RethinkingOurStory

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Jesus’ humanity.   Jesus’ divinity.

Historically these two themes have defined the Christian discussion about Jesus, the central figure of our religion. How we think about these two seemingly mutually dimensions of Jesus is powerfully determinative in the religion we live.

Last week we laid some groundwork for rethinking the habited ways we Christians have come to think about Jesus, imagining a way of thinking about our own humanity that has bearing on how we think about Jesus. We pictured a model with three concentric circles, three layers of human consciousness; body consciousness, ego consciousness, and Spirit consciousness. We focused on that third, elusive, spirit level of consciousness asking, “what is it?”  ”Is it?”  ”Does it exist at all?”  and if so, “What makes us think so?”If you missed this lesson, it is critical prerequisite for what we’ll say today, so go back and have a listen.

Let’s pause for a moment to remember something we said during the “Rethinking God” section of our year-long project. When we speak of “the divine” we are speaking about that, about which we cannot speak. Our minds and hearts are not expansive enough to contain the mystery and the depths of the divine, rather, it is an encounter we have out on the edge of human experience. We see majestic mountains, or we contemplate the expanse of the universe, or we hold a newborn baby and consider the mystery of being-ness vs. not-being-ness. Out here on the edge of human experience, we get glimpses of the transcendent, the beyond-us-ness of reality, and we want to talk about it. But here we face a problem. Our minds and hearts are unable to contain the immensity of this Reality. Consequently, we are reduced to developing code words to talk about the experience:  we call it “God,” “the Divine,” or “the transcendent.”

But human beings being what we are, our next inclination is to try and pin down this un-pin-down-able reality to precise, controllable terms. We try, but we can’t do it. Our minds and our hearts are simply unable to fully embrace that which is by definition, beyond us.

So we use pointers, simile, symbols, allegories, images, and figures of speech to talk about this part of human experience. We say “God is like this, or like that.” We say that God can be experienced similarly to a child experiencing a Father, a bride experiencing a bridegroom. We create these analogies, and then we savor them deeply.  However, we must always remember that they are merely ways of talking about that which cannot be talked about.

It’s important to remember this when we speak of “the divinity of Jesus,” or “Spirit consciousness.” In this arena, we’re talking about reality beyond ourselves. We’re treading in areas of our religious tradition that we are told we can never contain, never fully grasp.

That being said, let me offer this conclusion to last week’s preamble;
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.

(Remember, we don’t know what we’re talking about here.  We’re using shaky metaphors at best.)

Human beings were vested with the image of God vested at Creation. That’s what the Story in Genesis tells us. Human beings have capacity for oneness with the Father the way Jesus had oneness with the Father. That’s how Jesus prayed for us in John 17. We humans can be “in Christ” and experience “Christ in us.” It’s a mystery, but that’s how Paul spoke of his own life.

I’m suggesting that these ways of speaking of the union between Divine-ness and human-ness crop up throughout our scriptures, because the Divine is an essential element of being human.
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.

A way of talking about this mystery of human existence is to say that we are of God, we are in God, and that we are made of the same mysterious, inaccessible, transcendent, ineffable stuff that God is made of.

The implication of this is quite challenging to the way we’ve so often thought of the divinity of Christ.

In this way of framing our story, what distinguishes Jesus from normal everyday people like us, is not that Jesus was divine. No, this way of thinking suggests that we are all divine the way Jesus was divine. This way of thinking suggests that what distinguishes Jesus from normal, everyday people like you and me, was not his divine-ness, but how purely he expressed that divine-ness. This way of thinking suggests that Jesus set a standard of pure expression of what it looks like when we humans live from our  Divine centers. It suggests that rather than being a non-human deity like Zeus, Jesus was a pure expression of what it means to be truly human.

Let’s go back for a moment, to our concentric circles of human consciousness. Imagine sprinkled throughout the outer two layers of body and ego-consciousness dark nodules of illusory belief, undigested hurt, unhealed wounds, and truths we believe that are not true. Imagine these dark shapes littered throughout our ego and body consciousness and generating their own thoughts and feelings. Imagine these falsehoods, these wounds, these illusions creating everyday actions, feelings, instincts, drives, and impulses;  beliefs like this:

• You are not worthy of love, or…
• You have been so bad, you must now earn God’s love, or…
• The only way you can ever redeem yourself is to straighten up and fly right for the rest of your life.

On the basis of  beliefs like these, people  think thoughts and feel feelings about Reality. They develop strategies for living, they interpret other peoples actions, they build belief systems, they build coping strategies. They develop a whole version of self, on the basis of these dark nodules of false belief and illusion, and this amalgamation of belief, instinct, coping strategy, feeling and action becomes the version of self with which we interface with the world. It is a version of self that is based on falsehood, a false self, but it is the self we live nevertheless. It is a version of self that betrays us at every turn, it fractures relational peace and creates wars among nations. It creates a pecking order in the office, and a pecking order of nations, the haves and have-nots. It deeply infects the human race and is the root behind our misery and our tendency for self-destruction.

But imagine Jesus somehow magically, or by divine appointment coming to live on earth in his true humanity. Imagine Jesus through some means, perhaps through special birth, perhaps through divine appointment, perhaps by genetic anomaly or an attained enlightenment; imagine Jesus living on the earth as a true human.

Absent the amalgam of false belief and instinct that infects humanity, imagine Jesus living a true self, as a true human, as a pure expression of the divine-human that is all of us.  Imagine Jesus free of the false self, free of the wounded self, free of the betraying-instinct self. Imagine Jesus, a true human, an unadulterated human, a pure expression of humanity; fully human, fully divine.

