by Rev. Dr. Toni LaMotta
Many years ago, I taught high school religion and for some reason I had to be out of town for a few days and was asked to leave an assignment for my students. I asked them to write an essay, answering the question that Jesus asked Simon Peter, Who Do YOU Say that I am? Their responses of course varied from the sublime to the ridiculous – and I’ve been pondering my own answer to that every since.
Our theme for this month is The Jesus Path – the Christ Consciousness. So, today, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on the answer to that question in the hopes that you will continue to ponder your own response as well.
The Jesus Path centers on the transformation that comes from following Jesus Christ in such a way that we become awakened to our oneness with God, our own divinity.
In the Jesus Path God is defined by Jesus but not confined to him. Jesus reveals God in an astounding new way and also models for us what being a liberated human being looks like. If something is not consistent with Jesus’ life and teaching, we do not embrace it. For instance, the prevailing idea (originating from the biblical letters of Paul and Hebrews) that Jesus died for our sins to appease the wrath of God is not consistent with Jesus’ teaching that “God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked,”1 and that we should forgive others without retribution or attempting to extract a penalty from them. He forgave others without requiring anything from them and from the cross asked God to do the same.2 Jesus, emphasizing the passing of the old sacrificial system, taught, “God desires mercy, not sacrifice.”3 It may have been inevitable for the early church, immersed in both Jewish and Gentile sacrificial culture, to interpret Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for sin, but we should not if we are going to take Jesus himself seriously. Jesus went about proclaiming persons were already forgiven without need of temple, ritual, sacrifice, or even repentance!4
So if Jesus is not an atoning sacrifice for us, what is he? The historical person of Jesus of Nazareth is a prototype of what it means to be awakened to our own humanity and divinity. The classic Christian creeds seem to get it right when they define Jesus as fully human and fully God. However, they are limited if they understand that the only expression of that is Jesus rather than including other great spiritual persons and, ultimately, all of us. Jesus is different from us only in degree, not in kind.
Different religions including Christianity have various ways of describing the nature of that union and how one attains it, but knowing, embracing, experiencing, and manifesting our oneness with God is the great treasure. This is God’s greatest gift to humankind and the goal of all existence. The Jesus Path describes this in the most daring language: the goal of salvation is to realize our own divinity. Jesus said it simply, “Do you not know that you are gods?”21 Our response has most often been, “You’ve got to be joking.”
His prayer was that we would realize our oneness with God.22 Paul speaks of it as Christ living in us.23 Others speak of it as “participants of the divine nature,”24 or being like Jesus – “He [Jesus] was like us in every respect,”25 and “When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”26 Eastern Orthodoxy boldly names it “deification,” and in Holy Thursday litany confesses, “In my kingdom, said Christ, I shall be God with you as god.” In the words of Athanasius, an early church leader, “God become human that we might become divine.”27 Deification is part of all Christian traditions, although it has so receded into the background in most that it sounds unfamiliar, even unchristian, when clearly expressed, as in the early church’s words: God became a real man so that each of us might become a real god! St. Basil28 wrote that humans are the creatures that have received the order to become gods. Jesus’ words were even stronger – not about “becoming” but about what is true right now – “You are gods.”
“the Jesus question.” Who was he? Who is he? What was he trying to say? How limited a view do we have because of what we have been taught in the past?
In New Thought, in Unity, we look at the life of Jesus, the Christ, as an example of one who truly lived as one who KNEW WHO HE WAS, ONE with God.
We look at him, not as the great exception, but the great example. He was a simple Jewish boy, who in some wonderful way, became so at one with God,
with all Life, that he became the Messiah . . . The Christ.
(The Christ meaning one whom surrenders a limited sense of life to the Divine realization of wholeness and Divinity with Good, Spirit-God.)
Unity minister, Eric Butterworth:
Christ was not born in Bethlehem, Jesus was! The birth of Christ goes back much, much farther than that to Genesis 1 where it says: “God created man in his own image.” Jesus was not the creation of the Christ in man. He
discovered the Christ dimension in himself and fulfilled its potential. And so the Christmas story does not end with the birth of Jesus. Instead, it foretells of the Christ in you, and compels you on your own awakening. The problem of Christmas is that it has been a birthday celebrating Jesus rather than a commitment day celebrating the transcendent light in each one of us.
Christmas was more than the birth of a man – it was the birth of the consciousness called the Christ – It calls us to an awakening. The birth it celebrates is not the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, but the birth of the Christ Light in each one of us.
A great mystic once said:
“Christ could be born a thousand times in Galilee,
But all in vain, until it’s born in me.”
EH wrote at p. 359 of the textbook:
It was impossible for Jesus not to have become the Christ. As the human gave way to the Divine, as the man gave way to God, as the flesh gave way to Spirit as the will of division gave way to the will of unity — Jesus the
man became a living embodiment of the Christ.
On that same page EH, wrote:
As the human gives way to the Divine in all people, they became the Christ.
Teachers today, like Fr. Thomas Keating say, “If you don’t want to be God, you’ve missed the whole point of Jesus’ message.”
Jesus was a universal person living in a specific time and place. His followers made claims about him that he did not make about himself. The language of love often says to our beloved partner, “You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” or ‘You are the most handsome man who has ever lived.”
So, too, the early Christians, lost in their passionate love for Jesus and saved from small ideas, called Jesus the only son of God. In the power of Myth, Joseph Campbell tells us that In the ancient world, rulers were often said to have been born of a virgin and called son of God. It was natural to understand Jesus in these terms in that culture and incorporate this into the stories about him.
Yet, Jesus called himself son of man and, as pointed out in the Gospel of Thomas as well as the four canonical gospels, we are all called sons and daughters of God.
While progressive Christians find that God is beautifully defined by Jesus, we know that God is not confined to Jesus. We are comfortable following Jesus while affirming other authentic spiritual paths and persons and being enriched by them. We model how all traditional religions can evolve to higher levels without having to leave their unique path. Jesus didn’t dismiss his religion. Instead, he offered a more evolved version of it for his time. His model is relevant for all religious traditions today.
We can even confidently follow Jesus’ own model for interpreting his bible, the Hebrew scriptures. He embraced parts of them, ignored parts of them, and rejected parts of them — namely, those portrayals of God that were less than loving. Jesus said, “You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say that you should love your enemy, too.” To follow Jesus is to make him the discerner of all things biblical and reject those things that are less than Christ-like.
Once we let go of all claims to exclusivity and narrow theologies, we can embrace God’s light in many loving paths. We can embrace a truly universal Jesus whose Christ (anointed) consciousness flows through all creation by whatever name. Then we can genuinely enjoy the lovely stories around the birth of Jesus as pictures of adoration and love and at the same time KNOW that these stories are telling us as much about OURSELVES as they are about JESUS.
There was a little church in a plaza called Santa Rosa. One Sunday morning, as the congregation filed in, there was a loud intake of breath. The statue of Jesus stood in the corner as usual, but vandals had entered the chapel
and broken off its hands. After Mass, the priest organized a committee of parishioners to investigate the crime and buy another statue.
The following Sunday, as the congregation filed in for Mass, there was another loud intake of breath. This time, a sign was hanging around the statue’s neck. It was carefully hand-lettered and read: I have no hands but yours.
If our world is to know PEACE, if your family is to know LOVE, if the people you work with or socialize with are to know JOY, it has to come from YOU… There is no God out there waiting to give the world peace, joy or love. They have already been given. The Consciousness of the Christ has already come – but it is up to you and me to activate it in our experience
Recently POPE Francis gave a talk on this same idea and he said–in order to know Jesus, “what is needed is not a study of notions but rather a life as a disciple”. For “in journeying with Jesus we learn who he is … we come to know Jesus as disciples”. We come to know him “in the daily encounter with the Lord, each day. Through our victories and through our weaknesses”. It is precisely “through these encounters” that “we draw close to him and come to know him more deeply”. For it is “in these everyday encounters that we acquire what St Paul calls the mind of Christ, the hermeneutic to judge all things”.
Who do you say I AM?
Another way to look at what we believe about Jesus is to ask the question -What do we say after the word’s I AM
What follows the I am will always come looking for you.
I am so clumsy – invite clumsy
I am so old – wrinkles come
You get to choose what to say
I am blessed. Blessings come looking for you.
I am strong. You invite strength into your life
I’m so unlucky – invite disappointment
Invite good things into your life
I am
Ephesians – You are my Masterpiece
Do you need Me?
I am there.
You cannot see Me, yet I am the light you see by.
You cannot hear Me, yet I speak through your voice.
You cannot feel Me, yet I am the power at work in your hands.
I am at work, though you do not understand My ways.
I am at work, though you do not recognize My works.
I am not strange visions. I am not mysteries.
Only in absolute stillness, beyond self, can you know Me as I am, and then but as a feeling and a faith.
Yet I am there. Yet I hear. Yet I answer.
When you need Me, I am there.
Even if you deny Me, I am there.
Even when you feel most alone, I am there.
Even in your fears, I am there.
Even in your pain, I am there.
I am there when you pray and when you do not pray.
I am in you, and you are in Me.
Only in your mind can you feel separate from Me, for only in your mind are the mists of “yours” and “mine.”
Yet only with your mind can you know Me and experience Me.
Empty your heart of empty fears.
When you get yourself out of the way, I am there.
