Vineyard Church of Knox County
The Divinity of Jesus
Sermon Audio from Sunday, June 4, 2006 — What's the big deal, it's just a novel, some of you may be thinking about The Da Vinci Code. The big deal is that Dan Brown has so blurred the line between fact and fiction that many people are reading this book or watching the movie and wondering what to believe about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, and Christianity. One page in the book makes the claim that the art, architecture, and secret rituals are all historically accurate. In other words, the book is a fictional novel that reflects historical fact. It would be like an author writing a book about WWII, a fictional story he made up based on the historical fact of the war. No big deal, right?
Many of us have seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, which is just that, a fictional story based in historical fact. But imagine this WWII novel suggested that Germany won the war and Hitler was alive and well today. Well, this is exactly the scenario we have in TDC: Brown’s fictional novel claims historical fact but as we investigate it we see flaw after flaw in his interpretation of history. The difference is this: most people know the history of WWII. Not many people know the history of early Christianity, even many Christians, so they aren’t able to dismiss false claims because they don’t know the truth. So, the big deal is not the claims in TDC. No. The big deal is that Christians are not grounded in their faith enough to know these claims are false. We want to be people who know what we believe and why we believe it so that if we read or hear claims like those posed in TDC we can at least be confident that our faith is founded on the truth. That’s the big deal. In the book, Brown makes the claim that the Bible we have today is not the accurate history of Jesus of Nazareth who lived and died in the region of Galilee 2000 years ago. We learned two weeks ago that we can be confident that the Bible is the accurate history of Jesus and early Christianity. Secondly, Brown claims that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a child whose ancestors are alive today – Mary is the true Holy Grail. Last week Rebecca taught us, first why we believe that Jesus was not married, but also the fact that a married Jesus doesn’t throw a wrench into our faith. Jesus, we believe, was fully human and being married and having a child are not evil or immoral or somehow sinful. Jesus could have been married and remained sinless, though we believe very confidently that he was single. Finally, today we tackle the central issue in Christianity, which is, Who was Jesus?