Instead of thoughts, feelings, and actions emanating from the hurts and mis-beliefs that characterize the human experience, Jesus lived as all humans are created to live, from his divine center. Jesus radiated the essence of God that indwells us all, unblocked, unpolluted, unadulterated by the coping strategies that so ensnare and divide us from our own Spirit consciousness.

In this way of rethinking our story, what distinguishes Jesus from the rest of us is not his divine nature, but his freedom from the nature of sin that would block the divine nature. Jesus expressed the Divine purely, naturally.

And when he did, we stood in awe, and said “He must be a god!”

But that’s not what Jesus said. What Jesus said is that we will do the same things he did, that you and I will do even greater things than he did.

That’s not what Paul said either. Paul said that Jesus was the firstborn of many who will live this unadulterated life, the firstborn of many who will follow Jesus into their own experience of unpolluted ego and body consciousness, the firstborn of many who will purely express the divine.

Now again, this is just a model for thinking about things that cannot be thought about, a metaphor to help us explain what cannot be explained, a metaphor like the Trinity that tries to explain three aspects of divine experience or a metaphor like “Father” or “King” that tries to talk about other aspects of divine experience.

But since metaphors are all we have, consider the implications of this way of thinking about Jesus divinity and humanity.

We began this section talking about how our religion’s thoughts about Jesus as a deity separate us from him. “He is a god, for goodness sake, and I am a mere mortal.” “He is in a different category than me, a completely different kind of being than I am, how can I possibly aspire to the selflessness, the sacrifice, the nobility, the truthfulness, the divine power expressed in Jesus.” “He’s a god…  I’m a mere mortal.”

But in this way of thinking, we’re not disconnected from Jesus at all. In this way of thinking, we’re divine the same way Jesus is divine. The difference is that unlike Jesus, our divinity is masked, hidden, and covered over by dark splotches of false beliefs, false instincts, and unhealed wounds. We need to be healed, we need to be delivered, we need to be saved from the encrustation of falseness that obscures the divine.  However, the divine is in us, just as the divine is in Jesus.

Jesus, having walked this earth as a visible expression of the invisible God (as Paul called him) showed us what was possible. He showed us what is embedded in us, at the core of our truest identity. He calls us to a new life, an abundant life, a holy life because he awakens us to the Divine present in us all. He calls us to a life lived beyond the illusory, beyond the sin nature, beyond the false self.

If our religion is based on a view of Jesus that is distinct from ourselves, we have no recourse but to helplessly await a magical rescue from our selves. But if our religion is based on a view of Jesus that reveals the deepest reality about ourselves, then he is calling us back to our truest state, back from the state we fell into that alienated us from our own divine identity, back to a true self, a self made in the divine image; a self that is one with God the way Jesus was one with God.

And the difference between the Christianities founded on these two different views of Jesus divinity couldn’t be more striking. In the latter, the spiritual life isn’t about gaining legal access to God; we could never lost it.  It is our true identity. In the latter, religion is not about earning God’s forgiveness so we can have restored relationship. The divine is as close to us as close can be, even in us. Forgiveness is simply the way things are, the nature of the Divine.

In this second view of Jesus’ divinity, the spiritual life is a life of discovering and returning to our true, Jesus-like selves. The spiritual life is about awakening to the indwelling Spirit of God the way Jesus did. It is about accessing our own the Divine centers and living responsively to the Inner Voice, the Divine Voice within us…   the way Jesus did.

And it is on that note, that we break for the summer.

But note this: the next section in our year long project is titled “Rethinking What Happened.”  In that section we’ll be considering what has happened to humanity to get us stuck in this false-self condition. We’ll reconsider what theologians call “The Fall” and “The Atonement,” asking how we got in the pickle we’re in, and what has Jesus done to help get us out.

When we do, the way we’ve rethought our own human nature and the way we’ve rethought Jesus’ humanity and divinity will have tremendous implications for what we mean when we say the words “Jesus saves us from our sins.”

See you in September!

NOTE:
See the comment below for scripture references about it being part of our humanity to share the divine nature.

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Again this week, we’re following the path laid out by the historical conversation by looking at Jesus humanity and what we Christians mean when we say “Jesus is divine.”

We spent several weeks thinking about Jesus’ humanity, his historically determined self-perception as a warrior-messiah (a well-rehearsed genre of leadership in Israel), but we also saw how he subverted the violent, militaristic core of that genre. We said that this understanding of Jesus’ humanity profoundly shapes how we live out our religion, how we follow Jesus.

Last week, as we began looking at what it means when we Christians say that Jesus is divine, we saw that if we don’t think clearly about this, it has troubling implications for living our faith.

Jupiter: God of the Romans

We saw that throughout the ages, people have held a personified, humanized, anthropomorphized, vision of God. We’ve tended to see God as a man; a super, special, majestic, celestial kind of man, but a man nonetheless. The Romans, Greeks, Aztecs, and Norse all saw their gods this way. It is almost a knee-jerk human instinct to do so. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, our saints, sages, and writers of scripture have disallowed us this instinct. We are to hold the tension of allowing our God to exist and function beyond human construct, beyond our ability to contain, understand, or pin down.

But even though our ancient traditions teach us this, we usually try our best to pin God down to the understandable. Even our scriptures tell the stories of God interacting with people as though he himself was a person. In the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, God talks as a person, acts, and wills as a person. But again and again in our tradition, we’re told not to limit God to any image we can construct in our minds.

