{"id":17784,"date":"2019-02-14T09:13:44","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T14:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17784"},"modified":"2019-02-14T09:21:08","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T14:21:08","slug":"jesus-and-christ-the-unnamable-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17784","title":{"rendered":"Jesus and Christ; The Unnamable One"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Jesus and Christ<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cac.org\/the-unnamable-one-2019-12-14\/\"><strong>The Unnamable One<\/strong><\/a><br>\n<strong>Thursday, February 14, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vCN7VFB5KRY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p>The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. <em>The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Think about what this means for everything we sense and know about God. After the Incarnation of Jesus, we could more easily imagine a give-and-take God, a relational God, a forgiving God. Revelations of Christ\u2014the union of matter and spirit, human and divine\u2014were already seen and honored in the deities of Native religions, the Atman of Hinduism, the teachings of Buddhism, and the Prophets of Judaism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Christians had a very good model and messenger in Jesus, but many non-Christians actually came to the \u201cbanquet\u201d more easily, as Jesus often says in his parables of the resented and resisted banquet (Matthew 22:1-10; Luke 14:7-24), where \u201cthe wedding hall was filled with guests, both good and bad alike\u201d (Matthew 22:10). What are we to do with such divine irresponsibility and largesse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why would a God worthy of the name God not care about <em>all <\/em>of the children? (Read Wisdom 11:23\u201312:2 for a humdinger of a Scripture in this regard.) Does God really have favorites among God\u2019s children? What an unhappy family that would create\u2014and indeed, it <em>has <\/em>created. The inclusion of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Christian canon ought to have served as a structural and definitive statement about Christianity\u2019s movement toward radical inclusivity. How did we miss that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Remember what God said to Moses: \u201cI AM Who I AM\u201d (Exodus 3:14). <em>God is clearly not tied to a name, <\/em>nor does God seem to want us to tie the Divinity to any one name. This is why, in Judaism, God\u2019s statement to Moses became the unspeakable and unnamable God. We must practice profound humility in regard to God, who gives us not a name, but <em>pure presence<\/em>\u2014no handle that could allow us to think we \u201cknow\u201d who God is or have him or her as our private possession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Christ is always way too much for us, larger than any one era, culture, empire, or religion. Its radical inclusivity is a threat to power and arrogance. Jesus by himself has usually been limited by the evolution of human consciousness in these first two thousand years. His reputation has been held captive by culture, nationalism, and much of Christianity\u2019s white, bourgeois, and Eurocentric worldview. Up to now, we have not been carrying history too well, because \u201cthere stood among us one we did not recognize . . . one who came after me, because he existed before me\u201d (John 1:26, 30). He came with darker skin, from the underclass, a male body with a female soul, from an often-hated religion, living on the very cusp between East and West. No one owns him, and no one ever will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jesus and Christ The Unnamable One Thursday, February 14, 2019 The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself. Think about what this means for everything we sense and know about God. After the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17784"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17784"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17786,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17784\/revisions\/17786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}