Saturday, October 7, 2006

Jesus and the Consciousness of Guilt It's Saturday afternoon, and I'm going to write about this because it's on my mind, as it has been for a long time. No, this is not about having a guilty conscience. "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are[~]yet was without sin." (Hebrews 4:15) This is going to sound strange, perhaps heritical, but I always think God wants our honesty and our questions. So here is one of mine: we often say Jesus understands us because he went through the human experience. It seems to me that if He did not sin, there was a part of the human psychological experience He never, in fact, experienced, and that is the reality of guilt, and the consciousness that comes with an acknowlegement of and owning up to one's own moral failure. If the original sin of the garden was of such a powerful nature as to change the ruling paradigms of relationship, creation, and the very plan of God, then it seems that something analgous happens to human psychological paradigms when sin is introduced at the personal level. To have to will and act under the pressure of former failure and sin is to introduce complexity that Jesus seems never to have experienced. Always, His mind was free of that kind of dissonance and struggle. Yes, I believe Jesus was fully human. And I believe in his divinity as well, though the shape of His earth-side divinity as it relates to his divine nature before the Incarnation is a question. Why is this question of "the consciousness of guilt" important to me? The Christ came to show us God's love, His life, to announce the Kingdom of God, and to save us. How His humanity relates to mine is without a doubt paramount in what He wanted us to grasp about God. It has always puzzled me that the earth-side Christ could grasp the weight and shackles of guilt, simply due to the fact that he never felt them. Here's the thought that came to me today like a bolt from the sky: I've always said that the Christ came to show us what what God meant when He created human beings. And today it hit me that we were not made to have a "consciousness of guilt," and the life of Jesus is evidence of it. If we were not meant to live with that kind of mind, then a big question is whether or not that mind can truly be repaired in this life, so that in effect, if not in truth, we return, as it were, to a state of freedom and release, based on the life and death of the Christ. Dare we trust grace that much? To simply drop guilt like an old, tattered coat that for some reason we think we just can't live without? Can we trust grace that much? Can we trust love that much? Just drop the angst and walk away? I am the way, the truth, and the life...the truth will set you free... 6:23:06 PM    comment []

The Incarnation II So here He comes, slipping from eternity into time and limitation via the womb of a woman who will teach Him to walk and talk and eat and put His clothes away. More mysteries confront us as we think about Jesus' psychological development as a child, as an adolescent, as a young man. Where and when did He finally figure it out? Was it a memory thing that finally kicked in? How did He come to understand again His nature, and what were His memories of limitless being? Did He have an intrinsic knowledge that was always a part of His DNA? Or did the Holy Spirit just whack Him on the head one day, and He was forever afterward enlightened to Himself? I don't mean to demean the Christ, or make fun. God in the flesh is colossal, and we speak about it with such familiarity, as if we grasp it. We barely grasp the reality of our being here, much less the plunging of God out of time into this mess of experience, this world chock full of death, evil, and sin. What a shock the Christ must have experienced as He grew. Even in knowing it with His God-mind, in His viscera, His body, His emotional experience, it must have been shocking to feel. Or perhaps He had always known it, and there was nothing surprising about it. I'm thinking of Paul the Apostle just now. He said God had revealed mysteries to him. That he'd been caught up into the third heaven, I think it was. He had seen things hidden since the beginning. He longed for the people he wrote to "to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge." To know the love that surpasses knowledge. There's a double bind for you. To know the unknowable. The love of God demonstrated through the dropping of the Christ out of eternity into time to live with us. To live inside the limitations. To live with death approaching every day. To live with hunger and dissatisfaction, with disease and disappointment, with ambiguity and faith. Thirty years of plain-robe living, thirty years I wish we could see into. I'd like to see Jesus negotiating the madness of the teen years, His acquisition of wood-working skill, His decisions to turn hormones aside for a greater life. And then, the decisive process whereby He decides to take up the hard task of saving the creation He had made. He lays down his hammer and saw, and walks away from home and hearth, and raises His voice to the few standing around, and says "The Kingdom of God is at hand." And for three years, the Word of God strides the earth, one day at a time, one human being at a time, healing, laughing, touching, weeping, listening, teaching, trying again and again to help a battered and confused humanity understand how loved they are. That their very reason for being is to receive Life, the Life that precedes creation, the Life that upholds it, the Life that is before and through and after all things. What is must have been like to grasp the muscles in His hand, the hand of God enfleshed in human form, enlivened by the Spirit that hovered over the waters of beginning. To feel those hands on your back in embrace, to feel them gripping your arm as He tells you He will not leave you as orphans, to feel their power as He pulls you out of the sea. And they say we are now those enfleshed hands, enlivened by that same Spirit. That as the Father was in Him, incarnate, now the Christ is in us, incarnate, and the hard task of saving the world goes on, one human being at a time. ...the gentle task of loving the world... 5:52:57 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Jeff Berryman .