God the Father

But because we do it anyway, because we work so hard to envision God as a “him,” a Father, a King, or a Bridegroom, when we say “Jesus is divine,” our mental images tend toward the special, toward the “big-man-in-the-sky.” Our instincts tend to equate him with the way the Greeks talked about Zeus, a full god;  or Heracles, a demi-god. We tend to interpret our doctrine that Jesus is divine in a way that corrupts any meaningful way of thinking of Jesus as truly human, at least not the way I am human, or the way you are.

In the section we did on rethinking our humanity, I said we’d discuss another way of thinking about ourselves when we got to the section on Jesus. Now’s that time.

Let’s imagine a way of thinking about our own human nature that takes into account the things we know about ourselves from experience, but also the things we’ve come to believe about ourselves by faith; beliefs we gain from our historical, religious, and scriptural traditions.

Human Nature in Three Parts

Imagine with me, three concentric circles. These three circles represent three layers of human consciousness. The outer layer is the easiest to see, the inner the most difficult.

Let the outer layer represent our body-consciousness. This is the part of us that is aware of existing in three dimensions, aware of existing in time and space. This part of us is aware of up and down because we feel gravity; it is aware of physical limits, because our body provides a nice package to contain us. In other words, we don’t exist beyond our skin the same way we exist inside our skin.

Body-consciousness represents a primal part of us that is rooted in our biology, and relies on our senses. It distinguishes the experience of awake-ness or asleep-ness, it knows if we’re energized or fatigued, it has muscle memory, it is conscious of hot, muggy days like we’ve had recently, or cold, frigid days like we have in winter.

Freud

We assume the capacity to observe our body-consciousness resides in our brains, the second of our concentric circles. Our brains both energize and direct our senses, and interpret the data we gather. Together, the gray matter, the chemicals, the neurons, the transmitters, create another layer of consciousness we can call ego-consciousness (for those familiar with Freud, we’d include superego in this layer). It is the amalgamation of thoughts we think and feelings we feel. It is the way of being ourselves that expresses temperament, habit, instinct, morality, and conscience. Though this layer of consciousness is also rooted in our bodies, the human brain is so vast in its capacity that this way of being self is distinguished from the animals, and is less primal than body-consciousness.

It is in this part of self that we contemplate truth, beauty, and the good life. It is here we become self-aware, and discover that we’re extroverted or introverted, intuitive or sensing, thinkers or feelers. It is here we discern if we’re strong or weak in compassion and resolve to do better. It is in this layer of being that we find ourselves more an impulsive person, or more a methodical planner.

At first glance, one could say that these two layers, understood deeply enough, would suffice to define our humanity. In fact, a whole philosophical school called “material reductionism” insists that this two-layer model must suffice. But saints and sages from all the religious, and from many philosophical, and metaphysical traditions have made another observation as well.

We are able to observe ourselves existing in ego-consciousness. I can observe myself thinking thoughts and feeling feelings. I can observe myself being moral or immoral. I can stand outside myself and watch myself being introverted or extroverted, impulsive or methodical. With training, I can put such a gap between this form of “me” and my impulses that begin to think of self having a third layer of consciousness, an “observer” layer.

Which raises the question, what is the nature of this observing layer of the self?

The problem is that when we set out to observe this observing part of ourselves, we become it. When I observe the observer, I become the observer. When I look at the looker, I become the looker.

So by definition, I cannot pin down with precision, what the nature of this observing self is. I know it is deeper than the thoughts I think or the feelings I feel because it can observe myself doing them. It is deeper than the temperament I possess, or the instincts I experience for the same reason. So what is this mysterious inner layer, this mysterious inner part of me?

As our society increasingly gravitates to the material reductionist view of “The Way Things Are,” the view of many has become that for something to matter, it must fit into what can be sensed, measured, or reasoned by human beings. Consequently, many come to believe that any layer to our humanity that is beyond the senses or reason.

But what if it’s not that way?

To say that reality only exists inasmuch as we humans can observe, measure, or reason is a statement of faith. Certainly we Christians (as well as Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus) believe that reality is much less limited than that. Our faith statements would be at odds to the that of the material reductionist.

We would agree with the reductionist view that the human brain, and ego-consciousness is extraordinarly powerful, but would disagree that chemicals and electrons are all there is to reality. We would agree with the neuroscientist’s observation that part of the brain lights up when nuns meditate or when Pentecostals speak in tongues, but would disagree that these spiritual experiences are nothing more than the electrons and chemicals that are being observed.

Because neuroscience can show us where spiritual functions happen, it does not follow, to us, that that’s all there is to reality.

I read a neuroscientists who said this, “Just because I can look at your brain and tell that you’re seeing an apple, does not mean I can say definitively that the apple is there, or that it is real, only that you are having a brain experience of an apple. The same is true of the experience of God. Because I can tell you that your brain is lighting up the God-section, this says nothing about the realness or un-realness of God. (REFERENCE)

Consider an analogy from my mp3 player.

To say that an experience in the brain is God, is like saying that playing an mp3 on an iPod, is Chopin. A Chopin nocturne plays by ones and zeros on my digital player, and if I was an engineer, I could fully understand the process. But if my player breaks, Chopin still exists beyond the player. Chopin exists as sheet music in some other part of the world. Chopin exists in the memories of many skilled pianists. Chopin exists in mp3 files on my computer. So if my iPod breaks, I can access Chopin elsewhere. I can get it back.

An mp3 player is not Chopin.

