Jesus: Spun or Unleashed?
O Lover,
The current morass of our society’s use and abuse of religion, Jesus in particular, has of late been nudging me toward a revisit to Alfie’s question “What’s it all about?” In our chaotic time when Jesus-spinning is unprecedented, what is the lodestone around which all else revolves? Might there lie hidden within this abuse pattern a silver lining opportunity for greater awareness of Jesus at the core of Your salvation saga?
I am a Roman Catholic follower of Your Jesus. This implies that while I profess Scripture’s “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil 2:11), the ever-fuller meaning of that primacy grows out of both Scripture and the ensuing tradition. Many examples of Your further Self-disclosure via Jesus the Christ have roots in the margins (thus “minority report”) of that tradition: desert fathers and mothers, monasticism, the Eckhartian and Spanish mystics, “Christogenesis” and “Omega Point” (Teilhard), the current intersection of Christic mysticism and cosmology. In short, the canon of Your Self-disclosure via Jesus the Christ remains open, the work of the wind of Your Rúah (“Spirit”) ongoing, the jurisdiction of Your Self-divulgence via the Incarnate One universal. The Jesus we follow can be sequestered within neither biblicism nor primitivism. In my faith tradition You are showing the Galilean to be the Cosmic Christ.
But does not such a dynamic take on “following Jesus” give rise to distortions or worse? Is not acceptance of such a fluid unfolding dangerous? Indeed, are not the last two millennia replete with attempts to spin Your Jesus: e.g., the cicada-like Constantinian compromise, pervasive eccelesiastical coercion, reduction to an atonement theory, tribalism regarding other faith traditions, a “prosperity gospel“ in a malapportioned world, christian nationalism, current caricaturing of the Christ as “woke,”each of these selectively proof-texted in Holy Writ?
Notwithstanding the contents of this sad litany, and much more, the restricting to 1st Century gospels and epistles of the one reported to have said “the one seeing me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9) is not the solution. This same gospel contains various allusions (e.g., 16:12-13 [“many more things”]; 20:30 [“many other signs”]; 21:25 [“many other things”]) to how both the disciples’s limited understanding and the finitude of language obstruct a vastly fuller explication of the ministry of Jesus, and therefore of You, O Lover. Furthermore, this trekker cannot be confronted with the massive Christ in Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (esp. 1:13-20), for example, without begging for more, an ask lavishly answered in two millennia of varied mystical experience. Indeed, to paraphrase Merton, every now, every here, is seed-door to the fuller meaning of “following Jesus” and the disposition of You the Father to whom he invariably points.
For me this Catholic understanding of the role of tradition has both enlarged and fleshed out earlier more creedal and static depictions of Your Christ which sometimes occlude as much as they reveal. Yet again I am stunned by the intrinsicality of Self-disclosure in all that the Christ shows You to be, a truth larger than all of the world’s books which might have been written (Jn 21:25). Two millennia after the Bethlehem event and its earliest writings I am amid the beneficiaries of that burgeoning largesse.
Finally, one of my heroes lifting to language the concerns of this post is the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394). His use of the Greek term epektásis (“pressing on,” “reaching forward” [Phil 3:12-13]) colors his entire Christic mysticism in a way which accentuates both the human thirst for You and Your lavish inexhaustibility. The spiritual journey, both in and beyond time, is thus most basically an unending exploration of You, O Lover. Of late You via Gregory’s epektásis emphasis have been opening me further to that ever-unfolding Christ, he in whom You have principally Self-disclosed Your unfathomable Love. Only such an Anointed One is commensurate with You who are beyond all names, depiction, or solving.
So once again, O Lover, I commit to Your unfolding and universal Jesus who is the Christ. Glory be!
