Transcript
What about Jesus?
First Baptist Richmond, August 16, 2026
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
John 1:18
No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, has made him known.
I was awake at 3:30 last Monday morning, thinking about Jesus. Does that ever happen to you? I tossed and turned for a while but eventually got up and pulled an old book off my shelf called Meeting Jesus again for the First Time.i It’s by Marcus Borg, who for years taught religion at Oregon State University. The book came about because a men’s group at a local church asked him to talk to them about Jesus “and make it personal.” Nobody had ever asked him to do that before. He had given hundreds of lectures about Jesus but nobody had ever said, “Make it personal.” It was a challenge. Not sure how to begin he wrote the words Me and Jesus on a piece of paper and then sat there, trying to recover his earliest memories.
Borg grew up in a small town in North Dakota in the 1940’s. His family was Scandinavian Lutheran and church was very important to them. He writes: “My early memories of Jesus are quite scattered. I remember pictures of Jesus with sheep, and with children. I knew he liked children; that was a big message when we were kids. Clearly, he was important. I knew that he was God’s son, and that he had been born in a miraculous way. Indeed, I knew that he was ‘born of the virgin Mary’ before I knew what a virgin was…. I also knew that Jesus died on a cross and then rose from the dead, and that all of this was very important. As a preschooler I memorized John 3:16 for a Sunday
school Christmas program… [and remember that] the verse seemed impossibly long at the time.”
Borg writes: “By the end of childhood, the ingredients of [what I call] the ‘popular’ image of Jesus were in place: Jesus was the divinely begotten Son of God who died for the sins of the world and whose message was about himself and his saving purpose and the importance of believing in him. I believed in that Jesus without difficulty and without effort. I realize now that I was still in that stage of precritical naivete, where you believe whatever you are told by the authority figures in your life, but that stage was not to last.”
In his early teens Borg began to have doubts about the existence of God. It was an experience filled with anxiety, guilt, and fear. He writes: “I still believed enough to be afraid of going to hell because of my doubts. I felt that they were wrong, and in my prayers I asked for forgiveness. Every night for several years I prayed with considerable anguish, ‘Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.’” But then he went off to college and the prayers stopped, and in his junior year, in a required theology course, he was exposed to the scholarly study of theology by a brilliant young professor with a fresh Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. “Intellectually,” he writes, “it was the most exciting material I had ever encountered.”
As a result, he ended up going to seminary, and there, in a first-semester New Testament course, he learned that the image of Jesus from his childhood—the divine savior who knew himself to be the Son of God and who offered up his life for the sins of the world—was not the image of Jesus that emerged from a careful reading of the Gospels. That Jesus appeared to be much more human, much more real, and, to Borg, much more compelling. It was like meeting Jesus again for the first time.
For me, too, it was a first-semester New Testament course that opened my eyes to the Jesus of the Gospels. My teacher was Dr. Gerald Borchert, a former attorney and Shakespearean actor with a big, hooked nose, bushy eyebrows, and eyes that were sunk deep into their sockets. He took us through the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, in that order. I remember that when we got to Luke he would sometimes read a passage out loud and then look up from the text with a smile on his face and say, “I like Luke!” But when we got to the Gospel of John he would read a passage, look up, and say, “I like Luke, but I like John better!”
Not me. I got stuck on Luke. Luke is such a wonderful storyteller. Without Luke we wouldn’t have the parables of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. But in the years that followed I came to appreciate the Gospel of Mark more and more. In my first church out of seminary I began to teach religion as an adjunct professor at the local college. I taught the Gospels, and because Mark was the first Gospel to be written, I always began with a book called Mark as Story, co-authored by a religion professor and a professor of literature.ii They suggested that before you do anything else you should read the entire Gospel in one sitting (which you can do in about an hour; it’s short. Not everyone can go to seminary, but everyone who can read can do that).
That’s what I asked my students to do, and when they came to class the next time they were full of questions. “Why doesn’t Mark tell us how Jesus was born?” “Why were the disciples so clueless?” “Why did Jesus curse that poor fig tree?” Over the next few weeks we talked about the characters in the story, the settings, and eventually we talked about the plot. I shared an article called “Getting your Novel started in Ten Days,” in which the author suggested that your main character, your protagonist, must want something that he or she cannot get.iii “In the Gospel of Mark,” I would ask, “What does Jesus want that he cannot get?” And the students would answer, almost in unison, “He
wants God’s kingdom to come!” And some would add, out of habit, “On earth as it is in heaven.”
It seemed obvious to them.
It struck me then that if all we had as Christians was the Gospel of Mark it would seem obvious to us as well. But we don’t. We have Matthew, and Luke, and John. We have Romans, and Galatians, and all of the other Epistles. We even have the Book of Revelation, which pushes our understanding (or maybe our misunderstanding) of Jesus to a whole new level. And one of the things Marcus Borg learned while he was in seminary is that these books and letters developed over the course of several decades, and that in those decades people’s understanding of Jesus grew and changed.
Think about it: when Jesus called those first disciples he didn’t ask them if they believed he was the Son of God, or that he was born of a virgin, or that he would someday rise from the dead. He simply said, “Follow me!” But as they did, as they heard him preach and teach, as they watched him help and heal, they began to believe in him more and more. So that when he asked them, in Mark’s Gospel, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Messiah!” In Matthew’s Gospel, written ten to fifteen years later, Peter says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” In the decades that followed, people began to believe even more about Jesus.
