Matthew 11:16-19
“Jesus the Philosopher”
August 24, 2003 - Eleventh after Pentecost

         “Who is your favorite political philosopher?” That question was asked of George W. Bush during a debate in Iowa for the Republican primary in 1999. His answer took everyone by surprise. “Jesus Christ, because he changed my life.”[1]

         President Bush’s answer may have simply evaded a question aimed at ferreting out the extent of his political knowledge. He pointed instead to his faith commitment. After the debate it drew both strong affirmation and heavy criticism. It wasn’t clear just why he chose to identify Jesus as a philosopher.

         Nonetheless, as we consider the genius of Jesus, it is worth pondering whether the President’s identification of Christ as a philosopher has any merit to it. If our Lord is in fact the greatest genius who ever lived, does His intelligence extend to that subject which has exercised some of the best minds in history? Is Jesus in fact a philosopher?

         Four heavy volumes of fine print sitting on the shelf in my office constitute The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[2] It covers all the major philosophers and ideas of the western world. It contains no entry at all for “Jesus” or “Christ,” though there is a short article on “Christianity.” A newer work, the well-respected Routledge Encylopedia of Philosophy (which incidentally costs $3,800 and so is not sitting on my office shelf), also contains no listing for “Jesus” or “Christ.” No discussion of Jesus as a philosopher appears in the 18 paperback volumes of Father Frederick Copleston’s A History of Philosophy. The same story with only a couple exceptions is repeated in almost all philosophical reference works.

         The truth is that philosophers, even Christian philosophers like Copleston, do not generally think of Jesus as one of them. Whatever else Jesus might have done or taught, philosophy is not usually regarded as one of the areas of His expertise.

         I freely admit, then, that this morning’s sermon is swimming against the tide. In claiming that Jesus is a philosopher, I may simply be indulging in wishful thinking, wanting Jesus to be more like me. If so, I would be making a rather common mistake. We often tend to see Jesus each through our own lenses. Marcus Borg at Oregon State sees Him as a revolutionary, challenging the forces of oppression on behalf of the poor. The flower children of the sixties saw Christ as one of their own, a free spirit standing for freedom of expression in opposition to the uptight establishment. Albert Schweizer saw him as an apocalyptic preacher who expected the end of the world at any time. Our church may tend to look at Him with middle class American eyes and expect Him to reflect our morals and way of life. So I may be doing the same makeover of Jesus in my own image when I claim that He is a philosopher.

         Being as objective as I can, I think there may still be cause for considering Jesus Christ as one who engaged in the activity called philosophy. If you take the word absolutely literally, “philosophy” is a combination of the Greek words for “love” and “wisdom,” phileo and sophia. So a philosopher is a “lover of wisdom.” Jesus was certainly that, and verse 19 of our text shows that He saw Himself as very much engaged the work of wisdom as we heard it in our reading from Proverbs. The crowd was to judge the wisdom He displayed by its results, by His own actions.

         However, Jesus did not do other things generally associated with philosophers. He did not write any books. He did not engage in a long and careful search for truth and meaning. He did not generate a systematic body of thought touching on all the great problems of human life.

         Moreover, it can and has been said that Jesus did not approach matters in a philosophical way. Many modern philosophers question everything, trying to arrive at conclusions on the basis of reason. Jesus simply taught the truth, never doubting for a moment that what He said was true. He based what He said on Scripture and on His direct knowledge of divine truth as the Son of God.

         Yet not every philosopher writes books. Not all of them create extensive systems of thought. Some of them based at least some of their thinking in divine inspiration. In a few ways the career of Jesus bears resemblance to the Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates wrote no books. He did not create a philosophical system. He was inspired what he believed was God speaking to him through the oracle at Delphi. And, like Jesus, he ultimately ran afoul of the authorities and was put to death for his teaching. So if Socrates is a philosopher, and almost everyone thinks he is, then perhaps Jesus is one too.

         The fact that Jesus did not construct a detailed philosophical system does not mean that He neglected the practice of what is at the heart of philosophy. At the root, philosophy’s love of wisdom is an attempt to make the best use of human reasoning in order to understand our life and the world around us. And Jesus regularly showed His proficiency in the practice of reason.

         Philosophy was born in Greece in the centuries before Socrates when people began to use their minds rather than their feelings or imagination to answer questions about the world. Instead of making up myths or accepting stories handed down for generations, they observed the world and thought about it as carefully as they could. They approached matters of truth with their heads as well as their hearts. Reason became a tool for learning about life and the world. And that use of reason is exactly what makes Jesus a philosopher as well.

         He did not need to ask or answer a number of the great philosophical questions. “What is real?” is hardly a major issue for someone who is the Creator of it all. “How do I know what is right and wrong?” won’t bother a man who is perfect. And of course, the question of the existence of God wouldn’t worry the Son of God. Neither were those questions large for the people around Jesus. His Jewish audience knew God made everything, that the Scriptures told them what was right and wrong, and that God existed. Christ didn’t need to reason with them about those things.

         Yet Jesus did think carefully and reason about the world and our place in it. He addressed the minds of those to whom He spoke. He spoke to their hearts, but He also regularly spoke to their heads.

         We need to catch a glimpse of the philosopher in Jesus, especially today. Both people inside and outside the church have gotten the notion that Christian faith is all about the heart and nothing about the head. Non-Christians think we’re foolish because we accept all sorts of beliefs we have no good reasons for. And we as Christians imagine that what we believe is true because it comforts us or makes us feel good.

         It’s true that Jesus called us to have faith, but nowhere did He say or teach that faith meant not using our minds or that a person couldn’t have reasons for believing. In fact, Jesus over and over offered people the chance to believe in Him by giving them good reasons. He didn’t just walk on to the scene and announce that He was God. He demonstrated it with teaching and miracles that couldn’t have come from anyone but God.

         He used that sort of evidence to address the doubts of John the Baptist. When John was put in prison by King Herod he began to wonder if Jesus really was the Messiah. So he sent messengers to ask Jesus who He was. And Christ invited John to reason about it. Just before our text, in Matthew 11, verse 4, Jesus tells them:

“Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.”

The Lord was doing with John what philosophers do. He offered him a logical argument based on the evidence. The reasoning goes like this:

         Premise 1: If somebody gives the blind sight, makes the lame walk, cures the lepers,
         heals the deaf, raises the dead, and preaches good news to the poor, that person is the
         Messiah.

         Premise 2: Jesus does all of that (gives the blind sight, etc.)

         Conclusion: Jesus is the Messiah.

So Jesus didn’t just ask John to believe. He gave him every reason to believe.

         That same sort of appeal to reason on the basis of the evidence is repeated several times by Jesus in John’s gospel, the one that makes such a big deal about faith. In John 10:38, Jesus told some skeptics that if they couldn’t believe Him just because of what He said, then believe because of the miracles He did. He gives that same argument to the disciples in John 14:11 when they are doubting. And the ultimate evidence was offered to the disciple Thomas after Jesus died on the Cross. He refused to believe Jesus was alive again until he touched the nail prints in Jesus’ hands. So the Lord showed them to him, putting both his heart and his mind at rest. Faith can have reasons and Jesus gives them.

         Jesus also used reason for another purpose. Like a skillful surgeon applying a scalpel, He used good thinking to pierce through and cut away the cancer of bad thinking which kept people from accepting God’s truth. Some of that bad thinking showed up in a trap which the Pharisees tried to set for Jesus in Matthew 22:17. They asked Him whether it was it was right or not to pay taxes to Caesar.

         The trap lay in what is known in logic as a dilemma. You are forced to choose between two obviously bad alternatives. The two alternatives are pictured as the horns of a raging bull. Try to grab hold of either one and you will be gored by it. If Jesus said not to pay taxes to Caesar, He would have spoken treason against Roman law. On the other hand, saying it was right to pay the taxes would have been a word in favor of the ungodly oppressor of the Jewish people, Caesar who claimed to be God. Either way, someone would be upset, on one horn the Romans, on the other the Jews.

         Jesus knew His logic, and the truth, quite well enough to do what is called “slipping between the horns” of a dilemma. He called for a coin used to pay the tax. He pointed out that the coin had Caesar’s picture on it, so it belonged to Caesar. “Give it to Caesar, then,” He said, seeming to grab one horn of the dilemma. But then He escaped by saying, “Give to God what is God’s.” By that part of His answer He clearly stated that Caesar was not God. His answer was brilliantly reasoned to speak the truth and to give no cause for offense to either Romans or Jews.

         It was bad thinking which Jesus addressed in today’s text. Speaking to them about John the Baptist, he used a kind of dilemma of His own to question their attitudes toward John and Himself. He pictured children playing games in the market place, and some of them trying get others to join in. Verse 17 is their little song:

         “We played the flute for you,
                  and you did not dance;
         we sang a dirge,
                  and you did not mourn.”

In other words, “We wanted to play wedding and be happy, and you didn’t like the game. So we decided to play funeral and be sad, and you didn’t like that either.”

         Jesus was pointing out the flaw in the way people thought about Him and John. They were like bored children, nothing satisfied them. John was an ascetic, fasting and abstaining from alcohol. They didn’t like that. He was too gloomy. Jesus enjoyed eating and drinking. They didn’t like that either. He was too frivolous. Jesus saw through their poor thinking and showed the fault was neither in Him nor in John. It was in minds which refused to recognize the messengers of God on any condition. Jesus used the games of children to show up the lazy thinking of the crowd. They wanted neither John nor Jesus. He showed them that both John and He represented true wisdom.

         The philosophy of Jesus challenges us as well. We are as easily bored with the spiritual alternatives we have as people were then. On the one hand our Lord calls us to the hard and sometimes gloomy work of giving up what we would like to do, of spending more time in prayer and less in play, of thinking of others before we think of ourselves, of focusing more on heaven and less on earth. That’s all too depressing, too sad, too much to ask of us, we feel. The pessimism of it all doesn’t feel right.

         On the other hand, Jesus can be too frivolous for us. He gives us grace for free when we would rather wallow awhile in our guilt. He wants us to sing and be joyful when we would rather be angry and sad. He wants us to see some good in everyone and become their friends, when we would prefer to see the bad and be their critics. That kind of optimism doesn’t feel right either.

         To all of that Jesus responds by inviting us not just to feel but to think, to realize that His philosophy strikes the perfect balance between gloominess and gladness. His truth threads its way through the dilemmas we face, not being caught on a horn on either side.

         You see, the Lord knew there would be those days when you and I wake up not feeling at all like being Christian. Days when you don’t feel like praying or feel like coming to church. You may not feel like talking to your wife or being civil to your neighbor next door. You might not even feel like you believe in God anymore. Jesus knew all about our feelings, just like He knew about the boredom of that crowd in Galilee. And He knew that the way to correct all that was to appeal to another part of us, to argue a bit with us as He did with them. He reminds us by way of reason of what we can forget by way of emotion.

         Christ Jesus was a philosopher. That means you and I can count on Him to speak the truth to us persuasively. He won’t leave us to our feelings when we find it hard to believe, but will always call us back to Him with clear and incisive reasons to put our trust in Him. I invite you today to think with Jesus. Study again the evidence you have for believing in Him. Remind yourself of His wisdom and truth. Let Him renew your heart by speaking to your head. And you will find that He is Lord of both, heart and head, reason and emotion. And you will know His truth, and His truth will set you free.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj