God and Jesus

The prompting of this paper is based on my great love for the Triune God and the apocalyptic view with which so many Christians are currently preoccupied.

My wish is that the Christian community expands its vision of God and Christ to embrace the whole of creation. I trust that in this paper I am able to keep the mystery of God alive.

Ezekiel 12:2

“Son of man, you are living in a rebellious house. They have eyes to see but do not see, and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious house.

Jesus sent his first disciples on the road to preach to “all the nations” (Matthew 28:19 (NIV) -19 “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” and Luke 24:47 - and to “all creation” (Mark 16:15) 15 “He was also training them to take risk by leaving their own security behind. This becomes even clearer in his instruction for them “not to take anything with them” (Mark 6:8)  "Take nothing for the journey except a staff--no bread, no bag, no money in your belts and to submit to the hospitality and even the hostility of others” (Mark 6:10 -11). 10 “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. 11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them”. Jesus says the same of himself in John’s Gospel (10:7) where he calls himself “the gate” where people “will go freely in and out, and find green pasture” (10:9).

What an amazing permission! He sees himself more as a place of entrance and exit than a place of settlement. It is strange that pastors only notice the going “in” but never the going “out” message.

There is a place and time for being outside, or we never really understand or appreciate the inside. A gatekeeper keeps the gate open in both directions, and knows the right motivation and timing for opening both. Like a good shepherd, he/she leads one to the best pasture at the best time.

Jesus clearly was much more concerned with the journey and integrity, than with presenting mere ideas or belonging to the correct group. 

Jesus was not only teaching or maintaining a purity system (which is to say a “belonging system”); but Jesus used everything, even people’s mistakes and impurity, to bring them to God. That’s good news for everyone. He practiced a process of transformation more than a belonging system.

For example, he says lovingly to an inquisitive scribe, “And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions. ”(Mark 12:34).

Jesus was affirming his particular stage on the journey, without telling him that he must travel all the way.

He wanted searchers more than settlers, prophets more than priests, He wanted honest journeyers.

All of these situations are describing the unique and rare position of one who is in tune with the Spirit of God. He/she is always on the edge of the inside. Not an outsider throwing rocks, nor a comfortable insider who defends the status quo, but one who lives precariously with two perspectives held tightly together: the faithful insider and the critical outsider at the same time. Not established safely inside, but not so far outside as to lose compassion or understanding.

The true disciple must hold these perspectives in a loving and necessary creative tension.  It is a unique kind of seeing and living, which will largely leave the disciple with “nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58) while easily meriting the “hatred of all”—who have invariably taken sides in opposing groups (Luke 21:16 -17) - 16 “You will be betrayed even by parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. 17 Everyone will hate you because of me.                   . 

The true disciple clings to God, and almost no one else.

People hiding inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group.  They are threatened by anyone who has found the answer to his/her being in places they cannot control. 

Matthew’s Gospel refers to this larger place as “the kingdom of heaven.” Where one has found his/her treasure, and is utterly grounded in the “passion” of the transcendent God, which is indestructible and uncontrollable by worldly systems. 

People being attached to the world, will seek their treasures and payoffs in the world. We need to let self centered opportunism pass and focus instead on loving God then all things will be given unto us.

Instead of loving God, many are watching life happen from afar and judging it in accordance with their limited understanding.

Yet God is inherent in life itself? God is the Life Force of everything? God is not an object like any other object. God is subject, the Life Energy in each and everything, which we call Love or Spirit.

No longer should we hold punitive images of God or one that impels us to think that God is apart from us, which has long dominated the Western churches. But instead of the triune God who flows through everything, without exception, and who has done so since the beginning of time. In this regard everything is Holy, for those who have learned how to see with their inner vision. The implications of such a spiritual shift are staggering: every vital impulse, every force toward the future, every creative momentum, every loving surge, every dash toward beauty, every running toward truth, every ecstasy before simple goodness, every bit of ambition for humanity and the earth, for wholeness and holiness, is the eternally-flowing life of the Triune God.

Whether we know it or not! This is not an invitation that one can agree with or disagree with. It is a description of what is already happening in God and in everything created in God’s image and likeness. This triune God allows us, impels us, to live easily with God everywhere and all the time: in the budding of a plant, the smile of a gardener, the excitement of a teenage boy over his new girlfriend, the loving nuzzling of horses, the tenderness with which eagles feed their chicks, and the downward flow of every mountain stream.

This God is found even in suffering and in death of those very things! How could this not be the life-energy of God? How could it be anything else? Such a big definition of life must include death in its great embrace, so that none of our labors will be wasted. In the chirp of every bird excited about a new morning, in the hard beauty of every cliff, in the deep satisfaction at every job well done and even in a clerk’s gratuitous smile to a department store customer or in the passivity of the hospital bed, “the world, life or death, the present or the future—all belong to us; and we belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God,”

That’s the great moment in all divine revelation, when beautiful ideas drop in through intuition to the mind and to the heart, which happens when we move from the level of dogma to the level of experience; when it is not something that we merely believe, but in a real sense something that we know. This is how the divine dance of God can be experience by us all, believers and non believers alike.  

God’s joyous unveiling can melt even the most hardened constrictions, illuminating the way toward union of Spirit, Self, yes even society.

Let us be clear that God is not a being among other beings, but rather Being itself. Nothing human can stop the flow of divine love; we cannot undo the eternal pattern even by our worst indiscretions. God is always winning, and God’s love will win. Love does not lose, nor does God lose. No one can stop the relentless outpouring force of the Divine grace.

God is relationship itself. Our task is to trustfully receive and then gradually reflect the inner image of God unto the world around us.

This divine mirroring will never stop; mirroring is how the whole transformation process is personally initiated and finally achieved. But we have to be taught how to “gaze steadily into this law of perfect inner freedom, and make this our habit.

Jesus the enlightened one:

John 12:35-37 (ESV)

35 So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. 36 While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”

We must realize that we can know and love God on many levels. Some are the transpersonal level (“Father”), the Personal level (“Jesus”), and the Impersonal level (“Holy Spirit”) and never forget to love our neighbor and all of God’s manifestation.

May the peace that transcends all understanding be with us - Amen