I really don’t think many of us realize the power of Jesus to transform lives. We use words like “salvation” and “grace” and “love,” but these words can seem tame, mild, gentle, all goodness with the implication of being soothing.
Yeshua in his earthly life was not usually soothing. Rather he was unsettling. He spoke with authority and not as the scribes whose authority was derivative from their educational credentials. This authority did not depend on any institution or master teacher certifying him, but instead flowed out of his being. It was authentic, and authenticity will trump credentials anytime. And authenticity will show up any hypocrisy in the vicinity. Hence Jesus was unsettling. However this authority is the basis of the power Yeshua expressed when he healed, liberated from demonic forces, fed thousands with a handful of bread, and called the dead back to life. Those around him witnessing these things were astonished to say the least. The gospels give accounts of people being more than awe-struck; they were knocked out of their senses, meaning that their world view had been massively dislodged by what they were experiencing through this man. What they previously had held as reality had suddenly been shattered, and they were left grasping at how to make sense and meaning out of what they had just experienced.
I look at the Church, broadly speaking, the way the Christian religion presents itself and is expressed by the general population, and I see it acting as though Jesus might as well be still buried in the tomb. The Resurrection is viewed as a triumph over death – Jesus’ triumph over his own death, followed by his ascension to heaven and the right hand of God the Father, where he is safely ensconced and removed from the scene here. No longer do we need to deal with the power of his authentic presence disrupting our lives and confronting our limited and limiting self understanding identified with family and occupation, economic status and associations, likes and dislikes, preferences and values.
The Gospel that we then preach is weak, the Resurrection as a mild exhortation to see the Risen Christ in others, which runs the danger of either naming all “nice-ness” as Christ-like or, upon encounter with difficult people, claiming that they challenge us to act Christ-like to them, to treat them as though they were who they obviously are not. That often is all I see of how the Church presents the Resurrection as significant for living out our daily lies.
What if Yeshua were alive and present today right here the way he was 2,000 years ago in Galilee and Judea? The comfortableness in which we practice the Christian religion would be directly challenged, and instead the possibility of real and immediate change in people’s lives would replace the hopeful idea of gradual spiritual growth manageably spread out over a lifetime. Then we would see clearly that salvation and grace are not self-generated by trying to improve ourselves morally and spiritually much the same way as we slowly accumulate savings for retirement. Then we would see clearly that it is God’s intervention with us that gives us life, shows us true Love and provides all the meaning we could want.
Well, it’s time to move beyond the insipid and vapid littleness of common understanding of resurrection, and stop ignoring the power that is present here and now in the Resurrection Jesus. It’s time to stop ignoring the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and realize that this Spirit is much more than a wispy ghost innocuously floating around us. This is Resurrection Presence of Jesus here with us, the One who can emerge out of invisibility and make our hair stand on end as the scales of our spiritual blindness drop away. “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it,” Jacob said out in the desert fleeing his brother whom he had heartlessly tricked. Surely God is in this place – in the desert of our hearts – and we do not know it.
Ignoring the reality of God’s presence to save and to heal, to transform and to reconcile is possibly the great sin of today’s Church, or the sin of a lot of us as a strategy to keep such power under control or at least at arm’s length. There is an antidote for this form of ignorance – meditation. Practice the ancient spiritual discipline of sitting and ceasing from our own actions and attitudes that create protective barriers between ourselves and the power of divine presence. Meditate and be with the truth of being and come to realize it is not your own being, a being you can own. Meditate and keep mediating and watch changes emerge in attitudes, reactivity, actions, and relationships. Meditate and discover the power of God, power expressed as Love. Meditate and encounter the Resurrection Spirit of Yeshua.
Keep meditating!
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