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In the movie “Luther” (MGM, 2004), Martin Luther bargains with God. If God allows Martin to survive a terrible lightning storm, Martin will become a monk. Luther becomes a monk, but remains a man haunted by fear of God’s anger. The abbot visits Luther in his cell one evening. The Father tries to show him a better way than living in fear of God.
Luther is railing in his cell against demonic voices. The abbot listens outside and enters. Luther tells him, "I live in terror of judgment." The abbot observes that he cannot recall any sins in Luther’s confessions that would warrant this response. Luther asks the abbot if he ever "dared to think of God as unjust?" He proceeds to describe God’s righteousness and how God is "angry with us all our lives for our faults. This righteous judge who damns us," and who condemns sinful men to hell. The abbot mentions that Luther is not evil, "You're just not honest. God isn't angry with you, you are angry with God." Luther exclaims that he wishes there were no God. The abbot wants to know the kind of God Luther seeks. The young monk cries out, "A merciful God! A God who I can love, and a God who loves me." "Then look to Christ,” replies the abbot, “bind yourself to Christ, and you will know God's love. Say to Him, 'I'm Yours, save me. I'm Yours, save me.’" Luther prays those words, ardently.
I, too, came up under the teaching of a “god” above all not loving but just. I no longer serve that “god.” That is the “god” that made it possible for a young boy named Brian to go to bed at night in fear, fearful that if he died in the night, that “god” would send or allow the young boy to go to an everlasting damnation. Brian, I, no longer serve that “god,” and I no longer preach or teach others of such a hideous “god,” either. Instead, like Luther, I found a “God who I can love, and a God who loves me.” And, since God is Love, the Divine justness is in agreement with Divine love. Whatever justness there is in God, such is a loving justness.
I came to know of this Love-God (Agape) early in life. Later, a “god” whose imperial justice could be untouched by the motherly-fatherly tenderness of Compassion overshadowed this sense of Love. Through the human-neighborhood, flesh-and-blood particularity of Jesus Christ, I looked upon this Love in the flesh, as I read Scriptures and imagined the narratives about this Galilean. I read of a Divineness who, though of the totally Other, was the totally Here: “the days of his flesh (sarx; Hebrews 5.7 AV). Thankfully, this Love, later, led me to an image of God that released me from the terror of damnation.
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I experience Jesus Christ in at least two main ways. At times I sense the Presence as Christ. Here, the feel is more mystical, esoteric, and Other. Then, at times I sense the Presence as Jesus. In fact, at times I sense the presence of Jesus. The sense, here, is more humanlike, more friend-like, and more personally immanent. The Christ sense overwhelms me with mystery. The Jesus sense comforts me, as though a brother is there, one flesh with me, just coming to companion me for a time. I am not saying that Jesus Christ can be divided into Jesus and Christ. However, Jesus and Christ is a union of Word, or Logos, and flesh.
A close relationship with Jesus Christ is central to Christian faith. Yes, we can trust that God is “sheer Is-ness,” to use a striking mystical reference from Eugene Peterson (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places). However, we need to claim the humanness of Divinity as well, and we do that best through a friendship with Jesus Christ.
Among us who have different theories on Christology, or the Doctrine of Christ, we can still meet and will meet, if we are Christ-ians, in and with Jesus Christ. We will know that he is a friend always close to us. We can have moments of sheer ecstasy, wherein we sense a transcendence of all matters flesh and blood. Yet, we will always return to our sense of the worldly ordinary, where we are and live our lives. We find in the Gospels the union of Spirit and Matter in a Love we can pray to, cry before, and seek help from. In devotion to Christ Jesus, we will know a Love that gives us respite from any insecurity about matters of life, faith, and eternity. And, likewise, we can celebrate and share with the children among us a God who is not just Mind, Is-ness, or Mystery, though God is this, but a Friend called Love, as well.
Spiritual Exercises
1. What role does devotion to Jesus Christ have in your faith journey?
2. Contrast this fleshly Presence with spiritualities that tend to indicate “spirituality” is an otherworldly, or wholly transcendent, experience.
3. What does the teaching of the Incarnation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth imply about all matter, all Creation?
4. How might religious teaching foster alienation from our own bodies, and the body of the Cosmos? Might help reconcile us to our own bodies, lead us to reverence the bodies of others, and foster respect for all Nature?
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