promise of eternal resurrection.
Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness. The
precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere else. In
fact, that is my only definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees
Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail
you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or
reject anyone.
Isn’t that ironic? The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself
from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and
everything else. This is the full, final, and intended effect of the Incarnation—
symbolized by its finality in the cross, which is God’s great act of solidarity
instead of judgment. Without a doubt, Jesus perfectly exemplified this seeing,
and thus passed it on to the rest of history. This is how we are to imitate Christ,
the good Jewish man who saw and called forth the divine in Gentiles like the
Syro-Phoenician woman and the Roman centurions who followed him; in
Jewish tax collectors who collaborated with the Empire; in zealots who opposed
it; in sinners of all stripes; in eunuchs, pagan astrologers, and all those “outside
the law.” Jesus had no trouble whatsoever with otherness. In fact, these “lost
sheep” found out they were not lost to him at all, and tended to become his best
followers.
Humans were fashioned to love people more than principles, and Jesus fully
exemplified this pattern. But many seem to prefer loving principles—as if you
really can do such a thing. Like Moses, we each need to know our God “face to
face” (Exodus 33:11, Numbers 12:8). Note how Jesus said, “God is not a God of
the dead but of the living for to him all people are alive!” (Luke 20:39). In my
opinion, his aliveness made it so much easier for people to trust their own
aliveness and thus relate to God, because like knows like. Some call it morphic
resonance. C. S. Lewis, in giving one of his books the truly wonderful title Till
We Have Faces, made this same evolutionary point.
The truly one, holy, catholic, and undivided church has not existed for a
thousand years now, with many tragic results. We are ready to reclaim it again,
but this time around we must concentrate on including—as Jesus clearly did—
instead of excluding—which he never did. The only people that Jesus seemed to
exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners
like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself. Do check
me out on that, and you might see that I am correct.
Think about what all of this means for everything we sense and know about