Sarx

Peter asked me a question on an earlier post.

A question I’ve been harbouring for some time now is, what do you think of Y’shua? Did he exist? What role does he play in your mind, heart, understanding now?

It was the perfect question for me to get this morning with my coffee. It prompted a heartfelt reply from me, then a further conversation with Peter, via iChat.

I’ve edited all that together into the following:

Yeshua: Rabbi? Yes, who fully participated in the Rabbinic debates of his time. Messiah? I’m confused as I look more into what Jews thought of the text they had. God-in-the-the-flesh? Well now…

So much of the theology I understand, so much of the theology by which I see God, experience the word, deal with my neighbour, understand forgiveness, healing/salvation/wholeness (tikkun olam) is exactly incarnational. I can’t make the leap. If Jesus isn’t God in the Flesh, not only does Christianity not make sense, but so also does nothing else.

I tried to hint at this struggle with the bald theological line “I wonder how a totally transcendent deity can be involved at all.” In fact, this a problem I have w/ Eastern Orthodox theology as well: at times it got so focused on Christ-God that it seemed like Jesus-the-Guy who went through a voice-change and puberty and acne and probably tried to figure out why he suddenly had back hair… This guy gets lost in all the Gold Icons and hymnography.

Right now, I need this guy to help me make sense out of God. For his ability to help me through that, I love him deeply. I can’t imagine life without him. Indeed, I can’t imagine God without him.

Ironically: the God that hairy-backed Rabbi helps me most understand is the God I find in Judaism. Hence my confusion.

The reverse is also true. For Jewish theology, the mitzvah is a sacrament: a connexion not a law, per se. Ignore Paul, and just think high-church sacraments for the time. In the absence of an incarnational God, the question for me is “What is the sacrament connecting with?” When I think of Eucharist I can point to that one rabbi. Connexion.

Put when I drape myself in the sacrament of the Prayer Shawl, what’s the connexion?

Strangely enough, when I try to think in Jewish terms (And I know I’m bad at that) the God that is there, at the other end of the line, isn’t very personal. