The Universal Christ
Page 18
In John’s account, two angels appear and ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She replies, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” She then turns around and sees a man whom she doesn’t recognize. Mary supposes he is the gardener (John 20:15) and asks him where he has taken Jesus. Then, in one of the most dramatic moments in the Gospels, the man simply pronounces her name, “Mary!”
What happens next? Translations say “she turned,” or “she knew,” or “turning to face him,” she cries out, “Rabbuni!” which means “Master” (John 20:13–16). Instantly, Mary sees the one before her in a different way, you might say relationally instead of merely physically. She realizes it is still Jesus, but he has fully become the Christ.
In reply, Jesus the Christ speaks a somewhat shocking line variously translated as “Do not touch me” or “Do not cling to me” (John 20:17a). Why would he suddenly give such a cold response? The answer lies in an understanding of the Eternal Christ.
I don’t believe the resurrected Jesus was being aloof or rejecting Mary’s friendship, nor was he afraid of intimacy. He was saying that the Christ is untouchable in singular form because he is omnipresent in all forms—as we soon see as the “gardener” at the tomb (John 20:15), as a wayfarer on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13), as a man tending a cooking fire by the side of a lake (John 21:4). In each of these inner and outer journeys, Jesus was in the process of returning to his God and Father, whom Jesus tellingly describes as both “my God” and “my Father” and “your God” and “your Father” (John 20:17b). Jesus now speaks from his omnipresent and inclusive Christ role. (I personally suspect this is the same kind of presence that so many people experience right after the passing of a friend, or shortly thereafter.)
I believe that, by repeating “my” and “your” twice, the text is trying to communicate that the event under way describes one common and shared God experience—his and ours. Yes, they are the same experience! You could even say this is the first premonition of what will become the doctrine of the Body of Christ, the radical unity between Christ and all people (1 Corinthians 12:12ff.). Jesus of Nazareth, an individual man, has become Christ, the Corporate Personality.
We used to know him primarily by outer observation, but now we know him primarily by interior exchange. (Which is how we all know Christ, and is commonly called “prayer.”)
Now we can put the whole of Mary Magdalene’s story together. Apparently over much of Jesus’s ministry life, she had been a frequent witness to the personal, concrete Jesus of Nazareth. But after the resurrection, she also had the unique experience of being the first witness to the Omnipresent Christ. Then, acting on his charge for her to tell his friends what she had seen, Mary passed on the good news to the “apostles” (John 20:18, Matthew 28:8). This singular role makes her indeed the “apostle to the apostles,” which is exactly how the early church, commentators throughout history, and even early liturgical texts honor her. The first apostle was a woman. And saying that is not trying to be politically correct. It’s true by the early definition of an apostle as a “witness to the resurrection” (Acts 1:22).
Like Mary, we must somehow hear our name pronounced, must hear ourselves being addressed and regarded by Love, before we can recognize this Christ in our midst. And like Mary, we usually need to start with the concrete encounter before we move to the universal experience available to all. Spiritual knowing is an inner encounter and a calm inner knowing that we usually identify with “soul” knowledge. We need this intimate inner knowing because we can’t be left at the visual level or we will always think we can localize, limit, or capture God as a private possession (see John 20:29), or as something that can or must be “proven” to others.
This is no small point. If God is God, then the Divine Presence must necessarily be everywhere and universally accessible. If you can physically “touch” God, it’s easy to think God is just here and not there, mine but not yours.
Obviously, Mary Magdalene’s unique and important role was not ordinarily acknowledged in the first centuries of almost entirely patriarchal Christianity. Most still imagined that all of the apostles were male, and therefore priesthood and ministry should be reserved for men (as if gender were a quality of the True Self, the restored Self, or the ontological self in God!). This argument is undone, it seems to me, by Christ appearing first to Mary after the resurrection, and by his charge for her to be his first witness. Yes, the men ended up getting sent out into the world, no doubt because only men were taken seriously as safe or legal witnesses or even religious teachers in most cultures at that time.
It is also worth mentioning that the twelve men are consistently portrayed in the Gospel accounts as very slow to respond, and usually filled with doubt and hesitation (Mark 16:11, 13–14) and even resistance, denial, and betrayal, yet that is not brought up as an impediment to their leadership. But Mary seemed to recognize Jesus’s new kind of Presence the moment he uttered her name. Those who recognize the Presence are the most prepared to talk about it with authority, it seems to me, and not just those who hold a role or an office. But institutions can only survive structurally, it seems, by defined roles and offices. I do understand that.
Still, it is not insignificant that it took a woman who first loved Jesus personally to build the bridge from Jesus to Christ. Mary came to full spiritual knowing quickly because it was a knowing through love relationship, and presence itself. Notice that she knew and trusted Jesus’s voice, even when she couldn’t recognize him. How different that is from our more common empirical knowing, which limits itself to various kinds of “proof,” to its own form of reason, and to occasional moments of specific divine revelation. I believe that if we don’t learn how to send people on inner journeys or love journeys, the whole religious project will continue to fall apart, because we have no living witnesses of a transformed life.
