Why do I believe in Christ?
For some, it is enough to envision
God as an abstraction that gives us our life force. Buddhism operates on this level. There is nothing wrong with that. Yet we are relational beings; we thrive in
relationships rather than in isolation.
We long to relate to those who are important to us, those who give us
guidance about how to live our lives.
Therefore, many cannot do what God calls them to do – namely, serve Him
by doing good – without having a personal idea of who God is. God is not oblivious to this fact. Remember, He is the source of everything,
including our human nature, so the fact that we would long for a personal
relationship with Him is not a novel idea for Him.
As a Christian, I believe that God
didn’t leave any leaf unturned, including this one. I believe that He incarnated Himself, that he
took the form of one of His prized creations, to better reflect
Himself-as-Love. After all, if God is
love, and love is only found in relationship, then how else could He have
shared Himself with us, if not through becoming one of us as Jesus of Nazareth?
Jesus taught us to call God
“Father”. This is why we refer to Jesus
as the “Son”. It’s very confusing when
we apply our limited this-side-of-heaven intellect. How can someone be their own Father, their
own Son? But this is what we get for not
being satisfied with an abstract understanding of God. We cannot forget that we are not in heaven yet,
where all things will be made clear. I
believe that the reason for this difficulty is to encourage us to take a leap
of faith. Not just in terms of accepting
this basic tenet of Christian theology, but in life in general. There are times when we do not fully know
what, or why, or how, yet we must act and so we take a leap of faith. Only in retrospect does our leap then make
perfect sense. I believe this is why God
didn’t just make it crystal-clear to us who He is, and how He can be His own
Son/Father.
I think Jesus was speaking as a
representative of us humans when He called God “Father”. He was modeling for us what we ought to
do. I don’t think this necessarily meant
that Jesus had a split personality. And
consider this: if you are a parent, or
if you’ve ever worked with children, surely you have explored pretend
play. A dad may choose to sit on a tiny
chair and put on a boa scarf and sip air out of tiny teacups for the sake of
better relating to his young daughter.
He in no way ceases to be her father.
Yet how much more will she be able to come to know and love her daddy if
he is willing to come down to her level, and thereby support her efforts and
encourage her? Given the choice,
wouldn’t any child welcome their grown-up parents to play with then rather than
watch from a distance, intermittently wagging their finger when the child does
something wrong?
This is why I believe that if God
is love, then God must have shown Himself to be this love in the person of
Jesus. He came down to play among His
children, using our own level of understanding to guide us towards serving Him
better.
I believe that Jesus’s purpose was
to live among us, to teach us, and to model a life of integrity. This is another point of contention I may run
into with Christians, who hold that Jesus’s purpose was to die on the cross to
save us from our sins. I don’t want to
contradict this. However, I do want to
offer a slightly less religiously-laden explanation, which I don’t think in any
way takes away from what Jesus indeed did for us through His crucifixion.
I believe that Jesus was true to
Himself as God-is-Love. He turned the
other cheek, He forgave wrongdoing, He sacrificed for the sake of His
children. Doesn’t this sound like the
ideal of any relationship, to put the other person first? I further believe that this was starting to
have a radical effect on those He came into contact with, and His integrity
threatened the political and religious powers that be. Jesus was not the only one in history whose
well-intentioned integrity was resented by leaders: Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. come to mind
right off the top of my head. In no way
were Ghandi and King perfect, as Jesus was perfect, but they likewise strove to
help others by loving them, by putting themselves at risk, by speaking the hard
truth when no one else dared. It got
them both killed.
I believe that premature, violent
death is part of the scenery when one walks in line with God even when this
means threatening the status-quo. Too
many people are self-seeking. Too many
people desire greatness for themselves to tolerate any perceived competition.
Therefore, I believe that Jesus’s
passion and crucifixion were sort of inevitable based on the fact that He
remained true to His mission, the mission of the incarnation. In order to show love, one must put the other
before oneself. Jesus even said that
"greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). He didn’t seek death for death’s sake. He discerned getting around it. Jesus "fell on His face and prayed, saying, 'My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will' (Matthew 26:39). He anticipated it with much anxiety. And yet, in spite of the limitations He
placed on Himself by incarnating as a human being (and thus limited), Jesus
tapped into His core as God-is-Love, and succumbed to the consequences of His
integrity.
Christianity popularly calls
Jesus’s crucifixion and the following resurrection the crux of our
salvation. But I think the reason for
this is not so much in the fact that He suffered and died. I think the salvation we get from Jesus is in
His example of love to the death. He
preached it, and then He modeled it for us.
He left nothing to the imagination.
He summarized all commandments into one two-fold commandment. In the gospel of Luke, when a rich young man asks Jesus how to reach heaven and suggests that the Jewish scriptures say “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself" (10:27), Jesus affirms him by saying "you have answered correctly; do this and you will live" (10:28). Given the
opportunity to simplify the religious code of the day, Jesus said that our
purpose as human beings is to love. It
is clear that this is because we are made in God’s image, and as such, we are
to reflect what and who He is. If God is
love, then we as His image-bearers must reflect that love in our lives.
I believe that a non-Christian can
look to the example of Jesus and be “saved” without subscribing to the theology
that comes with it. I believe that Jesus
died, nay, that He lived, obeyed, and subsequently died as a result of said
obedience, to open the doors to heaven, as it were, for all of us. He told us to do likewise.
There are arguments about this
that I do not care to address, for I am not trying to address Christians, but
rather seekers who may not be convinced with traditional Christian rhetoric
about the existence of God or His love for us.
However, I believe that when Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and
the life. No one comes to the Father
except through me” (John 14:6), He meant that only those who follow His example
of self-sacrificial love can ever come to know God. Many will argue that Jesus said that only
those who believe in Him will have eternal life. Yet what they are referring to is undoubtedly
John 5:24: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My
word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into
judgment, but has passed out of death into life.” Here, Jesus says that we must believe “Him
who sent Me” (meaning the Father), and not “in him” (meaning in the divinity of
Jesus). Also, He prefaces this by
mentioning hearing His word, which means He wants us to believe what He taught, not necessarily to
believe who exactly He is, or what does it mean to be Messiah.
For this reason, I believe that Jesus is the
“word made flesh” – God taking on human form for the sake of better expressing
Himself and allowing us to get to know Him better. I believe that Jesus taught that to be saved,
ie. to keep from following Satan to hell, but rather to follow God to heaven,
we must look to His life, His teachings, and His example, and do likewise. That is what I believe Jesus taught about
salvation. Notice also that Jesus never
said “I am God”. This would actually be
a limitation of who God is, because God in His entirety cannot be contained in
the one human incarnation of Jesus.
While Jesus was God to the extent of living a life of self-sacrificial
charity, He intended to lead others to follow His example and thereby have
eternal life by virtue of their love.
John 13:34-35
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.
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