You can of yourself do nothing, but I can do all.
And I am in all.
Though you may not see the good, good is there, for I am there.
I am there because I have to be, because I am.
Only in Me does the world have meaning; only out of Me does the world take form; only because of Me does the world go forward.
I am the law on which the movement of the stars and the growth of living cells are founded.
I am the love that is the law’s fulfilling. I am assurance. I am peace. I am oneness. I am the law that you can live by. I am the love that you can cling to. I am your assurance. I am your peace. I am one with you. I am.
Though you fail to find Me, I do not fail you.
Though your faith in Me is unsure, My faith in you never wavers, because I know you, because I love you.
Beloved, I am there.
Speaking from a Contemplative Theological perspective, I would say that in his lifetime, Jesus was the perfect embodiment of the Divine. Through his being, absolute Oneness with God was expressed. As such, he was and is a Way Shower to all who follow him, providing a model for how we should live our lives.
He also played out an important and complicated role through his life and death, fulfilling the prophecies of the Jewish Messiah, especially as those prophecies were revealed through the prophet, Isaiah. As such, his life and death ushered in a new age, the coming of the kingdom on earth, which provided the content for most of his ministry. His life purpose was all about the coming of the kingdom. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
In some strange and mysterious way, he managed to break through the barriers of death. As such, he continues to be a source of life, healing, and wisdom for all who choose to commune with him in the depths of consciousness where all the barriers of separation break down.
The question, “Who do you say that I am,” is one that he posed to his disciples. Like Peter, I would have to reply, “You are the Messiah.” However, I believe that to this day, Christians are still discovering exactly what that means.
So as the immortal Christ, the one in all, Jesus continues to be the greatest mystery, one that can only be discovered through dedicated contemplative practice, and then never fully described.
Obviously, I had spent some time thinking about it.
Then I came across this in The Gospel of Thomas. It’s a variation on a question Jesus asked Simon Peter (Who do you say that I am?) after some of the other disciples had taken a stab at discerning his true identity. (see Matthew 16:13-20)
From the Gospel of Thomas
Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like.”
Simon Peter said to him, “You are like a righteous angel.”
Matthew said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.”
Thomas said to him, “Master, my mouth is incapable of saying whom you are like.” The footnote to my version of this gospel suggests that Thomas’ reply presents him as the disciple most in awe of Jesus because he’s incapable of expressing what he is like.
Reading this reminded me that, yes, we can speak from a particular perspective, as I attempted to do above, speaking from a contemplative theological perspective. Or we can quote verses from the Bible. Or we can repeat the words we’ve heard in church. Or we can toss up any one of our well-rehearsed arguments about who Jesus was.
Yet, in the end, if we’ve had a truly life-changing encounter with the Divine, then like Thomas, we’re incapable of saying what it’s really like.
So I think I like my first answer to the question posed by our reader the best. Because it implies that my understanding of who Jesus was is continually evolving. It grows as my experiences deepen and I open myself to new understanding. I think I can trust that. This, to me, is the essence of the spiritual journey.
NEW THOUGHT
We believe that each person is a part of the whole. That there is one Divine Presence, One Divine Substance, One Life that created us out of Itself. That there is ONE Life and ONE Light and we are a Part of that One
Life.
We believe in the underlying divinity of all of life. We believe that the more we identify ourselves as a part of the Whole, part of that ONE Life, (some say God, Universal Truth, Infinite Source) the more we identify with that Source, the more we live consciously from that place. The more we identify with the self, the ego, the little identities, the more we experience suffering, pain, heartache, and separation.
We believe that as we awaken to our divinity (wake up to our Christ Nature) we begin to live as conscious beings and begin to consciously create the good that was meant to be ours. This is the process of illumination, waking
up to our divinity and our unity with the whole. We call that awareness Christ Consciousness
Roy Eugene Davis: “There is only one reason why people, as a whole, live out their lives in fear and suffering. They are not aware of who they really are. They are asleep to the Truth. The solution to the problem of human suffering is for people to awaken and come into the full realization of who they are. There is no other way. Blind believing, superstitious performance of rituals, dependence upon outside gods or forces in nature, only indicate lack of Self-realization.”
“The way to Self-realization is not a trial and error method. It is fast, direct and evidence of progress can be readily noted. But the choice is ours. We can grope along, stumbling blindly, or we can turn our attention
and our efforts to the solution of man’s universal problem, ignorance of soul nature.”
And so, in New Thought we look at the life of Jesus, the Christ, as an example of one who truly lived as one who KNEW WHO HE WAS, ONE with God.
We look at him, not as the great exception, but the great example. He was a simple Jewish boy, who in some wonderful way, became so at one with God,
with all Life, that he became the Messiah . . . The Christ.