MYTHIC FACES OF JESUS: HERO AND/OR HOLY FOOL?

MYTHIC FACES OF JESUS: HERO AND/OR HOLY FOOL?

Reading: (Frederick Buechner, adapted)

It was the last meal he ever ate with his friends. The goon squad was already
laying for him in the shadows and all Hell was about to break loose. With great
confidence, he tells them, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world' (John
16:33). One thinks of the confidence of Charlie Chaplin as the little tramp standing
there so jaunty and hopeful in his baggy pants and derby hat. Standing there while
the whole world he has overcome threatens to crash down on him like a pail of water
balanced on the top of a door. When finally they string him up, they do it for the
wrong reasons. They string him up as a nationalist revolutionary. The only revolution
he is after is a revolution of the human heart and his concern is ultimately for all
nations. Even the resurrection has a kind of comedy to it. His closet followers
dismiss it out of hand at first as a tale of hysterical women. And when Mary Magdalen
comes upon him in the dim half-light of dawn, she mistakes him for the gardener of all
people.

Perhaps seeing Jesus in Chaplinesque terms is going a bit far. Yet this image
does challenge our thinking. Might it be a corrective for centuries of taking him all too
seriously?

Jesus of Nazareth rode into Jerusalem on an ass, often a symbol of a fool. Yet he
rode to his destiny as a scapegoat savior. A noble hero, proclaimed by those who came
later as the Son of God. The one who had won victory for all time by his vicarious
atonement. The one who sat at the right hand of God, and would usher in the kingdom
and defeat Satan forever.

This morning, I invite you to consider two archetypes in juxtaposition: The
Christ/Hero archetype, and the Fool archetype. Faces of the first pervaded Greek culture.
If a hero appeared to have humble origins, it developed that a god had fathered him.
True, there were often fatal flaws in these semi-divine heroes. But these flaws led, in true
heroic fashion, into tragedy. Nothing so demeaning as comedy or foolishness. The Greek
word "Christ" means anointed one. As an archetype it represents the highest, noblest
potential of human nature.

The Hebraic tradition, on the other hand, gives us material for seeing some of the
prophets as holy fools. Noah drank too much. Moses was a dense and reluctant prophet.
When David danced before the Ark on its entry to Jerusalem, his wife was mortified. Many
of the prophets were thought fools by their contemporaries, especially when they chose a
dramatic way to make their point. Jeremiah wore a wooden yoke on his shoulders for a
time to signify the bondage of the people to their sinful ways. Hosea married a prostitute
in sympathy for his God's predicament with His unfaithful people.

These Hebraic figures around whom myth evolved were not semi-divine heroes.
They were ordinary people caught in the awkward ambiguity between human frailty and
divine call. Much later, Hasidic tradition and Yeddish humor both came to appreciate
more explicitly the earthy and absurd dimensions of the human situation.

Look at Abraham, founding father of the Jewish people. His whole life is that of a
"schlemozzle," which in Yiddish means a person who is always getting soup spilled on
himself. In his efforts to be clever, he gets himself into all sorts of scrapes.

We think of tragedy and comedy as opposites. Is it simply because one tends to
make us cry, and the other to laugh? I like this definition proposed by Conrad Hyers: “the
tragic is the inevitable, while the comic is the unforseeable.” The comic spirit is true to the
uncertainty, the insecurity, the vulnerability and the absurdity of human life. Yet it steers
clear of despair. These are all qualities I believe John, Paul and others did their best to
remove from the Jesus tradition.

The basic foolishness of the Jesus story was observed in the earliest writings, the
letters of Paul. When he writes of Christ crucified as "a stumbling block to the Jews and a
folly to the Gentiles."(1 Cor 1:23), he was speaking no less than the truth. In the words of
Buechner, a Christian theologian/storyteller, he was "the king who looks like a tramp, the
prince of peace who looks like the prince of fools, the lamb of God who ends like
something hung up at the butcher's. (p. 60).

Yet Paul himself discarded the life of the human Jesus for a pre-existent Logos.
He had to explain away that foolishness with a sweeping heroic story frame. Much of
Christian writing since has been a grand extended explanation for the seeming
foolishness of Jesus' human life and death. The story of God incarnate could not be
allowed to seem foolish. There could be no uncertainty, no insecurity, no true
vulnerability, and certainly no true absurdity! Everything that happened had to be part of a
grand plan—a plan that Jesus knew and willingly accepted.

Did you know that one of the goals of many missionaries was to persuade people
to give up whole-hearted laughter? African natives, among others, were given to hearty,
full-bodied laughter. They were persuaded by missionaries to reduce their expressions of
mirth to what came to be known as the “missionary giggle." I mention this as an example
of Christianity's historic discomfort with the comic spirit.

There is a core reality in comic awareness: much of our lives and endeavors only
barely avoid being swallowed up by chaos, by darkness, by meaninglessness. Yet at the
same time, the comic spirit affirms that goodness and trustworthiness underlie our world.
There is no final, definitive victory . . . but life and love generally manage to stay that bare
one step ahead.

