, breathing lungs, hands that can embrace us, seated at his Father's right hand until he makes all of his enemies a footstool.
If by the first Adam all men sinned then how much more by this new Adam are all men made capable of participation in the victory of Jesus Christ over sin and death.
Glory to the Father in the church and in Christ Jesus by the Spirit through all generations forever and ever! Amen.
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