Over the course of those first few centuries Jesus went from being an unknown carpenter to being the second person of the Trinity. And that’s not wrong; in some ways it’s very right. Jesus is all of that and more. But that “Second Person of the Trinity” language creates distance between us and the one who walked this earth and worked with his hands, the one whose clothes often smelled like wood smoke and dried sweat, the one who may have sometimes had crumbs in his beard. When I talked about God
last week as a “luminous, swirling, benevolent presence” someone said, “I love that, but it doesn’t sound very personal,” and I said: “That’s why we have Jesus!”
Jesus is God in person.
I believe that. I believe what we affirmed in this morning’s Call to Worship: that the “fullness of God”—that luminous, swirling, benevolent, presence—was pleased to dwell in a human being, and that human being was Jesus. I love the way Marcus Borg puts it: that Jesus “showed us what a life full of God looks like.” And I believe what the Gospel of John affirms, that the Word that was with God and was God in the beginning became flesh in the person of Jesus. “No one has ever seen God,” John adds. “The only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, has made him known.” If you want to know what a person is like, you look at what they do and listen to what they say. If you want to know what God is like, you look at what Jesus does and listen to what Jesus says.
I was cleaning out my file cabinets last week and found that the four drawers I had dedicated to sermons from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were completely full—packed!—so that there wasn’t room for even one more. The rest of my sermons—mostly from the Old Testament and the Epistles—took up only two drawers. That’s not a judgment on the rest of the Bible. I love Paul, Moses is my hero, but Jesus is Lord. If I’m going to spend time with anyone in the Bible I want to spend time with him.
And think about this: I’ve been preaching for nearly forty years now at an average of fifty Sundays a year. That’s 2,000 sermons, and the time I spend getting ready to preach them is usually around twenty hours. Which means that in addition to the seven years I spent in seminary, I’ve spent nearly six full years digging down deep into the scriptures, searching for buried treasure, and bringing up whatever I find (even if it’s “still covered with twigs and mud and I don’t know what it is yet”)iv to share with my
congregations. And four of those years have been spent digging down into the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
As a result, I have fallen in love with Jesus. I don’t mean that in any romantic way, of course, I simply mean that by reading the Gospels with my imagination fully engaged I have been able to “watch” him help and heal, I have been able to “hear” him teach and preach. It’s almost like being one of those first disciples who walked beside him on the dusty roads of Galilee, who sat around the campfire with him after dark, listening to him talk, and who woke up on the hard ground the next morning, stiff and sore, but ready to go again. I have loved the journey, and even though I’m getting ready to step down from full-time ministry I am not going to stop being a disciple. I said recently, “I want to follow Jesus so closely that he feels my hot breath on the back of his neck.”
I still do.
Here are just a few of the things I’ve seen and heard on this adventure:
§ I’ve heard Jesus say, “The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the gospel.” And for Jesus, it was the Good News of God’s coming kingdom.
§ I’ve heard him say, “Follow me,” and felt my heart leap into my throat at the prospect of actually doing it.
§ I’ve watched him break the Law of Moses by reaching out to touch and heal an unclean leper, as if compassion were even more important than obedience.
§ I’ve heard him say, “Let the children come to me,” and pictured them in his arms, smiling and giggling. I picture him smiling, too.
§ I’ve watched him raise Jairus’ daughter, heal the woman with the flow of blood, and trust Mary Magdalene with the first Easter sermon, because women matter just as much as men.
§ I’ve heard him say, “If anyone would come after me let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Which is brilliant, because once you volunteer to die you become fearless, and sometimes that’s what discipleship requires.
§ I’ve heard him say to Zacchaeus, “Come on down, for I’m going to your house today.”
§ I have noticed that he seemed to have the most trouble with religious people. He was fine with sinners and tax collectors, in fact, they flocked to him, causing me to wonder why they don’t usually flock to his church.
§ I have watched him ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday bringing nothing but love, and yet knowing that the religious and political authorities would be so threatened by him that they would want to kill him.
§ I have seen him break the bread that represented his body, and lift the cup that represented his blood. I have heard him tell his disciples to eat and drink.
§ I have heard the crowd calling for his crucifixion, I have watched Pontius Pilate wash his hands, I have seen Roman soldiers nail him to a cross.
§ But I have also heard him speak Mary’s name on that first Easter morning, and watched her face light up as she realized who it was. I have some sense of what she was feeling. In so many ways I, too, have seen the Lord.
Right at the end of Matthew’s Gospel Jesus tells his followers to go into all the world and make disciples, a word that means, literally, “learners.” What were those disciples supposed to learn? To obey everything Jesus had commanded. And what are those things? Well, you can find them by reading the Gospels, and if you can’t remember all of them you might remember this one: to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor just as much as you love yourself. I
told someone last week that if we could only do that Christianity would have a different reputation than it does in the world.
But it doesn’t. Christianity has a bad reputation. And this may sound judgmental (because it is), but I think it’s because most Christians are not interested in following Jesus. I think they want just enough of him so that when they die, instead of going to hell, they can go to heaven. And knowing Jesus, he would probably let them in. He would probably say, “If that’s what you really want, here—take the keys to the penthouse suite.” But that’s not what he really wants; he wants them to follow him. He wants you to follow him. He wants you to obey everything he has commanded partly because it will change your life for the better, but mostly because it will change the world for the better. Who knows? It might even bring in the Kingdom.
I keep thinking about that conversation Jesus had with Peter on the seashore after his resurrection, the one where he said, “Peter, do you love me?” What if that is our final exam? Not, “Do you believe that I am the Son of God?” Not, “Do you believe that I was born of a virgin?” Not, “Do you believe that I rose from the dead?” But this, this one question: “Do you love me?”
How would you answer that one?
Jim Somerville, 2026
