How Do You Perceive Jesus?

Once again I am taken by something Cynthia Bourgeault says in her recent book ‘Wisdom Jesus.'

I will cautiously say the she is talking about how the “guilt-inducing theology” has permeated our Christian history. 

And she references, as just one example from, Luke 18 where Jesus tells the rich ruler:

‘How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! ²⁵Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ 

Her comment caused my mind to say WOW!  

See what you think.

“…Our only truly essential human task here, Jesus teaches, is to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood.  His mission was to show us how to do this.” (p.106)

Clarification: 

She uses the word ‘egoic’ which refers to what she calls the “egoic operation system,”…  a grammar of perception, a way of making sense of the world by dividing the field into subject and object, inside and outside — and one of the most important first tasks of early childhood is to learn how to run the operating system…(p.33)  

In my words, she mean the systems of logic, reason and restriction of possibilities. 

I don’t know about you. But as a person who has mentally struggled with the more fundamental take on the Bible, I am just eating up Bourgeault’s more spiritual point of view.

It feels right to me that she is pulled by the Wisdom side, of the Old Testament, which she sees in Jesus.  

She follows a complete opposite path of thinking from  "the guilt-inducing theology:"  An angry God who is always pointing a finger of guilt on our human personhood.

So let me move passed all of the details of "what the Bible says,"  and simply talk about the way Jesus presented God to the people he walked among. 

One writer, I think it was Ted Loder, called Jesus a “non-anxious-presence."

Jesus did not display a character of anger, judgment, wrath and/or punishment.

Okay, there was the time he had a tantrum when he entered the temple:

15 Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; ¹⁶and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. ¹⁷He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written,

“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”?

But you have made it a den of robbers.’ (Mark 11)

However, the major part of Jesus’ life, on this earth, was a model of grace, acceptance, enclusiveness, forgiveness and love for those he walked among.

My purpose in my former Calls, and my purpose now, is to encourage people to know this Jesus/God. 

It just occurred to me that most of the radio and Television theology does not promote who Jesus really was/is.  

And they, unfortunately, get the majority of press in our world.

How very, very sad.