Friend of Sinners
https://fredsforehead.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/friend-of-sinners2.jpg
Alan: Some biblical scholars hold that Jesus was crucified because he kept the company of "unclean" people and acted in "unclean" ways.
If Yeshua had not been a rabbi with a growing following, his uncleanness might have been overlooked but punctilious churchgoers were determined to punish goodness for the crime of actually being good.
Matthew 11: 15-19
The Voice
15 He who has ears for the truth, let him hear. 16 What is this generation like? You are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out, 17 “When we played the flute, you did not dance; and when we sang a dirge, you did not mourn.” 18 What I mean is this: When John came, he dressed in the clothes of a prophet, andhe did not eat and drink like others but lived on honey and wild locusts. And people wondered if he was crazy, if he had been possessed by a demon. 19 Then the Son of Man appeared—He didn’t fast, as John had, but ate with sinners and drank wine. And the people said, “This man is a glutton! He’s a drunk! And He hangs around with tax collectors and sinners, to boot.” Well, Wisdom will be vindicated by her actions—not by your opinions.
Matthew 11: 15-19
The Message
15 “Are you listening to me? Really listening?
16-19 “How can I account for this generation? The people have been like spoiled children whining to their parents, ‘We wanted to skip rope, and you were always too tired; we wanted to talk, but you were always too busy.’ John came fasting and they called him crazy. I came feasting and they called me a lush, a friend of the riffraff. Opinion polls don’t count for much, do they? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Becky Fischer and Jesus Camp
The Son of Man
Since early adulthood I have been drawn by biblical references to "The Son of Man," a phrase used over 100 times in Judeo-Christian scripture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_man
Recently prompted by Einstein's views on God and religion, I am again pondering the mythic significance of "God the Father," "God the Son" and "The Son of Man."
"Science Depends On The Religious Attitude"
Albert Einstein's Writings On Religion
"God the Father" -- also represented as The Creator -- is a distant deity whose unfathomable (and often menacing) power inspires dread.
For most Christians, "God the Father" is inscrutable, and in "His" unknowability becomes a ready repository for fears over retributive justice.
If we cannot know the unpredictable Father's wishes - except "His" unflagging insistence on essentially inhuman perfection - we are reduced to placating a Deity whose standards we can never meet, standards that dwell on the eternally confused borderland between rigid Justice and infinite Mercy.
If we cannot know the unpredictable Father's wishes - except "His" unflagging insistence on essentially inhuman perfection - we are reduced to placating a Deity whose standards we can never meet, standards that dwell on the eternally confused borderland between rigid Justice and infinite Mercy.
James' Epistle: "Judgment Without Mercy Will Be Shown To Anyone Who Has Not Shown Mercy"
Mercy Is Not Fair
Which Do You Value More? Mercy? Or Justice?
Abraham Lincoln And Pope Francis Agree On The Roles Of Mercy And Justice
Christians And "Christians" Choose Between Mercy, Love And Forgiveness, Or Retribution And Punishment
In light of the Father's implacable (and inscrutable) origin, many (most?) Christians take refuge in the humanity of The Son, a person like us, an individual so fond of feasting -- and feasting with sinners like us -- that "the good people (priests and legalists in particular) held him in contempt, a dissolute wine bibber. A lush.
Not only was Yeshua a friend of sinners and boon companion of adulterers and whores, he actually preferred the company of The Fallen to his fellow Pharisees whom he reviled as "whitened sepulchres, polished on the outside, but inside full of dead men's bones and rot."
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%209:11-13&version=PHILLIPS
"Snakes and vipers" He called them.
Accessories to murder.
"Hypocrites" determined to block the way to heaven so no one could "get in."
Not only was Yeshua a friend of sinners and boon companion of adulterers and whores, he actually preferred the company of The Fallen to his fellow Pharisees whom he reviled as "whitened sepulchres, polished on the outside, but inside full of dead men's bones and rot."
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%209:11-13&version=PHILLIPS
"Snakes and vipers" He called them.
Accessories to murder.
"Hypocrites" determined to block the way to heaven so no one could "get in."
Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"
Here is the "synthesis" I now see.
God the Father is "locked" into the rigidity Christians often ascribe to Him, whereas the Son "brings the Father to fruition," going (and growing) beyond the Father, infusing the world with palpable love, mercy and healing so that by "putting on" the Son, we too can participate in "the freedom to be human," freedom from the leveling rigidity and manichean demandingness of The Father.