I want you to notice that Mary took her journey not by grasping on to the old Jesus, but by letting him introduce her to the even larger Christ. In Mark’s Gospel this utterly new mode of presence is stated quite deliberately, as it says, “he showed himself under another form” (Mark 16:12). Other texts have him bilocating, passing through doors, walking on water—all indications of a new kind of presence, which we are here calling the “Christ.” (Some of these post-resurrection stories are put in the Gospel as pre-resurrection events, like the Transfiguration scene or Jesus walking on water.) We usually have to let go of Jesus on one level before we can accept and believe in “Jesus the Christ.” If your Jesus remains too small, too sentimental (e.g., “Jesus, my personal boyfriend”), or too bound by time and culture, you do not get very far at all. For Jesus to become Christ, he must surpass the bounds of space and time, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Frankly, he must rise above any religion formed in his name that remains tribal, clannish, xenophobic, or exclusionary. Otherwise, he is not the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42) at all. This is much of the problem of credibility that we are facing now all over this same world that he is still trying to save.
Mary Magdalene serves as a witness to personal love and intimacy, which for most people is the best and easiest start on the path toward universal love. Then in the garden at Easter, she experienced a sudden shift of recognition toward the universal Presence or Christ. He, in fact, is the gardener! He has become every man and every woman! She was not mistaken at all when she “supposed he was the gardener” (John 20:15).
In our second witness, we will meet one who starts with the Universal Christ, which then leads him to a deep devotion to the crucified and resurrected Jesus. God can use either path as long as we stay on that path for the whole journey.
Paul
Unlike Mary Magdalene, the apostle Paul never knew Jesus in the flesh; he only and forever knew the Risen Christ. Earlier we recounted his experience of being struck down and blinded, and we moved from there to consider how
his transcendent experience—captured in his favorite phrase “en Cristo”—moved him away from narrow religion and into a universal vision. Here I want to focus on how Paul, in effect, started with Christ and rather quickly made a full identification with Jesus, whose voice he heard on the Damascus road (Acts 9:4).
Rather than reading Paul’s thought primarily as arguments about sin and salvation, as Christians have long tended to do, I want to read Paul as a witness to both personal and cultural transformation, which he himself went through. Jesus represents the personal and Christ the cultural, historical, and social levels. Paul really teaches both, although the second has been largely underemphasized until the last fifty years.
You remember that while traveling the road to Damascus, Paul (then known by his Hebrew name, Saul) heard a voice asking him, “Why do you persecute me?” He responded: “Who are you, Lord?” And the Lord said, “ ‘I am Jesus whom you persecute” (Acts 9:4–5). He was struck blind for three days (which often symbolizes a time of necessary transitioning to a new knowledge), and he had to be led into Damascus by the hand. During these three days Paul lived in what I call “liminal space,” betwixt and between worlds; he took no food or water from the “old world” he was accustomed to, and began his transition to a “new world” in Christ. His is a classic description of conversion, and it follows the typical progression from self-love, to group love, to universal love. But Paul did it rather quickly, whereas most of us take a lifetime. Very soon Paul’s “sight was restored” and the hater was baptized into a rather universal love. He became the foremost teacher and proclaimer of the Gospel (Acts 9:17), even more than the original Twelve, and for the rest of his life, he worked to build a solid bridge between his beloved Judaism and this new “sect” of Judaism, as he clearly first saw it (read Romans 11).
The fact that Paul didn’t know Jesus in person makes him the perfect voice to name the Christ experience for all of us who come after him. Did you know that Paul uses the single word “Jesus,” without adding “Christ” or “Lord,” only five times in all his authentic letters? (And two of those appear in the hymn from Philippians 2:10–11, which presumably he did not write.) In recent centuries, Christians have largely read him as if he was focused on what it takes for individuals to “go to heaven” and avoid hell. But Paul never once talks about our notion of hell! Most people fail to notice that. He would have agreed with Jesus, I think, that humans are punished by their sins more than for their sins. Goodness is its own reward, and evil is its own punishment—although the thought and language of that period led most people to ascribe final causality to God.
If you look at all Paul’s texts on evil or “the problem,” you see that sin for Paul was actually a combination of group blindness or corporate illusion, and the powerlessness of the individual to stand against it (Romans 7:14ff.) along with systemic evil (Ephesians 6:12 and Colossians 1:16ff.). Evil is not just individual nastiness. “Our battle is not against human forces, but the Sovereignties and Powers that originate in the darkness, the spirits of evil in the air” (Ephesians 6:12). We now see that these systems (corporations, nation-states, institutions) have a life of their own, and are usually unaccountable to reason or even law—as much as we try to make them accountable. The ancients were not naïve about such things.
Paul seems to have believed humans are caught in a double bind, and he was convinced that only corporate goodness could ever stand up to corporate evil—thus his emphasis on community building and “church.” This is probably why Paul is often called the “founder of the church,” and why he expected and hoped for so much from those first Christian communities. He was the proud parent of “children” and exemplars, whom he wanted to show off to the pagans. This admittedly often makes him look didactic and moralistic, which many do not like. But remember, the greater light you are, the greater shadow you cast. And Paul is a huge light.
