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As word of the loving rabbi Jesus spreads through Israel, people begin to bring their children to Jesus that he might bless them. The disciples rebuke them, but Jesus, in turn, rebukes them: “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs” (Matt. 19:14). Most scholars interpret this text on the basis of the low social standing of children in the ancient world—children ranked only slightly higher than slaves with regard to status and rights. That Jesus invited them to his side is not particularly unusual given his
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“This is the Celtic way. Everything is holy, every moment, everything, and everyone. Christ came to reveal the sacredness of all things, to make clear what was hidden, the Light of the world.”
Eventually, I learned that Irenaeus was right when he said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” Sin is the rejection of the beauty and goodness of God’s image in every person. Jesus lived such fullness perfectly, and he revealed the deep wisdom of that truth; Christ the Word speaks this into the world. The Light of the World, the flame of our hearts. Jesus saves.
He was not killed so his death would save people; he was killed because he was already saving them.
No empire can stand if the people it oppresses figure out that reconciliation, love, liberation, and oneness hold more power than the sword.
Jesus was born a savior, and he saved during his lifetime. “Fear not!” “Peace on earth!” He did not wait around for thirty-three years and suddenly become a savior in an act of ruthless, bloody execution. Indeed, the death was senseless, stupid, shameful, evil. It meant little other than silence without the next act—resurrection—God’s final word that even the most brutal of empires cannot destroy salvus. This is no quid pro quo. Rather, Easter proclaims that God overcomes all oppression and injustice, even the murder of an innocent one. At-one-ment means just that. Through Jesus, all will be
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Maybe, just maybe, Jesus had more to do with living life than with escaping it.
Salvation meant understanding that life is, indeed, a circle, where living and dying intertwine, where we help one another live fully now and hold hands while passing into the age to come.
Salvation is not really about heaven; it is not an escape. It is about living beyond fear, knowing that death comes for each of us, often in mundane, quiet ways. “It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good,” wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich. “Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother.”17 Jesus Christ, Savior, our true Mother.
When his first followers asked him how to pray, he directed them to pray not for a heavenly kingdom, but for an earthly one where all would be fed, there would be no more debt, and peace would reign. Here and now, not there and then.
I understood the inward journey, the going deep within, to places of interiority that escaped words. This quest is a mapless journey—there is no single road—the only guides to it are nature, saints, poetry, song, and Spirit. When you dare leave the map behind, Jesus emerges as the road itself and the Light that guides.
Slowly, however, I learned that Jesus as way included both joy and loss—they were not separate roads, more like companion routes. The ways of affirmation and abandonment were not easy, but they sometimes merged.
The creeds were the result of politics, power, patriarchy, and privilege, part of a larger argument about who would shape the Christian narrative, and not some miracle of the Holy Spirit.
