The Sins of Scripture (29 page)

Are males superior to females, free people superior to slaves, parents superior to children, heterosexuals superior to homosexuals, white people superior to people of color? That is the wisdom of a world dedicated to survival and driving all things into power relationships. But humanity is always impaired when it builds its sense of worth by denigrating the worth of another. What the Jesus experience showed was a vision of a new humanity and in that vision no one is diminished.

Jesus crossed the boundaries separating males from females and invited women into full discipleship. His followers would say that in Christ there is neither male nor female, bond nor free, both of which were radical pronouncements in a rigidly patriarchal and slavery-practicing world. These followers of Jesus would also write that women were the first to stare into a tomb that they perceived could not contain Jesus’ humanity and the first to draw the right conclusions (Mark 16, Matt. 28, Luke 24, John 20).

Jesus also embraced the outcast. He touched the rotting flesh of the leper and gave him back his own humanity (Matt. 8:2–3). You are not repulsive, Jesus conveyed; you are human. Jesus welcomed the touch of the woman with the chronic menstrual discharge, though by touching him in her uncleanness she rendered him unclean according to the Torah (Mark 5:25–34). Jesus stood between the woman taken in the act of adultery and her accusers (John 8:1–11). No sinful deed made anyone ultimately rejectable, he said, certainly not worthy of death. That is the power that people experienced in him and it was so freeing, so life-giving, that they said God was in Christ. Given hope by that power, they stepped beyond the barriers of their security and began to taste the new humanity.

Even religious rules are not ultimate, Jesus said time after time. Religious rules are seen to be invested with divine authority only because they have become part of our security systems. But, said Jesus, even the Sabbath is not to be treated as a rule into which human life has to fit. The Sabbath has value only to the degree that it enhances our humanity. The Sabbath was made for human life; human life was not made for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). So it is with every religious doctrine, practice and rule. God is not met in the religious symbols that serve our insecurity and that enable us to pretend that we are the saved, the true believers, the holders of ultimate truth. Those attitudes are not only a reflection of the evil present in religion, but also the sources of enormous human violence and pain. God can never be identified with religion. No human tradition can ever corner the market on salvation and pretend that it controls the only doorway to God. Human folly is all that those claims are!

One who is fully human is not bound by all that seems to bind human life—tribe, prejudice, gender, sexual orientation, religion, finitude, fear. We are free of all of those things. That is the Jesus message. Or as St. Paul once observed, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” No! shouts Paul, answering his own question: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35–39).

That is the Christ experience. That is what the New Testament is all about. Jesus, understood as the Christ, is both a call and the empowerment needed to answer that call. The call is to embrace a new humanity, to grasp a new consciousness, to enter a new order of being, to become fully human. The empowerment comes when that new humanity is claimed. Empowerment is experienced in the recognition that humanity and divinity are two sides of the same coin. Was he divine, we ask of Jesus? Yes, but only in the sense that by living fully and freeing his new humanity he was able to enter into the realm of divinity, of God. The two cannot be separated.

The doctrines, dogmas and creeds of our tribal religious past were a stage in our development. They were part of our religious childhood. Nothing more. They are certainly not eternal. When they become lifeless, they should be allowed to die. Artificial respiration of yesterday’s religious forms is a pious waste of time and energy. All creeds, doctrines and sacred forms serve only to point toward an experience they can never capture. That is why religious people spend so much time pretending that truth has been secured in these human forms. Our security demands that we be convinced of that. That is why we kill those people who threaten our religious convictions. That is why we reject those people who approach God and truth from a context different from our own. We call them infidels and pagans if they are in different religious systems; heretics if they were once part of our worldview. That is why we play religious games designed to prove our spiritual superiority.

Humanity is expanding in consciousness. In the expansion of that consciousness God is less and less the supernatural parent figure who is our divine protector and becomes instead the ultimate consciousness in which our own consciousness participates and is a part. We cease being dependent recipients and become God-bearers to one another. That is why our ancestors in faith came to experience God in the person of Jesus. This Jesus, they perceived, understood and lived out the fact that he shared in the consciousness of God. He invited us to step into that divine power by stepping into our potential and full humanity. His invitation carried with it the power to risk. By doing these things Jesus reversed the human value system that was dedicated to survival and self-preservation. He lifted up the downcast and humbled those who trusted in their own power (Luke 1:51). He valued the contributions equally of those who had labored only one hour and those who had toiled through the heat of the day (Matt. 20:1–16). He proclaimed that half-breed heretic Samaritans, when they obeyed the first law of the Torah and showed compassion on those in need, were more the children of Abraham than were the priest and the Levite who passed by without showing compassion (Luke 10:29–37). He honored the prodigal son because he came to himself, and Jesus made him equal to the elder brother who never ventured from home or duty (Luke 15:11ff.). He ordered the outcasts from the highways and byways to be compelled to come into the kingdom (Luke 14:12–24). He placed as great a value on a single lost sheep as on the entire flock (Matt. 18:12, Luke 15:4). He expanded the concept of humanity to include both our enemies and the objects of our prejudice and scorn (Luke 17:16). He called on his followers to love their enemies (Matt. 5:43) and to be willing to let their enemies love them (Luke 10:29–37). He entered humanity so deeply, possessed his own being so significantly, gave his life and his love away so freely, expanded the boundaries of his existence so totally that he became the human channel through which the reality of God was able to flow into human history. That is what people meant when they said, “God was in Christ.” This was the experience that forced them to describe his entrance into life through a miraculous birth, his inability to be bound by finitude and the tomb in his resurrection and his union with God depicted in the cosmic ascension. People experienced in him the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and attributed its signs to him. They saw the fulfillment of the scriptures in him and portrayed him as living out its intimate details.

