Anglican Mainstream

The second Chavasse Lecture on the subject of the Unique and Universal Christ was delivered by the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford

Who is Jesus? Agent or Presence of God?

The question of Who Jesus is remains central to the debates in the Anglican Communion. On December 14, the blog An Exercise in the Fundamentals of Orthodoxy posted a satirical Christmas Carol supposedly being sung by leaders of the Episcopal Church, entitled “O come let us ignore him”. www.peter-ould.net

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali addressed this central issue in his second Chavasse Lecture at Wycliffe Hall: Who is Jesus? The Unique and Universal Christ. Is Jesus simply an agent of God (however exalted) or the presence of God among his people?

The theological relevance of Jesus cannot be separated from discovering his agenda, what others thought of him and what he thought of himself. Did Jesus think of himself as unique in his person and work, and did he see that there were universal implications in his vocation?

Jesus’ mission was focussed on the renewal of Israel, the fuller working out of the implications of the return from exile in Babylon and an acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty. The imminence of God’s kingdom is extremely important – the God of Israel is the God who is amongst his people healing and restoring and preparing through those whom he has sent and in his own person.

There is a burgeoning literature of Muslim views of Jesus. Nazir-Ali discussed the view of Jesus as presented by Rageeh Omar in his TV Series The Miracles of Jesus. Omar believed that Jesus’ miracles were presented as a sign of his divine authority and of God’s victory over evil. Omar claimed however that the Quran does not emphasize the miracles of Jesus because this could lead to him being seen as divine. Nazir-Ali asserted contrary to Omar that the Quran does affirm that Jesus’ miracles occurred by God’s leave. For the Quran Jesus is a prophet, apostle, the Word and spirit of God, and even mentions his death in 19.33 and 3.55. He hoped that Omar can address in a future series what he has learnt from Christian tradition about Jesus and what his Muslim background has taught him. To understand Jesus and his movement, we have to look at the Jewish people for information and inspiration. To the Jewish community Nazir-Ali asked how far the Jews can within the integrity of their own faith see the marks of the coming messianic age in the figure of Jesus. Hindus and Hinduism itself has been changed in surprising and important ways by the encounter with Jesus. The criticism of caste, the emancipation and education of women and the tendency to ethical monotheism took place under explicitly acknowledged Christian influence. But the key question in Hinduism has to do with the uniqueness of Jesus as the Word made flesh whose death enabled human beings to have open intimacy with the God who is the source of their being. Jesus presented himself as divine wisdom in the search of the excluded, disreputable and the lost. The female form of wisdom affects our understanding of women as in God’s image sharing in a common mission with men but distinctively. Redemption in Christ does away with false distinctions, oppression and
subordination which result from the Fall and human sinfulness but not with a similarity in difference which is an aspect of God’s will for humanity.

In the term Son of Man, Jesus identified himself with the figure in Daniel 7 who represents God’s
people, and is given divine authority and rule, but only through suffering. He also saw himself and was seen by the Evangelists as the Servant of God. This suffering, of God’s servant, was expiatory of sin and restorative in dealing with the consequences of sin, including weakness and disease. The servant is the arm of the Lord and what he accomplishes of universal significance is well beyond the resources of even specially endowed mortals. Finally there are the actions and words in which he claimed to be the promised Messiah: the triumphal entry,the cleansing of the Temple, the replacement of sacrificial cults with the Last Supper; the parables, riddles and allusions to himself as the Son who comes to receive the fruits of the vineyard but is rejected and killed. The same Christian communities who understood the
Messiah as an anointed figure also associated that anointing, the term Christos, with the most
divine attributes. The rootedness of the New Testament documents in the first century, their relationship to the contexts they describe, the agreement of the Fathers with their witness and the emergence of credal orthodoxy in vindication of them, give confidence in what the Scriptures teach about Jesus. This teaching is maintained and sustained in the living tradition of the Church which seeks to keep the Church faithful to the apostolic testimony it has received.

The next lecture on June 14 will focus on the work of Christ.

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