Drawing on this analogy, we could suggest that another layer of consciousness exists beyond the grey matter in our heads, that a layer of consciousness exists beyond the electrons, beyond the neurons, beyond the transmitters of our brains. We could suggest that our brains, like mp3 players, may die, but that a layer of consciousness could exist beyond our brain’s life or death. In fact, in the last many years, a great deal of research into near death experiences seems to indicate this is so, that a layer of human consciousness exists beyond an active, living, brain. (REFERENCE)

Even though many today are deeply committed to the idea of material reductionism, many philosophies (not just Christian philosophies) chafe under the rigidity of these restrictions. George Berkley (the guy the city and the university were named after) made this point. When I see and touch an apple, I don’t see and touch an apple. I only see and touch the image that goes in my eyes, the sensations I take into my hands. Then I take these sensations into my brain and construct an image. My experience of the apple is the experience of this image. What I don’t know is if that mental image corresponds to reality. Is there a real apple out there that I’m experiencing? Of course I assume so, but I cannot prove it. (REFERENCE)

Schopenhauer

Building on this, another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer said something like this. Our sense perceptions are not reality, they are only sense perceptions. This means there are two worlds, the “phenomenological” world that we experience through our senses and the “numinous” world we must be willing to admit may exist beyond our senses. (REFERENCE)

The world of phenomenon that we access through our five senses may not be the sum total of reality, existence, or human nature. Our spiritual faith has suggested for thousands of years that this is so, and that the third part of human consciousness, the undefinable part of us, the part of us that is able to observe and think about the things that happen in the layer of ego-consciousness, is spiritual in origin.

The different religious and philosophical traditions talk about this layer of human consciousness differently, but in Christian thinking, we teach our children that this part of us is the part where Jesus lives in our hearts, the part of us is where the Holy Spirit of God indwells us. This is the part of us Genesis says is made in the very image of God, and it is where we experience what Jesus prayed for us, that we would be one with God as he experienced being one with God.

At NRCC, we’ve been talking about this part of our faith story for a while, and have said it this way; this is the part of us that is made out of the same stuff God is made out of.

We’ll finish next week by talking about the implications of this way of seeing humanity, and we’ll see that it helps us think about the words “Jesus is divine” in a way that doesn’t discount him being a real-live human being like you and me.

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Following a path laid out by the historical conversation about Jesus, in our year-long project, we’ve looked first at Jesus’ humanity, and now turn to look at his divinity. What does it mean when Christian people say Jesus is divine? Does it mean, as seems to be implied in many of the conversations we Christians have on the topic, that Jesus is a “deity?” If so, we need to take a look at that word and ask ourselves about the unspoken meaning it causes when we unconsciously frame our understanding of Jesus in these terms.

The word “deity” informs thinking other than our Judeo Christian thoughts about the divine. Romans, Greeks, the Norse, and Aztecs all framed their understanding of their gods in a way that gives meaning to the word “deity.” Consequently, the dictionary has several meanings for the word. One thing it means is attaining to the estate or rank of a god or a goddess. This evokes the understanding the Greeks had of their deities, Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus, Apollo, and Aphrodite. They were beings very much like humans, but bigger and more powerful. Is that what we mean when we Christians say Jesus is “divine?” Most wouldn’t say so if asked directly, but often these themes inform our unspoken assumptions about the word, and about Jesus.

But we Christians also think of Jesus as human, sometimes, causing the Greco-Roman notion of the demi-god seems to unconsciously apply. Some frame Jesus in their minds as half god, half human, like Herecles, son of Zeus and Alcmene, half god, half human.

The dictionary also uses the word in another sense, as a person or thing that is revered as a god. In this meaning, when a person or thing becomes highly valued to people, it is elevated in revered status equal to the gods (In this society, money is the only deity).

Is that what we mean when we say Jesus is divine? Are we saying that because of his ability to perform miracles, and the profound wisdom of his teachings, or because of the drama surrounding his death and resurrection, that we have come to revere him so deeply, that we have elevated him to the status of a god? Again, if asked directly, I don’t think many of us would say this is what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.”

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Yes, there is a danger to our Christian spirituality when we don’t think carefully about what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.” However, because this has been such a controversial topic in our ancient past, we Christians tend not to discuss it very openly. Feeling the pressure to acquiesce to the party line, we don’t do our best thinking on this subject.

On the one hand, we’re afraid we’ll be out of the club if we tinker with something as sacrosanct as the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity. When we Christians determine who is in the orthodox club, and who is out, who is part of a cult, our primary litmus test is this question; Do you hold that Jesus “was god,” or was he merely “a god.” If you say Jesus “was God,” you’re in; “a god,” you’re out.

Preparing for this mini-lesson, I was speaking to a devout Christian on this topic a while ago. As soon as I brought up the topic fireworks went off. “Go ahead and do this “rethinking Christianity” project if you must,” she said, “But you just can’t be rethinking this topic. Some things are just too sacred to mess with.”

However, on the other hand, if we don’t reconsider some of our instincts about Jesus’ divinity, our spirituality will suffer. If we unconsciously put Jesus in the same camp as Zeus or Apollo, or if we frame him in our minds as a half god, like Herecles or Perseus (Zeus fathered Perseus, another demi-god, this time with Danae.  The guy got around!), or if we frame the divinity of Jesus in these ancient, familiar mental constructs people have always had for their gods, we reduce Jesus, and we reduce the concept of divinity.

Also, if we unconsciously invite these constructs about divinity from other religions to inform our thinking about Jesus, we ignore much of the teaching of Jesus himself. We certainly ignore the teaching of the ancients who insisted we hold Jesus’ divinity in tension with his humanity. If we think of Jesus as an improved version of Zeus, in a very visceral way, it lets us off the hook.

