link<\/a> to Joan Osborne singing \u201cWhat if God was one of us\u201d, commenting \u201cNot a bad sermon, actually\u201d.<\/p>\nWell, a little light on exposition, perhaps, but definitely up there with the points to ponder.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf God had a name, what would it be, and would you call it to his face if you were faced with him and all his glory?\u201d<\/p>\n
The thing is, in Christianity, God was \u201cone of us\u201d, at least in the limited time frame of the first third of the millennium in Galilee and Judaea. In my panentheist vision, and taking Matt. 25:31-46 rather more literally than is normally the case, God still is \u201cone of us\u201d (and all of us), and you might call him Fred, or Jill, or Mary, or Bob. Or in the circumstances of the passage from Matthew, not call him anything to his face, not see his glory, as he would be a ragged-clothed beggar sitting in a shop doorway, a half-glimpsed hospital patient alone and groaning gently in a ward hurried past, a despairing face looking out from a barred window in a police van, a bloated-stomached African glimpsed on television, an addict shooting up in the park or your neighbour, normally surly and uncommunicative, who you haven\u2019t noticed you haven\u2019t seen for a few days as the unsolicited mail piles up behind his letter box.<\/p>\n
But this isn\u2019t going to be my normal guilt trip about not noticing the risen Lord in need of my help or company, or passing by swiftly with my head averted.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd what would you ask him if you had just one question?\u201d might at that point be \u201cHow can I live without pouring myself out to you in the form of all these people, and still making no significant difference to the ocean of need out there?\u201d. But I can hear his reply already \u2013 \u201cstart with one or two\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?\u201d.<\/p>\n
Wait \u2013 what have I just heard? \u201cJust a slob?\u201d You were pushing it with the beggar, the criminal and the addict, Chris, but that\u2019s just insulting to the Lamb of God, the Prince of Peace, the Saviour of Mankind, the Name above all other Names, God incarnate. In all his glory… Isn\u2019t that just a little (cough) blasphemous, Chris?<\/p>\n
Well, it seems to me that the peasant craftsman from Galilee who wandered the countryside preaching the kingdom without food for today (unless it was given in charity or gleaned from the fields) let alone tomorrow, who sat down in fellowship with prostitutes, recovering mental patients, lepers and even the 1st<\/sup> century equivalent of bankers would not have thought that. He preached time and again against wealth, against domination structures of all kinds whether they be the occupying Roman Empire, the rich and corrupt Temple hierarchy, the sanctimonious religious purists or even (Luke 12:53, Matt. 19:29, Mark 10:29) the family.<\/p>\nThe earliest followers understood this. They practiced radical community, sharing everything with each other and the poor (Acts 4:32-37) and healed and comforted among the lowest of society, the outcasts from society, just as had Jesus. But then came theology, and a string of titles, and Jesus the Christ became kinglike (except more so) where he had cast scorn on kings, became emperor-like (except more so) where he had cast scorn on empires and God-like where he had repudiated any thought of equality with God (Phil. 2:7); he was teacher where he taught his disciples not to call themselves teacher, Prophet, Messiah and King where he had renounced the offers of these statuses in his temptation in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13).<\/p>\n
I think this is a case of title-inflation, of “my Jesus is bigger than your emperor (or high priest, or resistance leader, or…)”, and I think that it’s to some extent a mistake. God having bridged the gap, we open it up wider and wider with our thinking and our terminology until it’s too wide to cross or reach over, too wide for a relationship. We end up close to being docetists, docetism being a heresy which held that Jesus only seemed to be human, while being divine. And we replace an unreachable God with an unreachable Christ. Our Jesus is not greater than your emperor in the sense of being more emperor-like, he’s greater in the sense of being totally different from an emperor, a herald of the Kingdom of God on earth, a champion of those who are poor, afflicted, outcast. He triumphs through sacrifice of self, not through force, not by overawing but by showing the emptiness of mere power.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s face it, if we are to think of Jesus as human, we have to think of someone who pissed, shat, had aches and pains and all the accompanying lowly features of human existence. I\u2019ll go further here; in an attempt to justify Jesus as having been a perfect sacrificial offering after his death, the idea grew up that he was perfect, that he could not sin, that he must have been physically imposing and beautiful (though linking him to Isa. 53:1-3 should have been a clue there). I don\u2019t think that can be correct; I think that we cannot think of him as human without also considering that he could be angry, lustful, proud, self-centered, arrogant, xenophobic and occasionally a male chauvinist (both of the last two of which seem in evidence in the tale of the Syrophonecian woman in Mark 7:25-30).<\/p>\n
I do not think it is possible to be both human and perfect. If Jesus was perfect, taking into account his extended words about \u201cthought-crimes\u201d in Matt. 5:21-30, he could not even think of sinning, and if he could not think of it, not only could he not have been tempted (and resisted temptation), but he could not have understood those who are. He could not be \u201cone of us\u201d, and so God could not be \u201cone of us\u201d, and so relate to us; be such that we can have a relationship with him.<\/p>\n
I know something like this from personal experience. I was very good at maths as a child; it was all obvious and easy to me through my teens. And I couldn\u2019t teach it to anyone else, because I couldn\u2019t understand how it was not obvious and easy to them; I couldn\u2019t empathise with them, and any explanation I gave went straight over their heads. It didn\u2019t stay that way, by the way; at second year university level maths stopped being easy and obvious ( almost catastrophically for my degree, which had to change slightly), and I suddenly found some comprehension of how it was possible to have difficulty. That made it possible to coach my mother when she took a course which required some maths a few years later.<\/p>\n
How much more must the failure of comprehension be for someone who is perfect, who is not really \u201cone of us\u201d?<\/p>\n
But, of course, God can be, and is, through Jesus then and in the panentheist conception now. And so in seeing his glory in the stranger on the bus and the beggar in the doorway and responding to the calls for help, one or two at a time, failing to fill the whole need, we can know that it is sufficient that we try to be a little more perfect than we are, rather than perfect all at once.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be paying more attention to a few of society\u2019s untouchables again next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter Enns recently posted a link to Joan Osborne singing \u201cWhat if God was one of us\u201d, commenting \u201cNot a bad sermon, actually\u201d. Well, a little light on exposition, perhaps, but definitely up there with the points to ponder. \u201cIf God had a name, what would it be, and would you call it to his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,3,7,15,6,13],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible-study","tag-christianity","tag-historical-jesus","tag-preaching","tag-spirituality","tag-tolerance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}