Christology and the Christian (Luke 9.1-50)

Over the past several weeks at LOCC, I have been writing bulletin articles and Bible studies from the Gospel of Luke. It has been an attempt to help us immerse ourselves in the world of a gospel and allow it to shape and critique our lives, to help us to re-image the world in new ways. (In Churches of Christ, we tend to spend more time in Paul than the gospels, so to allow the gospels to shape our christology is a little scary and incredibly transformative.) The following is my bulletin article for this week. It was forged in the wake of some frustrating comments that were made to me this week, so the first paragraph is in some ways my pained response to those conversations. With that disclaimer in place, here it is...

I do not know if I trust you enough to write this, but I am too tired physically and emotionally to use better judgment. Most of you do not know me. You might think that you do, but you do not. So, do I dare open the door to confession? Do I stretch out my hand, grasp the doorknob, and pull? Do I take the difficult step through the frame of vulnerability? Let us be honest, few of you have taken the time to really consider what I believe or what I do. Much of my work falls on deaf ears on blind eyes. That is understandable. I think outside the box, spending my time in uncomfortable and bizarre, if not totally eccentric territory. I struggle to understand and write about strange concepts and theologies. Why go there? It is much easier to stay in safe, familiar territory. Much of my work probably is really more of a game than anything else. Well, maybe not to me.

You see, for me what I do matters because it is what I believe. It is not really a hard concept to grasp intellectually. What we believe matters. The things that we believe should guide and inform the way we live and the decisions we make. That is pretty safe to say.

This week, Luke reminds us that what we believe matters. For those of you that are struggling with the title of this article, let me explain. Christology is a fancy word that means the study of Jesus Christ and what he has done. It is what we believe about Jesus. For the Christian that matters. What we believe about Jesus matters. Luke’s purpose for the way he structured Luke 9:1-50 is to get us to struggle with the question “Who is Jesus?”

Why? It is not just so that we can believe the right things. Despite popular opinion, faith is not just “believing” the right things. Faith is living out the things we believe. It is about allowing God’s story to become our story and living our lives so they look like Jesus’ life. Starting in 9:18, Jesus asks his disciples to struggle with christology. “Who do you say that I am?” He then makes the first of three passion predictions.

Now, Jesus could have stopped there. He could have ended with christology, asking his disciples to understand that as Messiah, he was to suffer, to be rejected, killed, and raised. But he does not stop there. But for Jesus, our christology shapes our lives. If we want to be believers, if we want to be disciples, we must make what we believe about Jesus real in our lives. That is why Jesus’ immediately follows the passion prediction with a description of the nature of discipleship. Notice how they connect. The life of a disciple is a life of daily self-denial. It is living what we believe about Jesus. I hope and pray that my work here will help re-introduce you to Jesus, that it will convict you to live out his life daily. I hope that what I do will challenge everything you think and believe and that maybe it will awaken us from our slumber and call us to action. What we believe matters. Do we believe this? “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Lk. 9:23).