Many times in the Christian scriptures Jesus told us to live the way he lived, to do the things he did. He told us to to heal those who are sick, to confront injustice the way he did, to express the divine nature the way he did, and to live virtuously the way he did. But if Jesus is a Greek deity, that makes no sense. Yes, Jesus lived and died selflessly. But, we say to ourselves, of course he lived nobly.  He was a god, for goodness sake. True, it would be better if I lived selflessly and virtuously myself. It would be better if I healed people’s wounds or confronted social injustice, but what hope do I have to live at this elevated level?  I’m a mere mortal. We see Jesus discern the heart of the Divine and living accordingly, and we say to ourselves, “I can’t do that, I’m just a man, just a woman. He was a god.”

Thor: God of Thunder

But, I suggest, these ancient Roman and Greek and Aztec and Norse constructs of “the gods” don’t apply to Jesus. I’m suggesting that the divinity of Jesus can’t be reduced to the term “deity” as our social and historical instincts would dictate. Jesus was something much more, an expression of the mysterious, uncontainable divine (More on that next week).

The dictionary suggests yet another usage of the words “divine” and “deity” which I believe serves as a better mental framework. It says this of the word “deity:”  of divine character or nature; holding the very nature of God; proceeding from God.

If we frame the words “Jesus is divine” this way, it does not let us off the hook. There’s no room for “well Jesus was a god, for goodness sake” kinds of thoughts. Jesus and the book of Genesis both teach us that we ourselves, are made of the divine, that we holding the very nature of God within our beings, and that we proceed from God. Yes, we’ve been corrupted, as we saw in the section we did on rethinking our humanity, but those essential characteristics were never erased.

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Council of Chalcedon

In AD 451, a group of bishops got together in a town in Turkey called Chalcedon. There hadn’t been much trouble on the topic of Jesus’ divinity in the early years of Christianity being as influenced as they were by the Jewish mind. They had been so rooted in the one-ness of the Hebrew God, that they understood Jesus as an expression of that divine oneness. They did not see Jesus’ divinity as a separate Zeus-like deity. But when Christianity spread into Rome where the Greco-Roman mind did have the Zeus-like images of God, they needed clarification. So they got together, talked it over, and issued a proclamation.

“Jesus is a oneness,” they said, “a fully human and a fully divine oneness.” Mostly what they said was negative, “Jesus is not what those other guys are saying he is.” They were defending against separatist doctrines that said Jesus was two entities, a spiritual one and a physical one.

But what this Council at Chalcedon did not do, was try to explain the mystery. They just left it in its unexplainable ambiguity. This Jesus figure, so important in our history, in our religion, we’re not going to try and pin down exactly what he is, or how this whole human-divine thing works.

And now, this many years later, mainstream Christianity hasn’t made any formal statement about Jesus that goes much beyond the one we made at Chalcedon. The divinity of Jesus remains a mystery we’re just content to live with. We’re ok with defying explanation, and in a way, this makes sense.

To say Jesus is divine, is to say that somehow he expresses God, and, as we saw in the earlier sections of our project, we cannot in any way, ever get our minds around the nature of God. “Ineffable,” “transcendent,” “incomprehensible,” these are the words we apply to the doctrine of God. Even though popular Christianity reduces God to being a guy in the sky, it is not our faith. We hold that one cannot contain the vastness of the divine in the human mind. Experience tells us there is something there, but wisdom is content to leave the immensity of the Divine in the realm of mystery.

So, long ago when people experienced Jesus as something beyond themselves, a reality bigger than their reality, it made sense that they would use the word “divine.” Jesus is beyond our capacity to contain, bigger than we can control or hold on to. So for centuries, we’ve said this; “Jesus is a man, a human being like you and me, having the same kind of body, the same emotional upheaval, the same hurt and disappointment and ecstasy that go with the reality of being human.” “Jesus is also an expression of the invisible God, a way of putting flesh to a reality that can’t be contained in flesh, an imperfect expression of the inexpressible, but a visible, tangible expression nonetheless, a way of putting into three dimensions, a reality that can’t be contained in three dimensions.”

We’ll hold these two truths in tension, we Christians say…

• Jesus a human being like you and me, and…
• Jesus an expression of the Divine that cannot be expressed

And we’ll live with the mystery that imposes on our brains. We’ll live with the tension that creates, because we believe there is a reality that is bigger than our brains and hearts can contain, and we believe the person of Jesus somehow expressed that bigger reality.

However, we humans (and we Christians are no exception to the rule), we don’t like mystery. We don’t like tension and we don’t like our truth to come to us in the form of paradox.

Even though the church has never said more than we said at Chalcedon in any kind of formal statement about Jesus, popular Christianity certainly has. And when we have, we’ve tended to swing to one or the other poles of this paradox. We give lip service to Jesus being human and divine, but we live, speak, and worship as though he is one or the other. Some generations, some denominations, give rich focus to Jesus’ humanity, others to his divinity.

In conservative American Christianity in our generation, we’ve tended to focus on the divinity of Jesus, Jesus exclusively as the Son of God.

When I was a middle-schooler, I participated in an irreverent discussion that took place in a Sunday school class. The topic of our discussion was the degree to which Jesus experienced every-day bodily functions. A kind, older, church-lady who happened to be in the class that day was appalled at the suggestion that Jesus would ever pass gas. It was inconceivable to her, that Jesus, the visible expression of the invisible God, as Paul calls him, could ever be reduced to a world of blood, semen, and gastric juices. “How could such inexhaustible Truth and Beauty as is contained in divinity ever coexist in such proximity to bowels and foot odor?”

