JESUS

Christianity is not about the divine becoming human. It’s about the human becoming divine.

I love Jesus. Who doesn’t love Jesus? He’s the most lovable person who ever lived. But how could that be? We have so little historical information about him. He never wrote anything down, and the stories about him weren’t written until at least two generations after his death. That’s a long time to remember things he said - and did.

His career in ministry appears to have been less than one year - maybe even as little as a few months. Luke’s story of him in the Temple at the age of  twelve is all we know about him until the age of thirty. And there is hardly any extra-biblical evidence of his existence after that. Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote at the end of the first century. His book, Antiquities of the Jews, has a small passage about, “a doer of wonderful works who was crucified by Pontius Pilate,” and even that quote has been questioned by historians for its validity. Nicolas Notovich was a Russian journalist who, in 1877, wrote an interesting, if heretical, book about Jesus’ missing years called The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ. In it, Jesus was well on his way to his fundamental beliefs after traveling into India as a young man and studying Buddhism and other Eastern faith systems that led to the formation of many of his later beliefs. 

How, where, and whenever it happened, I believe Jesus was an enlightened human being and a self-realized manifestation of God, his father. I also believe his purpose was to save us, only not from eternal punishment. That is a claim the early church made about him, not one he made about himself. He came to save us from our self-imposed separation from God, who is also “Our Father.” Jesus was the model of that innate connection to God. His mission was - and is - to teach us the truth about who we are, so we can experience the power we have. So why can’t we accept it?

A principle of A Course In Miracles is that, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”. And so we labor in prayer for something we already possess, in hopes that it will make us more like Jesus. 

In my 35 years as a practicing evangelical it disappointed me to see how many Christians believed doing good deeds made them Christ-like. Visiting sick people and feeding neighbors during a hurricane are nice starts. But Charles Stanley says, “The purpose of our lives is to attain full Christ-likeness”.

I decided early on that I would settle for nothing less.