When most of us hear the name of Jesus we think of an individual man who lived, died on a cross, and rose again. According to our tradition Jesus was and is a real man. He did live and die and rise again and ascend to the Father. What I call our great blind spot in the West is not so much here, but in the fact that we do not see any real connection or relationship between Jesus and ourselves, and between what happened to him in his life, death, resurrection and ascension, and us. Although we readily assume that the whole race of humanity fell in Adam, we see Jesus’ death only as an act of God for us, but not as an act that involved us—all of us, and all of creation. His death and resurrection were things that happened to him, not to us. To be sure, they were intended for our benefit, but humanity was a spectator to these events and is in no sense connected or related to him in his death and resurrection—until we do something to bring Jesus into our lives today.
This assumption of separation between Jesus and us is, in my opinion, one of the fundamental failures of Western Christianity. The blind spot of separation begets and perpetuates a multitude of ‘us-them’ divisions, including and especially religious divisions, that are destroying our lives and the planet. Moreover, this assumption necessarily makes our faith a work we do that relates us to an absent Jesus, rather than a mind-boggling, liberating, hope-begetting discovery of the reality of his union with us and with all creation.
Such a Jesus may make perfect sense to us in our individualistic mindset, but I contend that it betrays the Jesus of the apostles and of the early church. The apostolic Jesus is the Father’s eternal Son, and the One anointed in the Spirit, and he is the One in and through and by whom all things were created and are constantly sustained. These three fundamental truths about Jesus Christ have rarely been held together with the incarnation. And failure here has fueled the oppressive racial, relational, sexual, ecological, environmental, religious, and political and social hell we find ourselves in today.
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