As a semi-Christian semi-scientist, I’ve always tripped over the notion that Jesus was the actual one and only God. Or member of the Trinity, or whatever. It just seemed awfully over-the-top, placing Jesus in the mythical realm of Zeus and Vishnu, where he didn’t belong. And with all apologies to the apologists, my understanding is that this is why the early Christians decided that Jesus was God – their Jesus was in competition with these other gods.
And he still is, which is why it’s sometimes hard to have a calm discussion about these things. But speaking for myself, it’s these extreme claims about Jesus that for many years kept me from wanting to know more about him and his teachings. It seemed that Christianity required a suspension of disbelief equal to Harry Potter.
But eventually curiosity got the better of me: I wanted to know more about this guy who, if not God, certainly did seem godlike – even after stripping away all the mythology added years or centuries after his death. And behind all the hype and embellishment, there was something compelling in the narrative of God humbling Himself by assuming the form of a mortal peasant.
I studied the Bible, examined alternate translations, considered different schools of interpretive thought, but, never finding a version of Christianity that felt completely real, eventually walked away from the whole thing. There’s truth in there somewhere, I sensed, but we’re just not getting it; and I’d rather retreat to the austere shelter of agnosticism than believe in Hogwarts.
Agnosticism, it turns out, can be a fertile place. After spending some seasons in “beginner’s mind”, a believable story emerged for me: Jesus was the “Son of God” because we’re all “Children of God”. In whatever sense Jesus was “at-one” with God, we all are, or can be, as well.
When early Christians decided that Jesus was the one and only “God incarnate”, not only did they inflate Jesus, they shrunk God. In the centuries since these ideas were formulated, we’ve come to appreciate the vastness of even the observable universe, which in turn has deepened the meaning of the word ineffable. If someone today was asked to “picture” the God who created this universe, they would likely try to imagine someone or something far larger than could fit in a human body. If Jesus was a part of God, he must have been but a small spark of a flaming sun.
Which is all well and good, except that it opens the possibility of additional sparks. Can’t we all be gods as well? Or better, aren’t we all gods as well? We’re also silly animals, sometimes, which is where it gets complicated. Perhaps Jesus was just trying to help us differentiate between these two aspects of our being. He was basically saying: You’re a god, so act like a god.
Someone may respond: “Then let’s see you walk on water!”, but, in truth, I see lots of “walking on water”, all over the world, all the time. We humans are flat-out miraculous creatures – we just forget, sometimes. It seems Jesus was exceptional in his godliness, but he was also clearly encouraging us to follow suit.
It seems to require only a subtle shift for us to begin to realize our own godhood. If celebrities and pop stars can do it, so can we. Like them, we may do it imperfectly, or go off the rails entirely, but there’s joy even in the attempt. And of course, the whole idea here is that God, being infinite, can manifest him/herself in infinite ways. There’s no one “right” way to be a god.
There are quite a few ways to be ungodly as well, and our challenge in this life seems to be to separate our wheat from our chaff. But the starting point in this adventure is a recognition of what, as God’s child, you already are.
You are gods, an incarnation of the divine, a member of the Infinity. So go ahead and be what you are. The best way to honor Jesus is not to put him on a pedestal, it’s to join him at the table.
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