Of Gods and Humans

 

Of Gods and Humans

 

What if we tend to misunderstand the Bible?  Does it matter?  Does it matter if Angels really sang to shepherds or that Mary really was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus?  How was Jesus both God and Man? 

 

Join me on a thought experiment for the next few minutes.   First though, these are just my thoughts and as such are as much prone to error as any other human.

 

Assume for a moment that Mary (probably Miriam anyway) was a teenage bride.  Most girls married between 12-16 years of age.

 

Let’s assume that Joseph wasn’t an old man but was also a young virulent boy/man.  16-18 years or so.

 

If Jesus was unplanned, but what we actually see in the Gospels is a stubborn love that both Miriam and Joseph refuse to accept there is anything “wrong” in this, that there are no stables or innkeepers, instead an upper room in a family home, no angels or shepherds, no standing star – how would this affect your faith?   Ask yourself the question, why would it affect your faith?

 

It comes back to why are Christians uncomfortable around sex?

 

Have we misunderstood, (perhaps missing the point) made by the writers of Genesis?  Have we blamed women subconsciously all this time when they are not the source of the problem?  What if our interpretation has actually caused untold harm and misogyny not to mention deaths down the years?

 

What if “sin” is about misaligned relationship?

 

If sin is missing the mark  - something that sits with the original Hebrew and Greek origins, as a tragic flaw or an error of judgement.  In the Bible, the Greek word “hamartia” was used to translate the Hebrew word “chet” meaning to miss the mark or fall short of the Goal. Then sin could be viewed as the pain or psychological distress felt by the result of being wrong or to make the incorrect assumption.  A flawed belief perhaps in the rupture of a relationship.  The relationship. I will come back to this later.

 

What if Miriam and Joseph never doubted their love for each other or for their children.  This would mean that Jesus (Yeshua or Yeshu) grew up in a environment of love and support. He would have grown up in strength and wisdom (as Luke tells us) convinced of God’s expansive love. It doesn’t preclude that his brothers may have misunderstood and felt envious as they grew up.  We see evidence of that in the Gospels. 

 

So Jesus, the man without sin, in full relationship with God.  Is fully God and Man.  Jesus, gentle yet angry, passionate and  yet peaceful, humble and holy.  Showing what we are meant to be.

 

What if we were really to be disciples.  To be real followers of Jesus.  To follow Jesus radically.  To enter relationship with God fully.

 

Would it change how we saw Christmas, the events at Easter, our relationships with, well anyone?

 

How would men relate to women?

 

How would employers deal with employees?

 

How would nations deal with nations?

 

How would you relate to being your - self?

 

What if the self comprises both of our self-awareness and let’s call it  God-awareness

 

What if our self-awareness needs to be dovetailed with our God-awareness simultaneously?  Then sin(darkness) is the result of friction or space between these two states of self.  Neither of them is inherently evil, but self-awareness needs God-awareness for sustenance and inevitably life.

 

Getting it wrong, where reliance on self-awareness is believed stronger or separate to God-awareness leads to pain, fracturing and ultimately death.  This death relates not to physical death but judgement after death. 

 

It is worth including here some words by Thomas Merton on life and death.

 

“Without the cross of Christ, his love, freedom, and grace, death grinds down upon the last despairing spark of life and triumphs over it, because the spark, still clinging to its own illusion of interminability, refuses to give itself back to that from which it came.  Hence, various religious illustrations of this defeat: for Hinduism and Buddhism, the man who clings to interminability must in fact go on being born over and over again, since that is what he does in fact want.  In the Christian tradition, this “interminable” loveless and meaningless existence is called hell.  (We must, of course, remember that the graphic descriptions of hell’s torments are more or less literary and are not expected to be taken literally just as they stand.  Sartre’s idea of hell in No Exit is, in fact, much closer to Christian theology than are the lurid pictures of devils with pitchforks pitching sinners into the hottest flame.)

The life of Heaven, eternal life in Christ, is not simply a life without end.  It is not interminable joy – even joy, if interminable, would become dreadful.  The suggestive word “interminable” contains a hint that something that would be better terminated cannot, in fact, be put to an end.  It never ceases!  It goes on forever.  Who would want a joy that he could never get rid of?  Eternal life, on the other hand, has nothing in it which would be better if it were ended.  The very concept of an end is no longer relevant, for the goal is attained.  There is, then, no more goal, there is no end.  All is present and all is actual.  All is pure reality, the total compact fulfilment of man in love and in vision, not measured out in infinitely extended time, but grounded in the depths of the personal life of God and the inner dynamic of love: from the abyss of the Father, in the light of the Son, through the love of the Holy Spirit.

Death is the point at which life, by freely and totally giving itself, enters into this ground and this infinite act of love.  Death is the point at which life can, if we so choose, become perfectly real, not because it “demands to be interminable,” but because it can receive the gift of pure actuality in the love of God, in the Trinitarian life, the circumincession of Persons.  Death is, then the point at which life can attain its pure fulfilment.  Death brings life to its goal.  But the goal is not death – the goal is perfect life.” (Merton online source)

 

If getting it wrong equates to sin, and according to Paul in Romans 6:23 (NIV) “the wages of sin is death”. Then getting it wrong or sin relates to variations in the relationship between self-awareness and God-awareness except for total matching.  Our nature to make sense of what we see in the world we inhabit and on self-reliance is the underlying cause for this, the original sin if you like. 

 

John’s opening of his Gospel includes the beautiful lines, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5 NIV)

 

If sin equates to darkness, and light to God, then we might view the relationship between self-awareness and God-awareness in the following pictorial manner.  n.b.  I was unable to show the complete alignment as smoothly as I hoped but I think this shows the gist.

 

 

 

 

Source material.

Merton.    https://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/life-death-by-thomas-merton/

Biblical sources from https://www.biblegateway.com/