Next week, I’ll suggest a way we can think that can help us live with the paradoxical tension, the mystery of humanity and divinity. As I said in the section on rethinking human nature, what I say will have implications for how we think of our own humanity. We’ll see that Jesus himself, suggests that the same kind of oneness with the Divine that he experienced is ours to experience as well.

Next week.

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We’re  rethinking how we tell the Story of Jesus, following the ancient framework for our discussion, the humanity and the divinity of Jesus. To understand Jesus the human being, to understand his message, we must understand his times. We must understand the social, political, and economic pressures he, and all of his country lived under. This means we must understand how the Roman occupation and the Jewish aspiration for freedom and sovereignty informs Jesus’ life and message.

So thus far in this section, we’ve looked we looked at how the writings of the Qumran community shed light on both the pattern John the Baptist followed, and the path Jesus followed. Both were following a genre of leadership that in their time was shaped by a national resistance to Rome. John walked the path of the Qumran wandering prophet and Jesus followed the path of the God-sent, warrior-messiah. As we said, these were well-worn paths in Jesus’ society, and they came with clear expectations, vocabulary, and actions. It was clear to everyone, that Jesus was playing the part of warrior messiah.

the Justice League

But, we also saw, he used the role, to subvert the role. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus as a provocateur, firmly rooted in the tradition of resistance to injustice and oppression. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus working on the side of the downtrodden, demoralized and the broken. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus the champion of the exploited, and an opponent of the exploiters. (Which of course, demands we, Jesus’ followers, see ourselves in that same light.)

The role of the warrior-messiah role came loaded with another expectation as well, an expectation of military might and retributive violence. This, we saw, Jesus both transcended and subverted.

Indeed, Jesus called his followers to resist injustice, but to resist taking up the tools of violence and hatred to do so. “It just doesn’t work,” we can hear Jesus intimate. “You can live by the sword if you like, but you will die by the sword. You’ll cut some Roman throats, but they’ll hate you for doing so, and inevitably, they’ll be back around to cut your throat in turn.”

No, we need another form of resistance, another way to fight injustice, another way to struggle, another way to oppose. And his subversive strategy was to gain the heart of one’s adversary.

In one of Martin Luther King’s speeches, he was talking about Bull Conner, a particularly obstinate and violent man, and an aggressive and cruel opponent of the civil rights movement. We cannot, King said, simply defeat Bull Conner. If we do, we’ll just reverse the same power dynamic that he perpetuates on us, now. And while that seems attractive to us when we’re on the bottom of the heap, in the long run it is not what we want. We need to win the heart of Bull Conner. We need Bull Conner to be our friend. We need him to be fighting for what is just, just like we’re fighting for what is just. We’ll continue moving forward whether he comes or not. While our actions will anger him by upsetting the status quo, let us never do anything that will wound him, or his loved ones, or his people.

What makes this all the more remarkable, is that while King was preaching these themes, his own children were being threatened,  civil rights workers were being murdered, and innocent children were bombed in churches.

As followers of Jesus, it is not our way to stoop to the tools that will only perpetuate the system of retribution and alienation. This is true for social injustice, it is true among friends who are at odds, it is true during marital strife, it is true in all the contexts of our lives.

Ours are to be strategies that draw people into a new vision of reality, not to drag them back to the old one. Consequently, we show grace and love. Our confrontation will highlight evil, but not harm people. We will create a context of healing, restoration, forgiveness as the backdrop for our work toward freedom, life and light. Yes, we will highlight injustice, but we will never return evil for evil. We’ll completely change the dynamic by returning good for evil.  And, yes, it’ll take longer, but it’ll also last longer.

People who think such a strategy is naïve in the face of the darkness of the human heart don’t understand history very well. Oppressors perpetrate injustice, sure they do. They even do so very effectively for a very long time. But the hurt they render will always get its revenge in the end. And when it does, the cycle of alienation, division, hatred, and even violence just won’t stop.

I’ve seen it in my marriage; we see in the struggle of nations.

So yes, Jesus role was one of resistance and provoking change. But he was unwilling to do so using the same worn out tools that had created the oppression in the first place.

"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind."

Gandhi was a fervent follower of Jesus. He wasn’t a Christian man, primarily because his experiences of Christians were so awful, so bigoted, so hurtful. But Gandhi followed Jesus. He immediately recognized the similarity between the position of the Jews under Roman occupation and the Indians under British occupation. While there was tremendous pressure to throw of the colonial, imperial exploitation with violence and hatred, Gandhi challenged these instincts, inspired by teachings of Jesus. Resist, challenge, overturn, overcome, but do so without creating more oppression and more hatred tomorrow. Yes, it’ll take longer, but it’ll last longer.

This brings us to the primary framework for understanding the life and teaching of Jesus the human being; the term he used so often: The Kingdom of God, or The Kingdom of Heaven. The sheer number of times Jesus used the terms, and the centrality they played in his messages make them a primary interpretive lens through which we understand his teaching.

Despite current instincts, very little of what Jesus referenced when he used these terms had to do with the afterlife. Some did, but not much. American Christianity’s fixation on getting people saved so they can get to heaven was decidedly not Jesus’ emphasis.