What Paul calls “sin” and personifies as “Adam” or the “old man” (Romans 5:12ff., 1 Corinthians 15:21ff.), many of us today might call the “human tragedy.” Whatever term you use, Paul believed Christ named the normal human situation as an entrapment, even a slavery, and, like Jesus, Paul tried to give us a way out of what he saw as ephemeral, passing, oppressive, and finally illusory. His vision was not cosmetic but revolutionary, and we miss that if we make him into a mere moralizer or “church man.”
I would insist that the foundation of Jesus’s social program is what I will call non-idolatry, or the withdrawing of your enthrallment from all kingdoms except the Kingdom of God. This is a much better agenda than feeling you have to attack things directly, or defeat other nation-states, the banking system, the military-industrial complex, or even the religious system. Nonattachment (freedom from full or final loyalties to man-made domination systems) is the best way I know of protecting people from religious zealotry or any kind of antagonistic thinking or behavior. There is nothing to be against, but just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for! (Think Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa.) Paul’s notion of sin comes amazingly close to our present understanding of addiction. And he thus wanted to free us from our enthrallments with what he considered “mere rubbish” (Philippians 3:8), which is not worthy of our loyalty. “If only I can have Christ and be given a place in him!” Can you hear Paul’s corporate understanding in phrases like that?
The addict, or sinner, does not actually enjoy the world as much as he or she is enslaved to it, in Paul’s understanding. Jesus had come to offer us a true alternative social order here and not just a “way to heaven” later.
Did you ever notice that Jesus himself was not really that upset at the bad behavior that most of us call sin? Instead, he directed his critical attention toward people who did not think they were sinners, who could not see their own shadows or dark sides, or acknowledge their complicity in the world’s domination systems. Most of us would rather attack an easy, visible target—preferably sex and body-based issues—and thus feel “pure” or “moral.” Like any true spiritual master, Jesus exposed the root causes of evil (almost always some form of idolatry), and did not waste time punishing the mere symptoms, as moralistic people usually do.
In his groundbreaking study, The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West, the renowned Harvard scholar and pastor Krister Stendahl (1921–2008) writes that Paul hardly ever speaks of personal guilt, or personal and private salvation—we are just trained to hear him that way! Stendahl goes so far as to say that in the undisputed seven original letters of Paul, he does not speak of personal forgiveness as much as of God’s blanket forgiveness of all sin and evil. Sin, salvation, and forgiveness are always corporate, social, and historical concepts for the Jewish prophets and for Paul. When you recognize this, it changes your entire reading of the Gospels.
I do believe Paul was implicitly an evolutionary thinker, which he makes explicit in much of Romans 8. Real power is now available and false power has been exposed in Paul’s thinking, and now it is just a matter of time till false power falls apart. I have witnessed much of this evolution of consciousness in my own small lifetime—toward nonviolence, inclusivity, mysticism, and ever more selfless love, as well as more correct naming of the shadow side of things. This is the gradual “second coming of Christ.” Our present highly partisan politics, angry culture wars, and circling of the wagons around white privilege are just the final gasps of the old, dying paradigm. Jesus and Paul believed this already two thousand years ago, and we are now seeing the inevitable results at an increased pace. Violence is at the lowest rate in all of history, the statisticians say. (What must it have been like before?)
For Paul, it is all a “game of thrones,” and there is only one legitimate throne that keeps the smaller kingdoms in perspective and finally losing. “Jesus is Lord” is likely our first simple creed and acclamation (1 Corinthians 12:3), negating the imperial Roman “Caesar is Lord.” That is Paul’s great and firm act o
f faith. These smaller entities have a life and death of their own, and can never be captured by either killing or “redeeming” one individual. Evil was seen by both Jesus and Paul as corporate bondage and illusion, more than just private perverse behavior. Of course, both are true in the full picture.
Very important, and an utterly new idea from Paul was that the Gospel was not about following some criteria outside of the human person—which he calls “the law,” but that the locus of authority had changed to inside the human person. This is why he rails against law so strongly and surprisingly in both Romans and Galatians. The real and “new” law is an actual participation with Someone inside of us: the “love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5 and throughout). This Inner Authority, this personal moral compass, will guide us more than any outer pressure or law, he believes, and it is available to everyone. This is revolutionary and admittedly scary. As Paul writes in Romans 2:14–15, even “the pagans…can point to the substance of the law that is already written on their hearts…they can demonstrate the effect of the Law…to which their own conscience bears witness.” Paul thus provides the headwaters of our still largely undeveloped theology of natural law and individual conscience. He is directly building on what Jeremiah had foretold as the “new covenant” (31:31–34), which would be “written on our hearts.” It makes one wonder if most of us are still in the “old covenant” of law and order and merely external authority. Paul was far ahead of most of history, and already pointed us toward what I call “second half of life spirituality.”*