"Jesus Human Christ Divine"

                      

 Jesus was fully Human Yet Anointed with Divine Consciousness {Messiah}
 Some may think this statement to be heresy, but I would like to suggest to you that it is formally and theologically incorrect to say, “Jesus is God,” many Christians glibly do and then need to try and prove it using scripture.   I have to admit that I too were among the many at an early stage in my ministry.   But, again as I has suggested in my recent postings Jesus never really equates Himself as God incarnate.  The closest we can come to that theology is one with God.   I would also like to suggest that by taking Jesus out of the trinity and making him God might be more heretical.  We truly do not completely understand that mystery of the Jesus but an image that comes to mind for me is the perfect union of God with man, making Jesus both fully human yet also divine.  For the truly orthodox Christian, the Trinity must be “God,” and Jesus can only be understood inside that Eternal Embrace.  From within this loving relationship, the Christ came forth to draw us back through the physical Jesus to where we all originally came from (Genesis 1:26, John 14:3).  If you can entertain this perspective it may change your perception and understanding of salvation—and possibly the whole point of salvation itself.  Rather than understanding salvation as an escape plan from our sinful existence in this world to a sinless place called heaven for the “saved.”   Salvation for the saved becomes an enlightened and blissful reunion with the God of creation and you enter the Kingdom of Heaven here and now and for eternity.   Luke 17: 21 nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”

Proving that Jesus is God is not as transformative as being brought back into the perfect relationship with our Creator.  Our deep need is to experience the same unitive mystery in ourselves and in everything else—“through him, with him, and in him,” as the scriptures so clearly states for us.  Now here is the “The Good News” that we also are part of the eternal divine embrace, now as the ongoing Body of Christ extended in space and time. We are the second coming of Christ!

There are clear statements in the New Testament about Kingdom being here not out there and there is a universal meaning to Christ (Colossians 1, Ephesians 1, John 1, 1 John 1, and Hebrews 1:1–4). The schools of Paul and John were initially overwhelmed by this message. In the early Christian era, only some Eastern Fathers (such as Origen of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Maximus the Confessor) noticed that the Christ was clearly something older, larger, and different than Jesus himself.   They mystically saw that Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time; whereas the Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time. Genesis 1 verse 26,   In later centuries, the church lost this mystical understanding in favor of fast-food, dualistic Christianity that was easier for the average parishioner to believe and to comprehend.  The Christian religion pushed Jesus to the forefront, and in doing so “The Christ” got lost in the push, thinking Christ must be Jesus’ last name. 

The early Franciscan School surely fell in love with the person of Jesus as we should, but through Duns Scotus and Bonaventure it also saw Jesus as a corporate personality (a type, archetype, or model for the Christ) representing and directing the Whole.    For example, Roger Bacon (1214–1292), a Franciscan friar at Oxford, is called “the father of experimental science.” The natural world was no longer just “natural” for those influenced by the intuitive genius of Francis of Assisi.  Poor Bacon was seen as not very religious, and his laboratory was relegated to the very outside walls of Oxford, but Bacon had the courage and passion to love and serve the Eternal Christ and not just the historical Jesus. There was no gap between sacred and secular in his view. It was one sacred and all “supernatural” world where everything had its good purpose in creation.  Because as Genesis 1 teaches, Goodness was found in Kayos and out of Kayos all that was created was “GOOD”.   And it was all created for the entity “Christ” that would unite all things to be one with God.  For the Christian the Christ would be found in man they called Jesus of Nazareth.  

Reference:  Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 220-222.