Jesus was a product of the epic story of the Jews. On the eighth day following his birth, he was circumcised and became part of the Jewish story. Their history was his history. His genealogies portrayed him as the son of Abraham (Matt. 1:1–17, Luke 3:23–38). He was shaped by the epic that produced the tribal religion of the Jews, who understood themselves to be God’s favorite ones, God’s chosen, who assumed that their enemies were God’s enemies, who portrayed God rejoicing over the Egyptians who drowned in the Red Sea. But he was also part of the growth of that tribal God through the Exile as reflected in the demands for love and justice that the prophets added to the epic of the Jews. He was heir to the budding universalism that appeared in the latter days of the Jewish story when the Jews’ God consciousness began to grow past the model of the tribal deity. Second Isaiah captured that universalism, which Jesus eventually embodied when he wrote, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8–9).

Jesus seemed to understand that no one can finally fit the holy God into his or her creeds or doctrines. That is idolatry. We cannot continue to create God in our own image and expect God to serve our needs. We cannot continue to pretend that we are the chosen and all other people the unchosen. God is not an idol of our own creation. God is not our parent, our protector, our defender. God does not do our bidding or answer our prayers. God is God. You and I are not. The tribal deity of the Jewish epic was growing with the expanded consciousness of the people. Finally, in the words of an unknown prophet who called himself the voice crying in the wilderness, a messenger who we know as Malachi,
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we hear that the boundaries on God imposed by our security needs are being broken open and the divine shackles are falling off from who God is. Malachi heard God saying, “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts” (Mal. 1:11).

In the life of Jesus following the lead of the prohets, the God of Israel was becoming the God of the universe.

The Psalmist added to this universal, inescapable image of God when he or she wrote:

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!

If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

even there thy hand shall lead me,

and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, “Let only darkness cover me,

and the light about me be night,”

even the darkness is not dark to thee,

the night is bright as the day;

For darkness is as light with thee. (Ps. 139:7–12)

The tribal deity of the Jewish epic was growing. Universalism was dawning. This deity was still a being until Jesus transformed God first into a presence and then into a life-giving, permeating spirit, revealing for everyone to see the Ground of All Being.

Jesus commissioned his disciples to go into all the world (Matt. 28:16–20). They were to go beyond the boundaries of their nation, their tribe and most specifically their religion. When they would finally escape all of these boundaries inside their expanded and open humanity, they were to proclaim the gospel—that is, the infinite love of God for all that God has made, a love that recognizes no barriers. Boundless love will even love those who have sought to crucify the Love of God. It includes every species, every plant, every planet, every tribe, every person. All become God’s chosen. No one is an alien. No one is separate from God. We live in God; God lives in us. We are to be witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and “unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8, KJV). The name of Jesus is now Emmanuel, which means God with us (Matt. 1:23). When he says “Lo I am with you always” (Matt. 28:20, KJV) he is claiming the Emmanuel title. When God is set free as spirit, the boundaries of the nation-states, symbolized by their different languages, are erased and every person speaks the language of a universal love (Acts 2:1–4). As that spirit rolls through history, the barriers fall. Peter hears God say in a dream: “What God has cleansed, you must not call common [or unclean]” (Acts 10:9–16). Peter rises from that vision and baptizes Cornelius the gentile. The Jewish epic breaks into universality and becomes the human epic.

The movement is furthered when Philip the deacon baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–40). He was escaping the boundaries of the Torah, which stated quite specifically that “he whose testicles are crushed or whose male member is cut off shall not enter the assembly of the Lord” (Deut. 23:1).

Time and time again this biblical epic that began as a Jewish tribal story paused at what once was a boundary marking a human division. Ultimately the boundary was hurdled and the uninhibited love of God rolled on past the limiting tendencies of gender and race, sexual orientation and religion, until one human community came into our vision. Yes, we see still barriers of tribe, race, sex and religion in the human family. Many there are who think they serve God with murderous acts against the peace of the world. Some are Christians, some are Jews, some are Muslims, some are Hindus, some are Buddhists, but all are serving an idol, a tribal deity whose time in history is passing away. Do not mistake that passing away as something evil, even if it is marked by a rise of human fear and an increase of human hate and human killing. The vision of a new humanity is still emerging, and it will not be denied, for Luke has Jesus proclaim that the kingdom of God is near when sickness dissolves into wholeness (10:9). In Luke Jesus says that the kingdom of God is in the midst of us, that it is within each of us (17:21).

That is why Jesus is a God experience. That is why he was said to be the life that could not be contained by death or the grave; the life who made God available outside all the forms of the past, including the forms of religion. That is why the Jesus story was grafted onto the Jewish epic and served to increase the pace whereby that epic turned from a tribal history into a universal story of humankind.

Homo sapiens are evolving into Homo spiritus. A new humanity is emerging. Jesus is the first fruits of that new humanity.

This is why the scriptures that tell his story must be transformed into a universal story, true (as a time- and place-bound story could never be) to who Jesus was and what he said and did. This is why these scriptures can never again be used to denigrate, hurt, oppress, enslave or diminish the humanity of any person. This is why the church must cease its quest for power, authority and that most insidious temptation of all, internal unity, and begin to transform the world, to reconcile our differences and to make known a barrier-free humanity. We cannot pray the Jesus prayer, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” unless we are willing to act as agents of that in-breaking kingdom by giving up our petty divisions, our excessive claims and our symbols of power and begin to devote all our energies to building a different kind of world.