Crisis of Faith III: Jesus

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves." ~ Jesus

As a young adult, I read, analyzed and was fascinated by the King James version of the Bible.  Clearly, we had a bunch of men who tried to present a document that conveyed two sides of the Father of the Universe.  The Old Testament God was holy, firm…at times outright scary.  I revered that Spirit.  The New Testament God was still holy…yet when made mortal – gracious, light, loving, and selfless.  They called him Jesus.  I liked that one.  I followed that one. 

To be clear, for the era in which the biblical scripts were compiled, I am aware of its limitations and fallibility.  For the fact that we have boundless images of a Caucasian Christ, I am aware of its aesthetic inaccuracy and uses as an oppressive tool.  For his story’s undeniable similarities to Egyptian’s Isis, Osiris, Horus and the like, I am aware that it might have been mimicked (or outright stolen from African beliefs and transformed for propaganda).  But let’s face it, we cannot deny that if we simply focus on the Spirit Jesus’ life reveals to a world of haters, what we can gain is not all bad.  This makes me wonder what might happen if Christians chose to approach other spiritual communities with the following considerations: 

• The Spirit of Jesus is one physical aspect of God – created (without a man) by thought/word, set, nurtured, and birthed from the blood and water of a womb.  By misunderstanding, hatred and murder, the spirit returned to God.  We await its return at an undisclosed moment in the future (Goddess, Feminine power, Greco-Roman, Diety, Myth, Metaphysicism). 
• As a child, he studied and meditated in the temple (Student, Discipline). 
• An adult, Jesus acknowledged that he was a moral and sinless expression of all things Spirit and that in conjunction with the Spirit, he could do all things commanded by the Spirit – including altering life circumstances in the form of healing, changing the weather, talking to the spirits, calling out spirits, using magic, performing miracles and having knowledge of afterlife position. (ALL-NTR ).
• By the Spirit, Jesus embodied the law, universal truth, justice, order (Ma’at).
• Jesus had a clear, divine purpose in the earth, and needed divine aid to do it.  So do we (Spiritism).
• In breaking up systematic justice ‘at the hands of men’, he reinterpreted the law of love and created a system of consequences ‘at the hands of our own thoughts/actions’ (Kharma).
• Jesus believed in the movements of good and evil spirits (Bön).
• Jesus believed in One God, heaven, hell, angels, dead prophets…(Zoroastrianism, Afrikan Spirits Structure  – land of the ancestors, the divinities, the spirits, humans).
• Jesus is tortured and slaughtered as a human sacrifice- a propitiation to God on behalf of humanity (Mayan).
• On the authority of the most-high and supreme God, Jesus walked out his faith and beliefs.  No ‘home’ church, Jesus was not deeply religious.  In fact, Jesus hated the hypocrisy with which the scribes and Pharisees related to God and others (New Thought).
• At times, Jesus was full of the Holy Ghost and promised that God would send it to his followers in his absence.  The Holy Spirit inhabits those who ask for it and moves with the Spirit.  During times of possession, Christians have been known to dance, shout, laugh, fall out, sing with power, behave differently and speak in other tongues.  Again, the Bible encourages us to ask for this and wait on it (Voodoo, Hoo-Doo, Voodoun).
• Jesus had insight into the future, his death, his disciples’ death.  Jesus spoke of signs of the end times.  He and the former prophets were authorized as mediums for supernatural revelation.  We use their body and their words while deferring the same power onto today’s pastors (form of divination).
• Jesus states that he came for the Jews (Judaism).
• Jesus often went off alone to meditate (Buddhism).  
• Jesus was respected, envied, and suffered for establishing himself as being One with God (teacher, prophet). 
• Shortly before Jesus fulfilled his ultimate purpose – he met with, and was guided and comforted by the Spirit and his ancestors on the Mount of Transfiguration (Afrikan, Confucianism).
• Jesus got angry, sarcastic, and sickened by some.  For the poor and those who lacked spiritually, he cried and operated out of a sense of love and compassion (Humanism). 
• Jesus was murdered.  And so were many others, who during their time, expressed a way of thinking that went against the grain and seemed unstoppable otherwise (The World).

So where does this leave the Christian who is taught to strive to be like Christ?  Are we made perfect through Christ to run and cuddle into safer arms of God and relive the moment over and over again? Or, does Jesus’ spirit work remind us of our relationship to the Divine… to live out our destiny…to be like Him?  Or was Jesus presented as a compilation of all world religions and traded like bread for the souls of men?  Therein, the crisis. 

If Jesus is the ‘way’, the ‘truth’, and the ‘light’, then what ‘way’ are we following when we do not become just that once we are reconciled to God through his message?  Should we follow the example set by the very God that Jesus reveals?  Or should we strive to follow the dictates and laws embedded within cultures and defunct systems of man and church?  Should we decide to look within ourselves for answers?  Or do we continue to practice a form of godliness without the very power with which God endowed the Son, Christ?   

For a time I loved waking up in the morning “wit ma mind stayed on Jesus”…occasions spent at the expense of seeing his work as a route toward peace with Spirit and my purpose in the earth.  Now, I know better.  And still, I move freely, “Just as I am and waiting not, to rid my soul of one dark blot”.

InnaRae
Picture, random selection of Christ on what is celebrated as Palm Sunday