Jesus’ focus was on salvation, but it was salvation from Rome, it was salvation from oppression and foreign domination, salvation from injustice, and salvation from exploitation. At a deeper dimension, it was a focus on being saved from the internal ravages of evil, it was Divine salvation from hatred, dishonesty,  fear,  mean-spirited, and small-heartedness. It was about being saved from life without connection to the indwelling Divine, and being saved from the forces in our souls that fracture our relationships, fracture our personalities, and fracture our destinies.

In a manner typical to the Jewish framework of his day, Jesus’ focus was on this life, this world. Jesus was about bringing Divine rule, Heaven’s rule, God’s rule to bear upon the kingdoms of this earth. Jesus was about bringing the law of love, the law of grace, and the law of forgiveness to bear on the kingdoms of this world.

In all his interactions with people; with the sick and diseased of body, with the sick and diseased of soul, with tax collectors, with smug, self-satisfied Pharisees, with seekers, with obstinate Romans, with collaborating Jews, his interactions all worked toward a singular objective, to make things on earth, as they are in heaven. To bring to bear on the earth, Divine goodness, Divine justice, Divine Truth, and a Divine value system that breeds Divine Beauty.

To tax collectors who labored under the shame of their collaboration, but who were also desperate to guard the rewards their collaboration bought them, Jesus worked toward a healed soul, a mind that could see Divine Truth, and a life that was lived in the freedom of that Truth.

To adulterers bearing the shame of failure and exposure, Jesus healed the shame, and advocateed a life that wouldn’t perpetuate the harm. To Roman soldiers, Jesus ministered the Truth that set them free. To Pharisees with blinded eyes, Jesus ministered rebuke so they would see. To Pharisees who had authentic questions Jesus sat through the night answering. And to the crowds, Jesus taught forgiveness, grace, and goodness. He taught them to connect to the Divine Spirit, the Divine will, and he taught them how this strange new Kingdom works.

I have my children read a book every year. When they were early in high school, I had them read a compilation of stories about people who were setting right what is wrong in the world, fighting injustice, resisting poverty, and undercutting child labor and human trafficking.

When they were finished, I asked them to my office to talk it over. “Why do you think I had you read that book this summer?” I asked. They stumbled trying to get the right answer so they could get on with their summer. I particularly remember my son answering with a series of canned Sunday school responses, one after another. To each of his responses, I’d reply, “Nope, that’s not why I had you read the book.” Finally, semi-joking, he laid out the limits of his childhood religion. “I don’t know exactly how this is going to work out, but I’m pretty sure the answer has to be is either, “God loves me,” “Jesus saves me,” “the Bible tells me,” or “we should pray about it.”

I laughed, and let him off the hook. “Daniel, I wanted you to read this book about people serving the earth, healing what is wounded, fixing what is broken, because this is your religion.” If you’re a follower of Jesus, this is your religion.

“Jesus’ message was only a little bit about what happens after we die,” I continued. “That was almost an afterthought. Sure, Jesus acknowledged what we believe inside ourselves, that some part of us continues when we die.  He assured us that the hunger we have for the Divine will be satisfied. But it’s almost like he was saying there will be time to think about that at a later date, when we die. For now he told us think about this stuff; Be salt, spread across the earth to bring out the God flavors. Be light, spread across the earth to show forth the God colors. Heal what is wounded. Restore what is lost. Challenge what is evil. Enlighten what is blinded. Repair what is broken.”

“This, Daniel…  This is your religion.”

And this, friends, this is our religion. If we are followers of Jesus the human being, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the sage, Jesus the warrior-messiah, the opponent of injustice, the provocateur, the maker of right over wrong, then ours is to take up the mantle and become better-ers of the earth.

This is our religion.
This is the implications of following Jesus, a human being.

Next time we’ll begin to talk about what it has meant throughout the centuries when Christians have said that Jesus is not just human, but that he is also divine.

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Rethinking Jesus is a pretty critical part of rethinking the Christian Story.  Thus far, we’ve seen that our thoughts about him were set out for us long ago by a series of ancient discussions and controversies. The questions were these; Was Jesus a human being like you and me, or was Jesus somehow special, somehow divine? And if divine, what does that word mean?

Honoring this ancient conversation, we’re following this framework. We’re thinking first about Jesus’ humanity, then in a few weeks we’ll think about the word “divinity,” and how we might think of a divine Jesus.

To think clearly about the human Jesus, we have to understand the times in which he lived, so in our discussions, we looked first at the anti-Roman-colonialism that informed Jesus’ life and message, seeing how the occupation divided Jews into different responses, but how in each of the disparate responses, there was a commonly held expectation that God would eventually deliver them, and that it would happen by the rising of a warrior-messiah to lead them to victory over their enemies.  We began to see in specificity, how Jesus life was informed by the prophesies of one particular community, Qumran.

Last week we said that the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in the 1950’s and 60’s have given us a much better understanding of the human context of Jesus’ life. Seeing the form John the Baptist’s life took, gave us understanding of the givens and assumptions behind his message. We’ll see the same thing with Jesus; the form his life and ministry took, informs our understanding of the core of his message.

warrior-messiah

The form Jesus was living out, was that of the anticipated warrior-messiah. His ministry, his public life, was set to Jewish expectations. To be sure, we’ll see, he subverted the form, he reframed and contorted it, stretching it to the point that some did not see him fulfilling the role at all. However, Jesus was clearly playing the part of a Jewish messiah.

On this side of many centuries of interpreting Jesus, we tend to focus exclusively, on Jesus’ subversion of the warrior-messiah role, but failing to see the form Jesus’ life took, we miss the point of his subversive approach.

