New humanity has come. Forged in the flames of suffering and infinite abandonment, God Himself emerges on the other side of death. And he has brought us with him. Threading the impossible through the "eye of a needle" he has made peace between His righteous anger towards us and his overwhelming love for us.
The last post was mainly aimed at exposing a wound. The wound in fact- is our sin. Self inflicted and dehumanizing, our race has chosen to deface God's image on us like neon pink marker across a Monet landscape or like an out of key kazu sounding out during Beethoven's 9th. We are all complicit in the Fall "by nature and choice" as Driscoll says. And the result is more than embarrassing; it's fatal.
(Enter Jesus): In the coming of God to human flesh, something upside down happens. Instead of us trying to get to God through sacrifices, rituals, and disciplined behavior- God comes down to us. He is the divine "Fixer", who comes to be broken and crushed so that we can be made whole and radiant. As Eddie Vedder sings, "...when somethin's broke, I wanna put a bit of fixin' on it...when somethin's lost, I wanna fight to get it back again! (The Fixer)." Well, Jesus did come to bring war. But as you watch him dress for battle in the New Testament, instead of kicking out the Romans, you realize that He has come to die. That is the fight to get us back again. He gets us "back" from sin and death (slightly bigger enemies than the Roman empire). And his victory was definitive in the Resurrection.
Rome was dismantled, not through flashes of steel, but through a see of martyrs who followed their King, Captain, and Brother into the fray. And for the joy set before them they endured crosses, lions jaws, and flaming stakes. They didn't follow in this to earn his love, but to demonstrate the power of already having it.
Nietzsche says that the world was pretty much hunky dory, unless you had the overbearing jewish worldview of an God angry at you, who is broken hearted over the corruption of His creation. Have a look:
"A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape--I mean one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding continually. Only here was the rare and sudden piercing of the gruesome and perpetual general day-night by a single ray of the sun experienced as if it were a miracle of "love" and the ray of unmerited "grace." Only here could Jesus dream of his rainbow and his ladder to heaven on which God descended to man. Everywhere else good weather and sunshine were considered the rule and everyday occurrences (from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.137, Walter Kaufmann trans)."
But is this really the case? "Everywhere else good weather and sunshine were considered the rule and everyday occurrences." Really? When Jesus steps on the stage of world, he didn't just enter a small Galilean province dominated by Rome. He stepped into a world with as much longing for "fixing" and as much "brokenness" as our own. The religions were searching for meaning in god, the gods, or some kind of transcendent experience. The philosophies were aching for a logic (logos see John 1) that unified "the whole show (Miracles by C.S. Lewis)" of human experience. And just like today, humankind was enslaved to its desires and stricken with war, disease, political power plays, racial division, and the abuse of anything and everything good we possess. I'd hardly consider any day on earth- at anytime to be enjoying "good weather and sunshine" as a "rule". Even the pristine beaches of east asia are battered with tsunamis and the seemingly uber-nation of the U.S. can be terrorized. In what utopia has the human landscape ever had peace, harmony, and "good weather" as a rule?
Next, history bears out that it wasn't just among the Jews that Jesus became "a rainbow (and) ladder to heaven which God descended." This message spread like wildfire among the polytheists of its time. The most predominate churches written about in the new testament were in large cities with anything but a biblical view of God or humanity. And yet here, they found the resolution to a story that their cultural narratives never seemed to be able to find(Lamin Sanneh).
There is light. There is a dawn coming. Jesus' resurrection is the peek of the Sun just on the horizon and at the sight of it, there is a "ray of grace" that changes us when we see it. He took on cosmic darkness to bring an eternal light- to give us Himself. And not only for Jews, but for Germans, Chinese, Moroccans, South Africans- you and me. Thanks for reading this semi-cohesive "chewing" in my mind. I hope somebody finds it refreshing.
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