Loving Jesus, Loving Christ
To be loved by Jesus enlarges our heart capacity. To be loved by the Christ
enlarges our mental capacity. We need both a Jesus and a Christ, in my opinion,
to get the full picture. A truly transformative God—for both the individual and
history—needs to be experienced as both personal and universal. Nothing less
will fully work. If the overly personal (even sentimental) Jesus has shown itself
to have severe limitations and problems, it is because this Jesus was not also
universal. He became cozy and we lost the cosmic. History has clearly shown
that worship of Jesus without worship of Christ invariably becomes a time- and
culture-bound religion, often ethnic or even implicitly racist, which excludes
much of humanity from God’s embrace.
I fully believe, however, that there has never been a single soul who was not
possessed by the Christ, even in the ages when Jesus was not. Why would you
want your religion, or your God, to be any smaller than that?
For you who have felt angered or wounded or excluded by the message of
Jesus or Christ as you have heard it, I hope you sense an opening here—an
affirmation, a welcome that you may have despaired of ever hearing.
For you who have hoped to believe in God or a divinized world, but never
been able to “believe” in the way belief is typically practiced—does this vision
of Jesus the Christ help? If it helps you to love and to hope, then it is the true
religion of Christ. No circumscribed group can ever claim that title!
For you who have loved Jesus—perhaps with great passion and protectiveness
—do you recognize that any God worthy of the name must transcend creeds
and denominations, time and place, nations and ethnicities, and all the vagaries
of gender, extending to the limits of all we can see, suffer, and enjoy? You are
not your gender, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, or your social
class. Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what
Thomas Merton called the “false self,” to pass for the substantial self, which is
always “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3)? It seems that we really do
not know our own Gospel.
You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don’t believe it.
This is why and how Caryll Houselander could see Christ in the faces of total
strangers. This is why I can see Christ in my dog, the sky, and all creatures, and