On Jesus

Second in a series of essays exploring the Confession of Faith from a Mennonite Perspective.

Jesus is, of course, the founder of the Christian faith—Christians are so called because they are followers of Jesus, whom we believe is the Christ, that is, the one anointed to be the savior of humankind. And so, of course, Christians have spent a lot of time thinking about Jesus, who he was, who he is, what was the meaning of his life, even whether he was fundamentally different creature from the rest of humanity—or whether he was a human at all. The Confession of Faith from a Mennonite Perspective doesn’t differ radically from what most other Christians have said about Jesus. And this is a good thing, for the varieties of Christian experience is confusing enough without too much bickering about Jesus. Details and emphases differ of course, and it is almost surely the case that no theory about Jesus Christ is so wild that some one has advocated it. But most Christians, in most places and at most times, would, I think, not find much to quibble with in Article 2 of this confession.

Here are some things the confession says about Jesus:

Jesus is the Word of God, made flesh.
He is the savior of the world.
He died, but was raised from the dead.
His is now the head of the church, and will return to earth.
As the anointed savior, he acted as prophet, priest, king and teacher.
He proclaimed a message of God’s forgiveness for our wrongdoings.
He taught and modeled what his followers should do and be.
He was completely human, and he was completely God, “this image of the invisible God,” born miraculously of God and the virgin Mary.
As the head of the church, Jesus is to be emulated and followed.
Because of who is he is, he is worthy and deserving of our worship and obedience.

Are there some Mennonite emphases in the Confession? Why, yes there are. But, again, these are differences of emphasis rather than kind.

More emphasis is presented on what Jesus did and taught before his death. The confession states:

As teacher of divine wisdom, he has made known God’s will for human conduct.

Jesus is presented, not only as prophet, priest and king, but also as teacher. His teachings matter; they tell us how God expects us to act (both individually and corporately).

The confession expands on this a bit:

In his ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing, he proclaimed forgiveness of sins and peace to those near at hand and those far off. In calling disciples to follow him, he began the new community of faith. In his suffering, he loved his enemies and did not resist them with violence, thus giving us an example to follow.

These are things Jesus instigated during his earthly life, and they reverberate to us in our time and place in ways similar to how his death, resurrection and eventual return do.

And did you notice the focus on creating a community of faith? That’s a Mennonite emphasis, too, which is expanding on in Article 9, The Church of Jesus Christ:

We believe that the church is the assembly of those who have accepted God’s offer of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. The church is the new community of disciples sent into the world to proclaim the reign of God and to provide a foretaste of the church’s glorious hope. The church is the new society established and sustained by the Holy Spirit. The church, the body of Christ, is called to become ever more like Jesus Christ, its head, in its worship, ministry, witness, mutual love and care, and the ordering of its common life.

The emphasis of the suffering of Jesus being an example for us to follow is a Mennonite emphasis, too. Again, this is expanded later in the Confession under the rubric of “non-resistance,” something fundamental to a Mennonite understanding of peace (see Article 22).

This presentation of the what the Mennonites “confess” about Jesus doesn’t do justice to how attractive, how wonderful, how interesting Jesus is. In many ways, the confession is a document for Christians to read to affirm the basic orthodoxy of Mennonites, and thus it is (rightly so) a conservative document. But when Jesus came, his life and his teachings were electric, attractive to many and repulsive to some, radical enough to cause a new religion to start and spread to essentially the entire earth.

In the first flush of excitement after Jesus’s resurrection, his close followers began to spread the news—the good news, the gospel—about the Jesus they followed, saw killed and saw raised from the dead. Here’s how Peter, one of those followers, is quoted as saying to people who would be among the first non-Jewish converts to Jesus:

Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. As for the word that he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all), you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name (Acts 10:32-34).

This early confession of who Jesus is captures some of the excitement of the life-changing character of Jesus, the one anointed to save everyone who trusts him to do so. In the sometimes “churchy” language of the Mennonite confession, filtered by the history of the Christian movement and Mennonite history, the same Jesus is declared.