In Christ

A favorite metaphor taught by the Apostle Paul was “in Christ (Romans 12:5).” In this sense, he is not referring to Jesus’ last name when using the word ‘Christ,’ common in Western Christianity. And neither is he using the word as Jesus’ vocation, of ‘messiah’ (borrowed from the Hebrew) or ‘rescuer,’ Christos in Greek. Whether you prefer to believe Paul wrote seven letters or 13, he, in any case, somehow believed Jesus was Elohim incarnated in flesh. He is using a word familiar to both Jews and Greeks, messiah, and meaning something neither would endorse. Same vocabulary, different dictionary.

When Paul uses the word, Christ, he is implying that Jesus was pre-existent divinity who came down from ‘heaven’ to earth, a cosmic participant in the creation of all things. (The writer of the Gospel of John does a similar thing in the prologue but uses ‘the Word became flesh.’) When Paul writes, ‘Jesus Christ,’ he is not saying Jesus the Messiah, a human being (the ‘Son of [a] Man’ as Jesus claimed to be) sent and anointed (Messiah means anointed one) by God to deliver Israel from their oppressors (which Jesus was); he is affirming the return of the post-resurrection Jesus to YHWH from whence he came (Ephesians 1:20), to the Energy responsible for the ‘Great Flaring Forth’ (Brian Swimme) that began this 14bn-year-old journey resulting in our human consciousness among other equally grand achievements.

Many of Jesus’ early followers believed he was the Messiah destined through a political or perhaps a military solution to deliver Israel from the occupation of Israel by Rome. Still, Passerby, I take exception to Paul’s revisionist definition of the title, Messiah, which feels like absconding with the vocation of Rabbi Jesus. This re-branding contributed significantly to stripping Jesus of his humanity post-resurrection, consigning him to god-man status, forever separating him from his work, from his followers, and from the ‘little ones’ he loved.

While I very much appreciated Matthew Fox’s ‘The Cosmic Christ’ in which he uses the word Christ metaphorically to mean the Great Creator Spirit in a heroic attempt to present one universal God (Elohim) for everyone, I’m not certain that he didn’t muddy the water. His work may have been much more appreciated had he dropped the word Christ in favor of something more like ‘Great Spirit’, which has a long and beautiful history among aboriginal people groups. Christian teaching has, ever since the Nicene creed (325 A.D.), forever joined the divine Christ to the divine Jesus. According to the creed, Jesus is ‘very God of very God.’ They are forever inseparable. If we say Christ most anywhere on the planet, people think Jesus.

When your point is unity for all of the human-kind in one Great Spirit (a noble task), cosmic in scope, who Loves and belongs to all humanity, inclusive of all creation (which I humbly agree with), why employ Paul’s revisionist dictionary to immediately alienate, exclude, and invalidate any whose cultural context does not include Christ or Jesus? And, thats a lot of folks when you consider that the vast majority of people who ever lived never heard the name of Jesus.

If I were to agree with Fox and Rohrs’ impression that Christ, in Paul’s dictionary, is a metaphor for the Great Spirit (which surely Paul did not intend), then I could agree that we all are ‘in Christos,’ in Her, with one another, and with all else in the Cosmos, She created, and all would be well. But, when Paul wrote Christ Jesus, he meant the glorified Jesus. Elohim, the only God, incarnate in Jesus.

Passerby,
Please, leave Messiah, Prophet, healer, and Rabbi Jesus out of this. Let Jesus be Jesus. Then, “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” —Julian of Norwich

If we are all one in the Great Spirit, and since “God is Love,” as 1 John asserts, then Her gift to us and all of Her good creation is to be together, in Herself,

in Love, with one another.

And this is the kingdom that Rabbi Jesus invites us to. Again, John wrote, “Brothers and sisters, let us Love one another, for Love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” And, “those who don’t Love, don’t know God, for God is Love. (1 John 4:7-8)”