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Thursday, May 6, 2010

A Riff on Jesus's Sacrifice According to Fundamentalism






















I know sacrifice in fundamentalist orientated Christianity is important. But sometimes I think of what they think of Jesus’ sacrifice and I wonder: for a God who is all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing and Eternal...how awful could it be to just have ONE bad afternoon? Even one hanging on a cross? When I'm in this mood I like to think of Jesus’ DEEP humanity, a humanity that is no less than ourselves, the divine manifested as human, which doesn't make light of his human sacrifice. To make Jesus a God in the way fundamentalism does, is to steal the meaning of Jesus’ very real sacrifice. If he’s God, then how big of a sacrifice could it have been? But if he’s human, like us, divine like us, then his sacrifice has substantive, instructive, and transcendent meaning, not just a God who plays a human for an afternoon and then goes back home. For esoteric, or Gnostic Christianity, Jesus’ sacrifice IS a sacrifice because he has something to lose, his life. Jesus would never come back again. His individual light would never come into the universe again. The loss is VERY real. Otherwise, what has Jesus lost by dying? This is the Jesus I dearly love: intimately aware of his humanity, aware of his death as a very real death, and willingly hanging on the cross, becoming symbolically for us the space where time and eternity marry, where life and death are simultaneous.

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