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Jesus

JESUS AS LIBERATOR (Richard Rohr)

I am going to talk to you about Jesus with a different slant, and maybe
also about a totally different Jesus than we presently know. In 1970
Albert Nolan, O.P., the Master General of the Dominican Order, wrote a
book titled Jesus before Christianity. It influenced many Christians to
realize that most of us had never really met Jesus before Christianity.
We had been presented with what I am going to call a “churchified”
Jesus. That’s not necessarily wrong or bad, but with the excellent
Jesus scholarship of the last twenty-five years we have begun looking at
Jesus in a new way. In the past, the message was pretty much controlled
by what we were supposed to pay attention to and what we could largely
ignore.

The message I am going to try to summarize from various scholars will
sound perhaps to some of you a little different, a little new, and maybe
even a little heretical. I am not here to question the divinity of
Christ. It is much deeper than that. We have presented Christ more as
the founder of “Churchianity” (a word I coined), than as the founder
of any kind of reformed revolutionary movement in history. Many of these
scholars say we have domesticated Jesus.

****

In our attempt to study the message of Jesus, we have to access not just
linguistic knowledge of the most ancient manuscript, but also turn to
anthropology and cultural studies. We are now able to recognize the
political issues, the gender issues, and the historical context in which
Jesus was teaching. If we do not appreciate this, we miss His
message—not just part of it, but the whole message. If we omit looking
at this, we put everything inside of our cultural context—the way we
perhaps would understand Jesus or would like to understand Jesus. And in
the end we misunderstand Jesus.

We made Jesus a Christian. Jesus was not a Christian. I know that might
sound shocking to a lot of us, but Jesus was a Jew. He died a Jew. And
if we have grown up in the context of centuries of anti-Semitism, how
can we possibly give Jesus a fair shake when we are biased against His
religion, Judaism?

Jesus never heard of the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, I know this seems
scandalous, but until we can frame Him honestly and let Him speak
honestly, we don’t hear the real message. We make Jesus a founder of
our religion and one who oversaw the whole development as it happened.
Brothers and sisters, we have got to start being honest. Do we really
want to meet the true Jesus?

****

What does Jesus liberate us from? This won’t sound too different from
what we now call the ego, which was not the term Jesus used. His phrase,
and we all know it, was “unless you lose yourself, you cannot find
yourself” (John 12:25 [1]). Jesus did not have access to psychological
language. He did not need it. He spoke in a straightforward way that his
contemporaries could understand. But the interesting thing is, although
his teaching is clearly about freedom from the false self, both Catholic
and Protestant scholars, trapped inside the same European worldview,
arrived at the same conclusions: liberation from the body self, not the
false self.

[1]: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2012:25&version=NIV;MSG;KJV

I think this happened because the body carried shame. The body carried
guilt. When one had too much to drink, too much to eat, or had been
involved in superficial or dishonest sex, the body knew it. We knew that
this was not what we were about, so we naturally felt shame and guilt in
regard to mistakes we made with our body. It was easy to capture this.
But do you know what? Mistakes we made with our ego, like pride and
ambition, did not cause us to feel shame. We actually felt them as an
empowerment. This is the ego we have to free ourselves from.

****

Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious
practices over major theorizing. There is no indication He wanted any of
His followers to be what I call “thought police”—thought police
for others. That has been Rome’s preoccupation for the greater part of
1,000 years. Show me the passage where Jesus gave Rome the authority to
police the whole world! This is the way that Western civilization went;
we mirrored the secular culture in many ways. The only thoughts Jesus
told us to police were our own: our own negative thoughts, our own
violent thoughts, our own hateful thoughts—not other people’s
thoughts.

Saying a person is a heretic because they don’t believe this, or that
they’re going to hell because they don’t believe that, or that God
doesn’t love them because they don’t have this mental abstraction
that we have decided would save us—where did Jesus say any of this?
Where did Jesus say there was a set of mental abstractions we had to
believe that would make God love us or that would ensure that we would
go to heaven?

Adapted from Jesus as Liberator/Paul as Liberator (CD, DVD, MP3)
http://store.cacradicalgrace.org/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=SC-C-13&Category_Code=&Store_Code=CFAAC

Starter Prayer:
Free me, Lord, to hear Your truth.

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