God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and Church II

OhMyGod.com is a website. The phrase is also a favorite expression of female elementary 6th graders. “G-o-d” is a term our Muslim brothers would not pronounce, write, or iconographicize. It has, however, been used to refer to one’s “ultimate concern,” with which one is bound and sustained, and limits and propels one into existence.

In our time, the word “Christ” has become an expletive of disgust in some quarters, while “Holy Spirit,” if used at all, translates into the taotaomona that scares the young into proper behavior. “Church,” of course, is the building with the archaic architecture that is open when the museum is closed, or the community node where people meet each year to be the Bud, and get silly.

The Teutonic word “Gott,” the supreme power, became “God,” the good almighty power to the Anglo-Saxons, which is quite a few rivers away from the YAH (YHWH) of the Fertile Crescent, a designation for the only Reality—“I am the Real; there is no other Reality but me!”—of the caravan herders. This Reality is no goody-goody-two-shoe, and in the compelling poetry of Nikos Kazantzakis in The Saviors of God, it is the Crimson Line that marks the evolutionary process.

Kristos is Greek for “the anointed,” which is the meaning of the Jewish word “messiah,” the expected King from the line of David to unite the separated tribes of Israel. Christ is not the last name of Jesus Ibn Nazareth. Yet in the life and death of the Nazarene carpenter, especially after the Romans razed the temple of Jerusalem and the messianic expectation was heightened, this Jesus would be mythologized not only as the Savior of Israel but later, of humankind. John of Patmos allegorized the satanic Roman Empire.

Yesterday was Good Friday in the Christian calendar. It is paradoxical that Christians named it “good” Friday when the narrative is about the crucifixion of Jesus, in the ignominious company of a couple of thieves. Jesus was, of course, a good Jew but a movement outside the synagogue evolved into a religion that would bear the name of the role he played. To be a Christian is to play the role of being the anointed (called) and brining the expected deliverance of a people.

It is thus not surprising that the movement of Jesus’ followers was not called Jesuism. It was never about the idolatry of Jesus, although later devotional piety would make the whole gamut of a wimpy to irascible idol out of him.

This disparity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith would become a dividing line of religious schism throughout the ages.

The value of viewing the Jesus of history is to make sure that the faith carried in his name is not abstracted, that the concretion of the personal dimension remains. It is to the credit of Christian thinkers that they kept this personal dimension within the Godhead from which came the persona of Jesus Christ.

The Jesus of history is almost a mirage, with scholars determining that only about 20 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus could be deemed authentic. In a time when the life expectancy for the male was 33 years old, Jesus as a single male of that age makes him one of ripened maturity rather than a spring chicken in the prime of his youth, or as a young adult as depicted in many art forms.

But it was his death in the hands of the Romans, and blamed on the duplicity of the Jews, that we know of the roles he played. In Augustus’ Pax Romana where the culture of Empire, of opulence, peace and abundance, this Jesus had the temerity to talk of another empire, of beggars and the oppressed, of orphans and destitutes, of servants and prostitutes. The illusion of prosperity was contradicted by the reality of the excluded and the marginalized. In the real, he located hope and the possibilities of an authentic future.

Playing the purposeful victim added the dimension of martyrdom. The event of the crucifixion was not senseless for it made the guardians of civilization cognizant of the need for order and justice, a later component of Roman law. In Constantine’s court, the Christ crucified would rise to being Christo Rei, the King.

The notion of sacrifice was ingrained in the Semitic perspective, of being a victim and martyr on behalf of a cause “greater than I,” the supreme paradigm for human existence. Add to that the Persian-influenced Hellenistic dichotomies of light and darkness, of truth and ignorance, of good and evil, and the Jesus of history became the transcendent Christ of faith who would preside over the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Skip the limitations of the ecclesiastical edifice, and you find a rather affirming stance toward life. That good and evil exist is not denied, but that “grace abounds much more than sin,” is preached. The role of the Christ is the offense of shattering calcified illusions, of pomposity and hubris, a pointing to the power of possibilities over the hampering inertia of cowered denial of limitations, celebrating the power of life presiding over the forces of death.

This spirited acceptance of one’s personal acceptance by the cosmic force makes individuals oblivious to their travails and discomforts, and in the leap of faith, they find their assurance in hanging over the bottomless abyss of ambiguity. Life is secured not in keeping it safe but in giving it away on behalf of the other. “No love is greater than this, that one gives his life for the sake of the neighbor.”

Loving one’s neighbor is a truth that reverberates across the spheres, and resonates in the chambers of everyone’s soul, and to borrow and paraphrase the favored image of World War II landing Marines who flung their bodies into the barbed wires of history so that humanity may trample on their backs, we get the imagio dei of the Christ, and understands it as an option open to everyone, anywhere, anytime.

That this has been true, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall, world without end, we respond: Amen.