The Christ Within
The journey of changing my mind about God (repenting from the Greek “metanoia”) has been filled with existential angst to uplifting joy and freedom. The black and white thinking slowly dissolves like metal in a glass of water. Yet it is progress. Like the Bible, it is a progression- a slow revelation of God with the full culmination in Jesus Christ (“If you’ve seen me, you have seen the Father” (John 14:9).
The non-dual nature of Jesus’s ministry is evident in His critique of the old ways in the Old Testament: “You’ve heard it said…” (see Matthew 5:17-48). Yet we seem to live in a current culture of black and white, them and us, yes or no, racial disharmony, and abusive Earth practices shouting from the rooftops, “I can’t hear You, Jesus!”
The violence in America is atrocious and accepted. Is it any wonder we spend billions on military might to appease our collective ego drive to dominate others?
Yet the false self (mainly ego) obscures the Christ within all. All, as in, all. The Christ is part of the hypostatic union or the joining together in Jesus the Christ (Anointed One); the other part being the historical Jesus. The fully human aspect of the historical Jesus is fully encapsulated with God in the Christ. Is it any wonder Eastern iconography has Jesus holding up two fingers with His right hand? Essentially, Jesus is the microcosm and the Christ is the macrocosm. How do I make this intuitive leap? In part, intuition, and yet that is not rigorous enough to hang your hat on. There must be more. In John 1 we read the mystical account of the apostle Jesus loved which John unflinchingly asserts “that in the beginning was the Word.” It is the New Testament version of Genesis! Mankind is under a new covenantal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
John Duns Scotus, one of the most important and influential philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages, was more in touch with the epistles of Colossians and Ephesians. It is hard to say where the Bible will “speak to the Christ” within each person which is one of the reasons scripture is such a dynamic, ancient book that is timeless. These letters saw Jesus as the “first image in the mind of God” (Ephesians 1:3–6, 10–11), which is even further described in the hymn in Colossians 1:15–20. Jesus, Scotus said, was a pure and gracious declaration of the primordial truth from the very beginning which was called the doctrine of “the primacy of Christ.”
The Incarnation of God, in Jesus, offers us the living “icon of the unseen God” (Colossians 1:15), who is the theme for all else (1:16), who integrates all things in himself (1:17), who is the headmaster in a cosmic body that follows after him (1:18). If I might make use of a contemporary image: Jesus is the “hologram” for all that is happening in a holographic, steady as well as repetitive cosmos (1:19). In this holographic universe (Christ-I will elaborate on this topic in future posts) we currently exist as children of God. We have a part, template, in this holographic universe making us all One in Christ. A striking characteristic of this universe is the exact representation of God. Namely, it is both immanent and transcendent. Jesus Christ is the blueprint for all. He does what we also need to do, which is why he states, “follow me.”
Let me end by saying that all the themes of this post will be expanded upon in future posts. With that being said, I would like to conclude with a hymn from Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), a saint and mystic, revered to this day by Eastern Christians, wrote some words that point beautifully to this new force Meld, that we call the Body of Christ. It is in this cosmic embodiment created by God’s grace and our response to Trinity’s invitation to the Divine Dance. Hymn 15 in his Hymns of Divine Love beautifully names the divine union that all the Bible is forever inviting and edging us toward. Here, in Symeon’s hymn, Scripture has become spirituality:
We awaken in Christ’s body,
As Christ awakens our bodies
There I look down and my poor hand is Christ,
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand and wonderfully My hand becomes Christ,
Becomes all of Him.
I move my foot and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous to you?—Then open your heart to him.
And let yourself receive the one Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him, We wake up inside Christ’s body Where all our body all over,
Every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him,
And He makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged
Is in Him transformed.
And in Him, recognized as whole, as lovely, And radiant in His light,
We awaken as the beloved In every last part of our body.
“Test yourselves: Do you acknowledge that Jesus, the Christ, is really in you? If not, you have failed the test.”
Recent Comments