To begin, Jesus started his ministry with the same people John the Baptist did. He stepped into their prophetic expectations as laid out by the Qumran community and their missionary-prophets. Two of Jesus’ disciples (Andrew and Peter) had previously been followers of John. When Herod encountered Jesus, after he had beheaded John, he saw so little difference between the two that he remarked, “It is John, whom I beheaded. He is risen from the dead.”

And like John, Jesus began his preaching in the back country. His miracles and powerful message eventually drew such a crowd, that he had to keep moving in order to stay one step ahead of the priest-police.

Here’s where we see how the form of Jesus life unveils his intent. Jesus, the messiah, was precipitating a change in the social order; that’s what Qumran prophets and warrior-messiah’s did. He was contending for the divinely-directed downfall of the power structures of his day, and his posture toward Rome and its puppet government was clearly one of resistance.

For example, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, we think of it as a peaceful symbol. What could be more humble and peaceful than a donkey? But to Jews, it invoked the prophesy of Zechariah…

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem!  Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with your salvation, He is humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; and the bow of war will be cut off. He will speak peace to the nations; and His dominion will be from sea to sea, from the River to the ends of the earth.

The act of riding into Jerusalem clearly invoked military-messianic expectations in the people. Yes, the messiah will appear lowly by riding a donkey, and yes, he will bring peace to the region, but watch out, Ephriam!  Watch out nations to the ends of the earth! He will establish peace, but to do so, he’s going to cut off your engines of war. He’s going to establish his dominion from sea to sea.

As  seemingly peaceful an act as riding into Jerusalem on a lowly donkey, was in fact, an act of direct provocation. This was not gentle Jesus, meek and mild. No this was a descendant of David, emboldened by the prophetic expectations of his people, arising from apparent weakness, to confound and subdue the horsemen and chariots of Rome. This was the act of direct confrontation to the Roman empire. And to these expectations, the people sang:  “Blessed be the one who comes in the  name of the Lord. Blessed be the son of David.”

As messianic expectations would have it, Jesus immediately entered the city and provoked a fight. He fashioned a whip, stormed the Temple, and physically attacked those licensed by Rome to exchange currencies in the Temple. He drove out the collaborators who were profiting on the backs of Jewish citizens. That’s what warrior-messiahs do.

Also, he played the part of the agitator coming to town when he did, just before Passover, Jesus and his band were strategically protected by the crowds in town as holiday pilgrims were arriving from all over. These were zealots, bandits, peasants, laborers, beggars, all of whom had experience the oppression of Rome and the puppet Herodian government. Their presence created a tinder box of indignation against foreign oppression, and acted as a buffer of protection for Jesus. But in the night, when it was dark, and the crowds were gone, strategically, just as a provocateur would, Jesus slipped into the night, and was nowhere to be found.

Jesus played the part of the warrior-messiah. He looked the part, he spoke the part, and the establishment clearly understood what he was up to. From the time Caiaphas saw him attack the money-changers, the scriptures tell us, he plotted to arrest Jesus. He looked for a way and a time to put him away without interference from the mob who thought of him as a warrior-messiah, a descendent of David, a liberator. Caiaphas told the police to arrest Jesus, but not on a feast day when the mob was around to witness it, “lest there be an uproar of the people,” the text tells us.

Even Jesus’ band of followers fit the expected genre of warrior-messiah. Simon, was called “the zealot.” The term “Iscariot” in Judas’ name resembles the word sicarii, the word used by Josephus to describe dagger men in the resistance. James and John were called “Boanerges” which Mark translates as “sons of thunder.” They are the ones who wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village because people hadn’t welcomed Jesus. Jesus’ disciples carried swords. Jesus taught them to. He told them, “If you don’t have a sword, you better sell your coat to get one” (Lk. 22:36).

The life Jesus lived, the band he formed around himself, the words Jesus spoke, they all fit him neatly into the warrior-messiah genre expected by his country, by his times.

Listen to these texts…

Mt. 10:34:  Don’t think I have come to bring peace to earth.  No, I have not come to bring peace, but to bring a sword.

Lk. 12:51  Do you think I have come to give peace to earth?  I am telling you not, but rather to bring division.

As we just mentioned…
Lk. 22:36  If you have no sword, sell your coat and buy one

And in the Jn. 2 episode where Jesus made a whip of cords, and drove the money changers from the temple, overthrowing their tables in the process, he clearly met the criteria and the prophetic expectations of the people for a warrior-messiah.

However, Jesus did not only play the role of warrior-messiah. He used that familiar and powerful role, in order to enact an agenda that deviated from the norm.  He used the role to redefine the role. Yes, Jesus was a warrior-messiah, but he was also a Prince of Peace. Yes, he was in the business of resisting Rome and establishing justice, but he was also subverting the people’s expectations of how that would happen.

Those same texts we just listed have corollary texts that seem to undermine them.

He said in both Mt. and Lk. that he did not come to bring peace, but he taught on the mountain, “blessed are the peacemakers.” The sword figured heavily in Jesus self-identification, but he also taught people struck on one cheek, to turn the other, people demanded to carry a soldier’s kit one mile, to carry it two, people sued for their coat, to give their antagonist their shirt as well.

Yes, Jesus drove the money changers out with a whip, but he also taught that we are to love our enemies, and do good to those who hate us (Lk. 6:27).

So…
Jesus was a warrior messiah, and Jesus was intent on bringing justice to those oppressed. That’s what messiah’s did. Jesus was fully committed to overthrowing the “might makes right” narrative.

But at the same time he fit into this role as a change agent, he was undermining the expectations everyone had about how it justice was to be achieved.

We’ll see more on his message next week.