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November 2 - December 8, 2019
Elijah, a social prophet who was experientially in touch with the Spirit of God. He even, according to the stories about him, “journeyed in the Spirit,”
prophets of ancient Israel. For most of them the story of th...
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Ezekiel, whose book begins with words that almost make the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand up: “In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month of the year, on the fifth day of the month, by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.”
Saul became the apostle Paul through his experience of the Spirit.
According to Paul himself, he had a vivid experience of journeying into “the third heaven”
It seems to me that, given that there really are spirit persons and that the Jewish tradition included many such figures, Jesus was clearly a spirit person.
That vision was followed by a series of visions in the wilderness in what we typically call the temptation narrative, but which a cultural anthropologist would recognize immediately as a wilderness ordeal or vision quest, characteristic of spirit persons.36
About them it is said in the Jewish tradition that they would still their hearts before God before they would heal.
Why would a first-century Jewish person address God as “Papa” when his tradition typically used much more formal terms of address for God?
It is a bit shocking, and Jesus may have used this word for that reason, of course. That would be quite in character. But it also seems likely that this intimate term of address for God expressed the intimacy of Jesus’ own experience of God.
Sometimes his sayings began with the word amen rather than ending with it. This initial amen is unusual within Judaism. Such authoritative forms of speaking suggest that he perceived himself as speaking “from the mouth of the Spirit,” and not simply as reciting tradition.37
Jesus was both a healer and an exorcist.
But historically speaking, we can say that Jesus was perceived by his contemporaries and himself as an exorcist who cast demons out of people and as a healer of diseases, and that this was attributed to the power of the Spirit working through him.
All of this makes it plausible to locate Jesus’ own spirituality within what we know of Jewish mysticism in his day.
The more we realize that there was a form of Jewish mysticism in first-century Palestine, the more likely it seems that Jesus stood in that experiential tradition.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”40
At the center of Jesus’ life was a profound and continuous relationship to the Spirit of God.
The sketch of Jesus as a spirit person suggests that Jesus was not simply a person who believed strongly in God, but one who knew God.
The image I have sketched views Jesus differently: rather than being the exclusive revelation of God, he is one of many mediators of the sacred.
What are the chances that God would speak only to and through this particular group of people (who just happened to be our group of people)?
However, I find the image of Jesus as a spirit person highly credible.
There really are experiences of the sacred, of the numinous, of God–and Jesus was one for whom God...
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Candor compels me to acknowledge that experiences of the sacred do not prove the reality of God (though I find them far more interesting and convincing than any of the “proofs” for the existence of God). But if one does take these experiences as epiphanies of the way things are, as disclosures of the sacred–as I do myself–they have implications for how we think of God.
The supernaturalist way of imaging God also sees God as a being “out there,” and differs from deism only by affirming that God from time to time supernaturally intervenes in this world (especially in the events reported in the Old and New Testaments).
“the god of theism,” which images God as a being separate from the world–that is,
And both typically stress belief as the basis for affirming the existence of a God who is essentially not around.
Rather than being an article of belief, God becomes an experiential reality.
The experience of spirit persons in general and of Jesus in particular suggests that God is not to be thought of as a remote and transcendent creator far removed from this world, but imaged as all around us–as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being,” as the book of Acts puts it in words attributed to Saint Paul.
It shifts the focus of the Christian life from believing in Jesus or believing in God to being in relationship to the same Spirit that Jesus knew.
the Christian life moves beyond believing in God to being in relationship to God.
Spirit is synonymous with God, so long as God is understood as an experiential reality and not as a distant being.
Spirit and compassion.
Jesus’ advocacy of compassion continues to be an invitation and a challenge to the church in our day.
For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God.
Jesus’ message speaks of a way of life grounded in an imitatio dei–an imitation of God. Image of God and ethos–what God is like and how we are to live–are brought together.
Compassion thus means feeling the feelings of somebody else in a visceral way, at a level somewhere below the level of the head; most commonly compassion is associated with feeling the suffering of somebody else and being moved by that suffering to do something. That is, the feeling of compassion leads to being compassionate.
Hebrew words for compassion and compassionate are
To paraphrase William Blake, mercy wears a human face, and compassion a human heart.
so Jesus’ statement “Be compassionate as God is compassionate” is rooted in the Jewish tradition.
Like a womb, God is the one who gives birth to us–the mother who gives birth to us.
As a mother loves the children of her womb and feels for the children of her womb, so God loves us and feels for us, for all of her children.
In its sense of “like a womb,” compassionate has nuances of giving life, nourishing, caring, perhaps embracing and encompassing. ...
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to complete the imitatio dei, to “be compassionate as God is compassionate” is to be like a womb as God is like a womb. It is to feel as God feels and to act as G...
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According to Jesus, compassion is to be the central quality of a life faithful to God the compassionate one.
“Be holy as God is holy.”10
It is in the conflict between these two imitatio deis–between holiness and compassion as qualities of God to be embodied in community–that we see the central conflict in the ministry of Jesus: between two different social visions. The dominant social vision was centered in holiness; the alternative social vision of Jesus was centered in compassion.
For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm,
To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political.
advocated instead what might be called a politics of compassion.
But in first-century Jewish Palestine, this was not the case. Purity was neither trivial nor individualistic. Rather, to put it concisely, purity was political.
