The Importance of Jesus

For the greater part of my life, I have been haunted by the person of Jesus. From my earliest days as a child, there was something compelling about him and all that he stood for. Much of that, however, was mostly mediated through the church I grew up in and served as a priest. It was also heavily influenced by his role as the Christ, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity.

For the last several years, however, I’ve been far more interested in who he was as a man. I want to know the human dimension to him in hopes that I can become more human myself.

What made him so receptive to the Spirit in his life? What drove him, what influenced him, what set him apart, what happened to him that made him so utterly unique? Or, as Walter Wink puts it so succinctly: How did Jesus struggle to incarnate God? How did Jesus experience and communicate the presence of God? What did he really mean by the “kingdom”?

Even more so, why am I so attracted to him as a man? What is it about him that is so striking, so revelatory?

Here’s where I am now in my search: I am spending more and more time reading about those who are constructing a Christology from below, using scholars employing the best tools available for a historical/critical approach, but also a deep faith life committed to living out what it means to be truly human.

Although I come laden with the “detritus of routinized religion” in my personal historical journey, I am convinced, along with these scholars, that it is possible to “recover priceless rubies among the rubble” in the process. Ultimately, I want to seek a fresh picture of what Jesus might be for me and for others. In the words of Wink, I want to “understand what mystics have always known: “that the exegete stands, with Israel, at the Sinai of the soul, where God still speaks.”

In a careful reading of the gospels, what becomes crystal clear is that what makes Jesus so utterly unique in human history is his condemnation of all forms of domination:

• Patriarchy and the oppression of women and children
• The economic exploitation and the impoverishment of entire classes of people
• The family as chief instrument for the socialization of children into oppressive roles and values
• Hierarchical power arrangements that disadvantage the weak while benefitting the strong
• The subversion of the law by the defenders of privilege
• Rules of purity that keep people separated
• Racial superiority and ethnocentrism
• The entire sacrificial system with its belief in sacral violence

“Jesus proclaimed the Reign of God (or ‘God’s Domination-Free Order’), not only as coming in the future, but as having already dawned in his healings and exorcisms and his preaching of good news to the poor. He created a new family, based not on bloodlines, but on doing the will of God. He espoused nonviolence as a means for breaking the spiral of violence without creating new forms of violence. He called people to repent of their collusion in the Domination System and sought to heal them from the various ways the system had dehumanized them.” Wink, The Human Being, p. 14.

Wink believes that Jesus’ critique of domination is the “most radical and comprehensive framework for understanding what he was about.” P.14 “It was Jesus who exposed the Domination System with such devastating effect and envisioned God as nonviolent and all-inclusive …. The revelation Jesus brought was so at odds with the world’s power arrangements that we have yet to take its measure.” P. 15

I was never really certain what we meant by saying that the reason Jesus is so important to us is that he “saved us from sin.” I now understand so much better that the great sin that he invited us to be rid of was the idolatrous relationship with power that is so ultimately attractive to us and can result in the most de-humanizing forms of behavior.