"Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?"

Pastor Laura Guy

April 30, 2006

Here's an instant replay of what happened in worship:

Fusion 112 sang a song about the Bible; Sara Groves' song, The Word.
We continued our series "Can We Trust the Bible?" by looking at the claim in The Da Vinci Code that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
We asked how it would change the way we thought about Jesus or the way we thought about the reliability of the Bible if we were to find out that Jesus had been married. Although Pastor Laura said she believed Jesus was not married, we spent some time thinking about why this idea might shock people so much. Since we learned about the Gnostics last week and their dualism of creation/flesh=bad, intellect/mind=good, we had to ask ourselves whether any feelings of discomfort we might have thinking about Jesus being married aren't just feelings of discomfort thinking about the possibility of Jesus being in a sexual relationship with his wife and how this would put us in the same category with the Gnostics.
We reminded ourselves that Jesus was the Incarnation of God - fully human while being fully divine. Whatever it means to live a human life, that's what Jesus lived. For many of us, that means falling in love and getting married. However, Pastor Laura shared that she does not think Jesus was married because there wasn't any reason for the Gospel writers to leave out that information; it was not taboo (we know that Peter was married). She also said that John records that Mary Magdalene's first word when she recognized the risen Christ was "Rabbi!" ("Teacher!"). If Mary was Jesus' wife, she probably would have greeted him some other way!
We looked at how Luke begins his Gospel in Luke 1:1-4. We noticed a similarity to the way Dan Brown begins The Da Vinci Code, claiming that everything has been thoroughly researched. Why is it, we asked, that some people are more inclinded to believe Dan Brown than to believe Luke?
We thought about the people who wrote the Gospels and what their motivations were. We asked whether we could begin to trust the Bible by beginning to trust people like Luke, people who wrote down what they knew about Jesus by interviewing and investigating the people who had spent the most time with him.
We prayed for God's help to think through our own doubts and questions, knowing that we could bring them to God and bring them with us to church.
We shared communion with the risen Jesus, thanking him for the tangible way we can encounter him in the bread and the cup.