Today in therapy, my therapist was thrilled with something I’d said as we had a conversation around Jesus, which really made me wonder how many others don’t quite understand this. I felt as though her hug signified that I was a secret member of some enlightened club. My comment was, “A lot of people misunderstand Jesus. He is the way, the truth, and the life though I don’t feel that he is to be worshipped as the gatekeeper to God. What he was basically saying was to follow his example to find your own resurrection, your own miracles, your own relationship with God, the Father.”
Ever since I was a child, I felt weird worshipping Jesus. Now, I feel differently after having read the full New Testament and a good 70% of the Old (I’m still working through some missed books that I hadn’t read last year). I do believe that God created Jesus, the perfect human, after realizing how lost we were. God tried over and over again in the Old Testament to draw us back to Him, but we were so hardheaded and stubborn that it seems finally he hopped off his thrown, came down in human form, and did what any father would do. He showed us the way by leading the way and setting the example of how we should live, which worked for some of us.
Others still seem to be missing the point. When I look at the Catholic Church for example, I see the antithesis of what Jesus stood for in a lot of ways. God was never meant to be an institution, but the primary relationship in all of our lives. Religion was something that Jesus always hated and spoke in rebellion against, which is part of the reason why he was crucified by the religious institution of that time. The good news was that God never turned his back on the many in honor of the few religious humans of that time. The good news was that God loved all of his children regardless of how lost they were. In fact he loved them so much that he came down to the physical form to show us how much He loved us. He never judged us to begin with. He loved us so much that he embodied perfect love while on this Earth, and grace while his own children tortured him, and left him for dead.
At this point, you’re wondering… if He’s God wasn’t this all part of His plan? Yes, in some sense it was. I had the revelation some time ago that love requires sacrifice. This Earth displays this concept broadly. Look at the food chain. Look at the trees that die to provide our shelter. Death and sacrifice are part of love and life. Jesus knew the plan. He was born to show us how much God loved us and that entailed the ultimate sacrifice of dying “for us,” but also because of us. It was part of God’s plan to show us what love and forgiveness looks like in the face of extreme “evil.” Jesus led by example. No matter how unkind and cruel people were to him, he never gave in and let this cruelness deter him from his mission of showing love even in the face of death.
Jesus did die for our sins… not in the sense that most believe where he was the sacrifice God required to make us all “clean.” God never made us imperfect or “dirty.” “Jesus died for our sins” is a way of saying “He died because of our sins.” All sin means is to “miss the mark.” We missed what it means to be human. When we change the language around this we could say, “If it was not for our cruelty, Jesus would not have been killed,” we can clearly see the meaning of “for” in Jesus died “for” our sins. In other words, I think the “for” means “because of.”
Jesus came because humans were so misguided in their beliefs about God. They believed they were dirty, guilty, unclean, impure, etc. and felt that they had to “make it up to God” by offering sacrifices. The animal sacrifices and human sacrifices seem to be humanity’s misguided beliefs about God leading the way to hell and even after Jesus came and showed the opposite, people still couldn’t come to terms with the fact that they were previously mistaken in their beliefs. Instead, they took the whole situation and believed that God sent Jesus as the ultimate “lamb” to cleanse them. Jesus does cleanse people, but it isn’t in the act of his death, but his life. It is the fact that God sent someone like Jesus because he cared so much about helping us to see the truth of who he was and the truth of how he felt about us that cleanses us. It is his life and love that cleanses, not his death.
Do you have a relationship with God? If not, what is it that holds you back from experiencing God’s love?