Is Jesus God?
“The divine superiority we attribute to Jesus, the understanding we painstakingly honor in worship and doctrine, may well be a major obstacle to a true following of Jesus as the Christ of faith. We condemn Jesus to divine captivity, thus obfuscating both his divinity and his humanity. In the exalted pedestal of patriarchal projection, Jesus is so divinely holy and remote that his radically new way of being human ends up in jeopardy and is seriously compromised. The power of his message is domesticated, the challenge is muted, and the glory of God fully alive in the human is overshadowed by the addictive hunger for divine power and glory. Our preoccupation with the divinity of Jesus may well be a gross distraction from really knowing who Jesus is.”
—Diarmuid O’Murchu, Catching up with Jesus: A Gospel Story for Our Time
“Grandfather Helder, is Jesus God?”
“Well, Passerby,…that certainly cuts to the chase, doesn’t it?
Of course….Jesus never professed to be his Father, the Creator, nor did he ever invite worship (But the worship of Jesus seems to be the only thing the church is interested in doing). He never professed any interest in starting a new religion with himself as its focus. And yet here we are. He was a reformer of Judaism whose focus was teaching a new way of being human.
Passerby,
If I may…it does not matter to me or to Her Holiness (who did create you) if you believe Jesus is or is not your Creator. You would do well to believe as you please until you trust in something else. As Pete Enns said once, “Don’t worry about it; you’re not going to make baby Jesus cry. (Pete is always a little sarcastic)”
Before Christianity, long before the gospel of John was written (AD 100-150), which implies Jesus is God, most obvious in the seven “I am” statements, and before the ‘Council of Nicaea’ (AD 325), at which Christian Bishops, under the leadership of Constantine the Great—the emperor of Rome, codified the deity of Jesus—he had passionate followers who did not think of him as God.
Not Christians, followers. I am one of those. I have followed the example and teaching of Rabbi Jesus every day, to the best of my ability, since I was 20 years old. I follow as they did, not because their religion told them they must believe he was God, as Christianity does today, but because the example of his life and teaching changed everything for me. I believe it was Gandhi who said, “If we only had the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and nothing else, it would compel us to follow. It would be enough.” (Gandhi spent time every morning meditating on those words)
• • •
The Son of Man
He was clearly more than the humble title of ‘Son of Man’ (a human being) he preferred. But descriptors like Omnipresence, Almighty, and Omnificence (all-powerful) would have horrified him. Krishna, in the Bagava gida, written seven thousand years ago, explains that as needed, Brahman/Vishnu (the Hindu creator God) sends a savior at the point when humans have completely lost their way to redirect us. I reason Jesus is, at least,—a Man sent by or from God to rescue humanity from itself. There has been no one before, or since, who bore the message that had the potential to rescue human-kind from its delusions than he did. In the words of Peter, one of his followers, “Where else would we go? Only you have the words of eternal life.” Had humanity followed that man’s teaching, the world would be entirely different, wouldn’t it?
• • •
Prophet, Messiah, Savior
“His was a prophetic anointing that revealed the heart, the pathos, and the will of his Father like no other. You would do well to read ‘The Prophets’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Jesus’ vocation as the Messiah, savior, or rescuer of his ‘little ones’ was certainly the message of hope they desperately needed and received from him. And, in his role as the great high priest (Hebrews 4:14-16), the example of his life lived and suffered with us gave certain credence to his intercession on our behalf in the heavenlies.
He lived a life among us made of dust as ours is. That life was our light because we knew what he was: a good, loving, compassionate man with an actual head-over-heels Love relationship with his Father, the Great Spirit. She is evidenced and attested to in all of human history. It was a life not over there somewhere in the clouds or in light, inaccessible and unapproachable. It was right here, just as we are. A life we could see and touch. We identify with him and his suffering and he participates in ours to this day.”
• • •
Earth is crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees
Takes off his shoes –
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A Healer
“Grandfather, since as you say, Jesus was a man powerfully anointed by Her for sure, but still a man, should I dismiss the healing miracles the gospels record as brilliant mythology but not history?”
“Pass, I live an enchanted life (which I invite you to) in an enchanted and benevolent universe, brim full with possibility, and that experience informs me that Jesus, in his life of flesh among us, would have been capable of all things that the human-kind in fullness of relationship with Her is capable of.”
“Papa, even sight to the blind, cleansing to the leper, freedom to the possessed, and life to the dead?”
“Yes Pass….You assume too little for the human-kind who are in glorious unity with Her Goodness. Even I, small, imperfect and insignificant, am complicit in the healing of the sick, deliverance of the possessed, and the raising of the dead. These things are what a human might do.”
A Socialist Jew
“The bread you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat you guard in your locked storage chests belongs to the naked; the footwear moldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the needy. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.”
― Saint Basil (330-379 AD)
In his teaching and social interactions, we know him as a man at the bottom of the social ladder; he preferred being with those he found there. The ‘Sermon on the Mount’ (Matt 5-7) is a collection of his teachings directed at those he was closest to, his people. They were the oppressed, the ones who needed most desperately to believe what the coming of the reign of the Spirit on earth, in lieu of the reign of the kings of the earth, would mean to them. This ‘Anointed one’ (Messiah) cared especially for them. Some of them followed this man to his death and their own in the end. Tradition tells us that the only one of the twelve who died a natural death was John. They followed him to the grave, believing they and those they loved would finally be rescued—safe, fed, clothed, housed, and healed.
• • •
Follow Him?
At the point where Jesus becomes the Creator—not simply an honest faithful man, ‘the anointed one’ (Messiah in Hebrew), one with Her, as in, “I and the Father are one,” as anyone we know could claim, the Son of a Man; he ceases to be the one I can follow, doesn’t he?
I might revere Him or worship him, but now he is over there somewhere, transcendent, not imminent, incarnation revoked, out of reach, and with a lot more tools in his kit than I do. Some of the deeds attributed to Jesus by the Gospel writers are clearly things that could only have been done by a god, perhaps along the order of a Greek or Roman god. I cannot hope to replicate the life of a god—I will never be one—I can only follow the example of a man as he asks me to do. Jesus wouldn’t have invited us to imitate him if we were unable to do so.
The Nicene Creed, which dogmatizes ‘Trinity’ (a three-person god) as the structure of Her Reality, states that Jesus, the Son (the #2 guy in that scenario), was “fully man and fully God,” simultaneously walking the earth in their mystifying effort to deify Him. Trinity as a Metaphor for relationship or perichoresis (circle dance) works for me as one among many, but not so much as the architecture of Reality.
I remain baffled by the motives of the players, especially the early Bishops who agreed to become the church of Rome. The motive of Constantine, the Roman emperor at the time, is easier to understand. Perhaps it was as simple as, ‘If Christianity is to be the state religion of Rome, then Jesus will need to be every bit as good as the Roman gods with whom he will be competing, so he must be one as well.’ I don’t feel the need to do that.