Prophet of an Uncertain God

We know what thousands of people have thought and said concerning Jesus, who is arguably the most influential person who ever walked on this earth—but we know absolutely nothing with any certainty about the man himself. 

Religious historians generally agree that he did indeed exist; that he lived and died in Palestine, in the first thirty or so years of the common era. Apart from that, there’s no certainty respecting his birth, his background and formation, his teachings and his actions. He left no writings. Stories about his life are all written by anonymous males who never met him; they composed their often contradictory tales between forty and seventy years after his death, using hearsay sources: no videos, no tape recordings, no photographs, no letters, no contemporary interviews or accounts. Nothing.

Yet out of this historical uncertainty comes a faith notable for its celebration of certainty: certainty that Jesus not only lived, but that he was, in the words of one of the early councils, fully God and fully man, the fulcrum of human history.

I count myself among his many millions of followers. I meditate on his words and actions every morning, and do my best, however failingly, to follow his precepts. It’s been a lengthy journey, and I still have a way to go. But something I think about a lot, now, is the opposite of the certainty that many seek and claim to find in religion, including the Christian one. 

For me, Jesus is the ultimate seeker. He is the prophet of what I call Radical Uncertainty.

Because what history sadly teaches us, surely, is this: certainty is the necessary pre-condition of evil. Therefore, it’s better to live our lives in such a way that our only certainty—with respect to our various beliefs—is how fallible and uncertain they, in fact, may be. 

I think that’s a different way of expressing the scriptural precept that we walk “humbly” in the presence of God. And Jesus offers the best example of how to do that.

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That’s how I read the gospel of Mark—the earliest of the synoptics, and the unquestioned source, along with what’s called “Q” (with unknown others), for Matthew and Luke. And while scholars may disagree among themselves, I think that the much later account of John is in fact a meditation on the synoptics, with some further unknown sources thrown in.

So look what we find in Mark’s account.

Jesus appears out of nowhere: there are no birth narratives. He joins the crowd that is seeking the baptism of John in the Jordan—and that triggers a religious experience: the Holy Spirit seizes him and tells him that he has a mission –but it’s a private experience, unknown to the crowd and the baptizer. 

Did Jesus know anything about that, before he entered the water? I don’t think so. This is the Uncertainty of the true seeker, learning from experience.

And then he immediately departs for the “desert” to spend time alone with God to better understand what he’s supposed to do. That’s the first reference to what will become the foundation of his new life: time in prayer alone with God. 

Why does Jesus need to pray? That question is pretty obvious, since it so marks his life, not just in Mark’s account—although I’ve never seen a satisfying answer to it. That’s because the answer is so obvious, but the pious and their teachers are reluctant to admit it: he never knew what to do next! He lived in uncertainty. So night after night, he had to connect with his God and ask. His mission was always a haphazard, trial-and-error affair. It was learning by doing; it was experimental—as, in a slightly different way, the whole of creation amounts to a great divine experiment.

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After the desert experience (which Mark does not describe), Jesus returned to his home country of Galilee and discovered that he had special powers, particularly to cast out devils. Those unclean spirits kept telling him who he was: the holy one of God. Humans, however, failed to recognize him—although they sought him out because of those powers (there were lots of other healers in those days). He went  home to the tiny village of Nazareth and announced his new mission to his former neighbors in the synagogue, quoting the prophet Isaiah.

But they rejected him. They knew him as a carpenter, son of Joseph; they knew his brothers and sisters. How dare he? they said. Where did he get this knowledge and this power?

And those were good questions. Jesus himself asked them every night, in prayer.

There’s another interesting aspect of the visit to his home village. Because of their lack of faith, he was unable to do among them the healing miracles that he could do elsewhere. That’s a persistent theme, especially in the early part of Mark’s gospel: faith on the part of the recipient is a necessary pre-condition for the power of Jesus. 

So I ask an obvious question. When Jesus set out to perform a healing, did he himself know in advance whether he would succeed? 

I don’t think so. I think that each performance was high risk, and might fail. Mark notes a few of the successes. He doesn’t tell us about the failures.

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Mark’s story falls into three parts. There’s the first phase of the ministry, in which devils recognize him, people flock to see him, he collects some disciples and both they and he proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom, as prophesied in that initial reading from Isaiah. While the message is compelling, it is vague and unfocused. It hardly constitutes a clear program of action. But Jesus gains confidence as he succeeds in healings and attracts followers.

As he discovers more about his own identity and power, he starts working wonders—feeding five thousand, walking on water, calming the sea. He’s on the road a lot, with some kind of headquarters in Capharnaum and an apparently random itinerary, which sometimes involves mainly pagan places: does he himself know why he’s gone to Tyre and Sidon or the vaguely named “country of the Gerasenes” (which can’t be found on any map)? But always, night after night, he spends time in prayer—because he has no plan of his own. In his continual uncertainty, he seeks direction from God. He’s called to proclaim an immanent kingdom—but does he himself know what that is? Mark never tells us. A couple of years pass—and what’s the point? What has been achieved? How much longer can he keep up a life that is both demanding—and unfocussed?

But his prayer has deepened; it has divinized him during this long apprenticeship. Why he’s not sure, but he takes his three trusted disciples with him to an unnamed “high mountain” where he is revealed as the recipient of “all” the Father’s love, God’s son with whom he is “well pleased”; and, in dialogue with Moses (founder of the temple religion) and Elijah (the greatest of the OT prophets) he learns that he is supposed to go to Jerusalem where he will die.

And then the march to Jerusalem begins—the third section of Mark’s gospel. When Jesus stages his triumphal entry into the holy city, acclaimed by the crowds as “Son of David” and its liberator—what does he himself know? He is, in the Nicene definition, “fully man”. Therefore he cannot know the future with any certainty. Is he certain that he will be betrayed, subjected to a monkey trial, and die the most shameful and painful of deaths? Or does he hope—despite the conversation with Moses and Elijah on the mountain and his own reported private words to his disciples—that his God will work yet another miracle on his behalf, and peacefully deliver Jerusalem and its temple to him, as the longed-for chosen one, the Messiah? 

In Mark’s account, especially when he chases the sellers out of the temple, he behaves as if, by right, he is taking over. And up to the very end he begs his God to spare him. Further, in this gospel, and only this one, his dying words are a reproach to the God in whom he put his trust throughout his random and unplanned and often contradictory ministry: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” 

You chose me out of nowhere; you called me and sanctioned me; you directed me in everything I did; you told me that you loved me, that I was indeed the promised one, the Messiah who would save my people and restore your kingdom. You gave me all these signs, as the seal of your will.

I did everything you wanted. And now—nothing.

Do you even exist?

Jesus of Nazareth: prophet of an uncertain God.