So was Jesus a holy fool? What does that mean, anyway?

For a start, the holy fool is usually a stranger. Either literally an outsider, or a
member of the community who is "strange" in some way. To the larger Jewish world,
Jesus was a Nazarene. There was a common saying, "Can anything good come out of
Nazareth?"

To his fellow townspeople, he was apparently considered odd. When he returned
and tried to preach to them, they mocked him, and tried to throw him off a cliff. “Isn't this

Jesus who used to live among us? Who does he think he is!” If his birth was hailed with
angelic choirs and visiting kings, even his family appear to have forgotten such nonsense
by the time he was thirty.

Holy fools behave in a way that varies from the consensual norm. Here Jesus
clearly fits. He challenged those norms constantly. He healed on the Sabbath. He
conversed freely with women, and even Samaritans. Instead of the expected Messiah
behavior, we are told that one of the first public acts of Jesus' ministry was to turn water
into wine at a wedding. He was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard.

John the Baptist as a "straight man" could be understood, but Jesus made merry
with sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes. He associated with the poor, children,
madmen and misfits. Doing the unexpected is another characteristic of holy fools. His
teachings went against pride, common sense, and accepted ideas about what was and
was not possible in his world.

In Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas justifies his betrayal on the grounds that Jesus is
a fool. After all, he will not reprove the woman who anoints his feet with expensive oils.
He did not tell her to go sell the ointment and give the money to the poor! Instead, he told
them all that her love had won her a place in heaven. Hadn't all the prophets before him
put justice and mercy and caring for the poor at the top of their list of virtues? No way
around it, Jesus was just not a sensible, rational liberal committed to social justice!

Holy fools tend to bring chaos into contact with the societal structures around
them. By questioning Jewish law, and especially by challenging the concept of ritual
purity that underlay it, Jesus challenged the structure of his society. That rigid structure
disintegrated into chaos in his vicinity.

One thing that makes certain fools holy is their role as catalysts in triggering
transformation or redemption in those around them. This transformation comes out of an
experience with reversal of so-called "normal" reality. It seems Jesus had this ability to be
a catalyst. Experiencing transformation in his presence, his followers responded with
more love and loyalty than understanding. Such reality-shattering experiences were
powerful, and generated stories that have come down through the centuries.

There is a certain sameness about heroes, isn't there? The qualities attributed to
them don't vary greatly from culture to culture. But the holy fools discard their culture's
definitions of excellence and become more and more themselves. More and more
unique. And more and more a puzzle to those who do not question their own
acculturation into a specific, historically determined human society.

The Christian story was certainly given a "hero" overlay. Take the basic reversal --
Jesus is born humbly in a stable, and died a humiliating death -- not your run-of-the-mill
savior. But this unexpectedly 'humble' person wasn't really -- the story has flipped this
reversal by making him "really" the son of God. The genius of the historical Jesus may
have been in living fully in the moment. But the hero is described as pre-existent and
eternal.

The historical Jesus never focused upon himself, but the hero overlay has made
him a self-proclaimed savior. The chaos surrounding Jesus was firmly overlaid with a
structure explaining the mysteries, and the breaking of consensual norms was seen as a
way of establishing new ones. Any element of surprise in the way and timing of his death
is overlaid with the explanation that it was the plan all along.

Remember -- the tragic is the inevitable, while the comic is the unpredictable.
Jesus' death can perhaps be seen as tragic in the classical sense -- as the inevitable
outcome of his persistent clash with the religious authorities of his cultures. But I am
convinced that the way he lived his life was more unpredictable than it was it was
inevitable. Those early writers who worked so hard to make him a hero tended to ignore
his life.

Yes, Jesus can be seen as the Christ archetype -- the image of human potential at
its noblest. Possibly even more important, he is also an incarnation of the Holy fool.

Jesus was a stranger within his own culture, and not quite what he seemed. His
behavior challenged consensual norms. He had an ability to live in the moment. His
teachings reversed accepted views of reality. They juxtaposed elements of structure and
chaos in unexpected ways. Above all, he catalyzed transformation in those around him.
These are all characteristics of a holy fool.

Jesus of Nazareth died a painful and humiliating death. His mission, if we define
him heroically as having a mission, seemed a failure. Yet his spirit continued to transform
those whose lives he had touched. A story grew -- a blend of Judaic hopefulness and the
Greek motif of a dying, rising God. It was a story unlike those of gods who died and were
reborn, and died again the next winter. This was a story of resurrection and final victory.

I believe the claim of final victory was and is wishful thinking. Yet something new
happened. Something more than the cycle of the seasons was evoked. Resurrection
may not be final, but it is possible. Life does not simply repeat itself. The divine dances
in our lives, and something new comes into being. That is miracle enough.

This season speaks to us of resurrections. None of them are finally victorious. Yet
I believe in the hopeful, comic spirit that stays one step ahead of the darkness reaching
out to swallow it -- or is reborn out of the darkness when it chances to be swallowed. I
believe in the unexpected, sometimes preposterous spirit of grace breaking into the times
of darkness in our lives. in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity, may this present
moment be alive with hope.