Some Big Wondering Continue

Here are some things that I have been reading that have clarified, my otherwise conflicted, former theology.

First this:  “…  shift our focus to consider Jesus’ life itself as a teaching.  By “a teaching” I mean a model, of course; all authentic teachers walk the talk.  But more than just a model, I want to consider his life as a sacrament — that is, as a spiritual force in its own right.  The traditional definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”  But what to my mind this definition does not make sufficiently clear is that a sacrament does not merely symbolize a spiritual reality; it lives that reality into existence.  

Jesus life, considered from this standpoint, is a sacrament: a mastery that draws us deeply into itself and  when rightly approached, conveys an actual spiritual energy empowering us to follow the path that his teaching have laid out.”  (p. 91 Wisdom Jesus, Cynthia Bourgeault)

Now try this on for size: 

“The divine Word, which has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, is source and ground of the order and intelligibility of the universe.  It is this Logos that maintains all created reality in being (that is, in the light of order, of “form”) holding it from falling back into disorder and nothingness, back into the primeval chaos (see Gn. 1:2).  It was the divine word, the Logos, that brought all things out of the darkness of nothingness into the light of being.”(p.55 Second Simplicity  Bruno Barnhart)

Let me see if I can tell you what has become very new and enlightening to this chronically advantaged mine.

To put it simply, we human beings are meant to be included in The Three -- The Trinity.

That is, in the round-pie-of-life you and I are the fourth slice of the whole picture of God’s world.

We are meant to be fully apart of the whole.  Active participants within the realm of God’s purpose.

And we participate actively because Jesus’ Spirit has been gifted to us.

I know I am probably leaving you with a lot of questions.

Well thats where I have been living for weeks(;

Even though I am sometimes baffled by what I am reading; I find great joy in the fact that what I am reading has unlocked a door in my thinking that has often been muted.  Muted by the narrow understanding of the church fathers; who have so logically laid our a theology that seems to limit the extraordinary promise that lived in the physical man of Jesus.

Jesus is so much more than a man — a human being.

  

He was, as Cynthia Bourgeault suggests, a true sacrament — “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace…. a spiritual force in its own right.” 

When we really pay attention to what we read in the Gospels; most especially in the Gospel of John. We begin to see a Jesus that is certainly not just the skin of God. But God.

John’s Gospel get to the very death of Jesus' true nature.

God’s genuine being, Spirit, love, mercy, forgiveness, grace, gentleness, tenderness and unconditional acceptance.  The Bread of life, The Light of the world, The Gate, The Good Shepherd, The Resurrection and The Life, The Way, The Truth, And The Life, The Vine.


There is not a whole bunch of physical person in those definitions.

Well, maybe The Good Shepherd.