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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 2:14 am and is filed under 5-Rethinking Jesus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.