The Son imbues us with freedom to be wrong -- to miss the mark -- but still being embraced as His loved ones. (As I write, I recall the dufflepuds' mistaken conception of "the father" in C.S. Lewis' Voyage Of The Dawn Treader. http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Dufflepud)
The Son imbues us with freedom to be wrong -- to miss the mark -- but still being embraced as His loved ones. (As I write, I recall the dufflepuds' mistaken conception of "the father" in C.S. Lewis' Voyage Of The Dawn Treader. http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Dufflepud)
The Son is a "prototype," an adumbration of Christ-consciousness to come, when a critical mass of humans remake themselves in The Son's image, thus fulfilling Yeshua's prophecy that "whoever believes in me (the embodiment of love) will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." John 14:12
"Even greater things..."
Greater things than the Son of God accomplished.
"Even greater things..."
Greater things than the Son of God accomplished.
And so it will be that the first "Son of Man" -- the first definitive evolutionary step beyond simian self-interest and dominance/submission chest-thumping -- will re-manifest as the full (and fulfilling) plurality of Yeshua's solitary incarnation of Love.
When the incarnation of Love diffuses across (and within) the species, the "Son of Man" -- "The Mystical Body of Christ" -- becomes the decisive evolutionary step in which "Man" (as we have known "him") becomes the evolutionary offspring of our entire species, just as "Lucy" australopithecus embodied a new humanoid being... and so on... until, at last, "homo sapiens" becomes the collective expression of incarnate deity who could be rightly called "homo amator."
“God became man that man might become God"
Church Father, St. Athanasius
ca 298–373
When the incarnation of Love diffuses across (and within) the species, the "Son of Man" -- "The Mystical Body of Christ" -- becomes the decisive evolutionary step in which "Man" (as we have known "him") becomes the evolutionary offspring of our entire species, just as "Lucy" australopithecus embodied a new humanoid being... and so on... until, at last, "homo sapiens" becomes the collective expression of incarnate deity who could be rightly called "homo amator."
Theosis, Service And The Future Of Christianity
It is revealing that "God so loved the world that he sent his only child into it."
With this declaration (and manifestation) of love, "The Impossibly Perfect One" confesses his love of imperfection, and simultaneously The Father's "vector thrust" to become God-Man fully emerges from the abstract Logos taking human form in order to get down and dirty.
The Father's throne was, perhaps, too lonely - even incomplete. And so "He" came down off his throne to "dwell among us" here in the world "He" so loved.
By "baptizing" Earth with the blood, sweat and tears of divinity itself, we humans were made co-creators, not monkey mimics.
Under the wing of The Son of Man, we become aware that creativity and loving service are as ecstatic as coitus - but also enduring.
And we come to realize that every "heavenly" impulse seeded by God-Father-Logos completes the epochal journey from Alpha to Omega, but now knowing Alpha is the Omega.
With this declaration (and manifestation) of love, "The Impossibly Perfect One" confesses his love of imperfection, and simultaneously The Father's "vector thrust" to become God-Man fully emerges from the abstract Logos taking human form in order to get down and dirty.
The Father's throne was, perhaps, too lonely - even incomplete. And so "He" came down off his throne to "dwell among us" here in the world "He" so loved.
"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+1&version=ASV
By "baptizing" Earth with the blood, sweat and tears of divinity itself, we humans were made co-creators, not monkey mimics.
If we do not love one another, God's love is not complete.
Co-dependent as we are, we humans complete God... or deny His completion.
We make love.
Or we leave it over there -- on high -- unaccessed and unmanifest.
We make love.
Or we leave it over there -- on high -- unaccessed and unmanifest.
Under the wing of The Son of Man, we become aware that creativity and loving service are as ecstatic as coitus - but also enduring.
And we come to realize that every "heavenly" impulse seeded by God-Father-Logos completes the epochal journey from Alpha to Omega, but now knowing Alpha is the Omega.
Over geological time, the Incarnation of Logos, "The Word made Flesh," transforms the dross of our benighted planet into an enlightened noosphere where Love becomes self-evident and self-aware, its irresistible promptings now written in the human heart and, little by little, in the human genome. (I use the word noosphere - a term coined by French Jesuit paleontologist Pere Teilhard de Chardin -- not to normalize its specific characteristics as set forth by de Chardin but to make use of the best available metaphor.)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ: "Research As Adoration"
Teilhard de Chardin SJ
In brief, Incarnation/Enfleshment is the underlying "direction" of The Ground of Being and we humans, remaking ourselves in the image of God's Son, become the selfsame love that (according to Christian belief) is also the pre-ordained outcome (or, at least, potential) of The Father's creative force, a force first manifesting zoologically as dominance-submission hierarchy only to evolve beyond itself into the realization that wisdom and happiness are only secured by service informed by love.
Kingdom come.
Kingdom come.
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