Paul Graves: Like Jesus, our humanity overrides religious affiliation
Darn it! My column missed Christmas Day by 24 hours! Oh well, maybe next year I can celebrate Christmas in my column. Likewise, there will be a lot of post-Christmas sales starting today. But it’s not the same excitement as buying and receiving gifts before or on Christmas. Is it?
Probably not – if Christmas was really about what WE do to “celebrate” Christmas. Fortunately, Christmas is about another gift-giving that too many of us (even when Christian) pay only lip service to. Maybe the gift is just too much for us – any day of the year.
Did you realize that Christianity is the only world religion based on God’s incarnation (becoming flesh) in the world? ’Tis true. But did you also ever stop to consider that God was not incarnated as a Christian? He was born and lived Jewish, never Christian.
But God was not incarnated as a Jew either. For those who affirm that God became flesh, it’s important to remember that God wasn’t born a Jew or a Christian, but as a human!
That distinction is pretty important when we look carefully at the message of Jesus as seen in the Gospels. It’s also important when we consider how an experience of Jesus in our own lives calls us to live each of our own days.
It’s important to remember that Jesus wasn’t dictating to someone as he wandered through Galilee or into Jerusalem. The written record of Jesus’ words and life we call the Gospels came decades after Jesus lived his human life. Those writers had particular audiences they tried to persuade to believe in and experience Jesus.
His words and his actions were lived in the context of his Jewish tradition. But his mission looks like an effort to make people more human, not more Jewish. His ministry to Jewish people was designed to challenge them to live their humanity more fully.
He asked the same of Gentiles (non-Jewish humans). Jesus seemed determined to show people that living as a full human took them beyond the religious (or nonreligious) boundaries they had comfortably settled into. Being distinctly human diluted distinct boundaries.
Being fully human today – when we seek to model our lives after Jesus – challenges us in the same way. While we can retain our traditions as Christians, Jews, Muslim, Hindus, Buddhist or whatever is important to us, our first call is to be human. That dilutes the artificial boundaries between us (when it works).
On one of my trips to Israel in the early ’90s, I visited with an Israeli Jew across the aisle as our plane descended into Tel Aviv. I asked him what he wanted to happen to ease the incredible separation between Jews and Palestinians in his country. His answer was two words: “No walls!”
He got it! The way for people to become more fully human was to decide together to take down the walls between them – both literal and metaphorical. Jesus obviously knew that, too.
Walls are born out of fear and built with the materials of fear – distrust, prejudice, anger, hate, paranoia, power … need I continue? Yes, it is part of our human nature to protect ourselves. It’s important at many levels. But when that protection becomes prejudice, we’ve let that lower human nature win out.
God became human in the man we call Jesus, to show us just how much MORE there is to being human! Our fears imprison us in a low-ceiling dungeon. Jesus stood tall and free because he knew being human is so much more. Called to our fuller humanity? Wow!
The Rev. Paul Graves, a Sandpoint resident and retired United Methodist minister, is the founder of Elder Advocates. He can be contacted at welhouse@nctv.com.