Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm: Christ Born in Us (5 of 5)

Having Christ Born in Us—It’s the Doorway to a Different Paradigm

For this year’s season of Advent-Christmas, Lee Van Ham is presenting other ways to look at this special season, his comments rooted in the cosmological nature of the birth narratives told in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, within time, in a particular place; by contrast, Christ was and is from the beginning. As John says, “In the beginning was the Logos.” To say, “Christ was born in Bethlehem,” is a theological affirmation, not a historical statement. The Christmas songs we sing are filled with theology linking Christ with Jesus. Such connections can be exciting, soul-nourishing, and transformative. My point here is that using Jesus and Christ interchangeably, without awareness of how they have separate lineages and definitions, fuzzes over important distinctions between them. With the loss of those distinctions, the Christ of the cosmos gets reduced to proportions of history—a serious mistake, and never more so than when we are up against the stories of empire and consumer economics.

Throughout the Gospels and Epistles we see the creativity of people 20 centuries ago connecting the Jesus of Bethlehem and the Christ of the eons or cosmos. Their work was important and essential, and informs our own search for the relationship today. Their context, however, differs from ours in that “Christ” was not then assumed to be Jesus’ second name as it is so often today. What is especially important for us today is to rediscover how they are separate. Only then can we rediscover a healthy, connecting relationship between them, instead of the co-dependent, dysfunctional linking that fails us when we need a big, cosmic-proportioned story with which to deal with our contemporary economic and cultural reality. Sometimes we hear people make the separation by saying not “Jesus Christ,” but “Jesus, the Christ.” That helps. But many hearers need further help in pondering the mystery of both the distinction and the relationship. I want to remind us how reluctantly Jesus called himself Christ or Messiah (the Hebrew equivalent). Some scholars, in fact, regard all such references as not spoken by Jesus but by the New Testament writers describing how they had come to think of Jesus some decades later. Jesus preferred other designations, his favorite being “the human one” or “the truly human one,” a preferred translation to what may be more familiar, “Son of Man.”

Given how wary Jesus was to identify himself with Messianic mythology that had developed in several strands over centuries, we do well to ask why many, soon after his life and ever since, have so readily called Jesus “Christos.” For Jesus, lots of the Messiah mythology was filled with expectations that would subvert him from his divine call, rather than fulfill it. This was especially true of the politicized stories of Christos as one who would seek political control. He also feared the outcome of Messianism that projected powers onto the Christ that we humans need to own for ourselves. Jesus’ way was for everyone to accept that they could develop the capacity to challenge empire and live a different way, not to leave it to THE Christ, but to also incarnate Christ as he did. It’s God’s way of living the divine image in us. But the most important factor in how we perceive the relationship between Jesus and Christ and ourselves lies in changing our worldview to one shaped by the emerging cosmological science and mystical spirituality.

Just as the Gospel writers understood “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” as a historical statement, they understood that the origins of Christ were cosmological, from the beginning of time. Whether or not we can relate to Christ as cosmological, as a divine mind, presence, Spirit, or consciousness embodied in human history and in all of creation will depend on whether we are ourselves evolving a cosmic consciousness. A consciousness needing a rationally ordered world and requiring that truth be only historical fact will of necessity reduce Christ to the size of reason or history—something Jesus shunned. The most common way to reduce Christ is to unreflectively equate Christ with Jesus. The impact of such consciousness on the Christmas story is to make it several sizes smaller than the way it has been told by the Gospel writers. It clips the story to the size where it can then fit in malls and within the Christmas traditions that evolve in the absence of the sacred.

The Christ connects not only to Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, but as Jesus taught, to the incarnating of Christos in all humanity and all of creation. But this is not the common way of talking about Christ. The common way connects cosmo-centric knowing, wisdom, and power exclusively with Jesus. This defeats exactly what Jesus sought to do, which was to see Christos in a fuller incarnation throughout creation. The “behold” of the angels was the opening fanfare to a highly energized focus on healing our blindness to the Christos power smeared throughout Creation since the beginning. Jesus continued to emphasize “opening eyes” and “opening ears”, both are graphic metaphors for the blindness and deafness of a consciousness unable to perceive the Christos immediately available to all. This evolution in consciousness, an evolution whose time had come (hence the phrase, the time is fulfilled), would change the paradigm of empire consciousness and all the activities of domination that go with it. When Christos consciousness incarnates in us, then we fulfill the intent of divine creation for us.

I hope that however you come to describe and know the relationship between Christ, Jesus, yourself, and all of creation, that it is a relationship too numinous to ever be captured by words at all, let alone a single set of verbal symbols. Connecting Christ, Jesus, us, and all of creation is a transforming adventure. There is no formula or arrangement of words that can ever encapsulate the interrelationships of these. I am well aware that certain arrangements of words have pleased some who proceed to make them orthodox or “the” correct way to talk about what must, if truth is our concern, always remain a mystery beyond verbal arrangements. So, the importance of my words are not that I have said it “right,” but that I am testifying to how the interrelationship of Christ, Jesus, me, and creation continues to be transformative, continues to give me chills and goose bumps, continues to reconfigure what I think I “know.” The interrelationships I sense continue to take me into conversations and awesome places where my rational mind knows that I can utter no more words. Sometimes I become silent as the conversation continues. My heart takes off its shoes, and whispers, “Holy.”

Holy is a good name for Christmas unwrapped in a new paradigm. Holy gives us the capacity to live Mary’s song of economic equality with all creation, as well as the cosmos’ angels words of living in peace without fear, as we generate good will shared in common.

Comments

[Ed Lucas]

Wow. This is why I come here! :-)

[Dan]

Excelente reminder hermano! You may be surprised that I hear you, understand you and give thanks for your perseverance to the vision received. There has never been a time that JEM will be more needed than in the coming decade. Feliz Navidad y Un Ano lleno de Sorpresas!!!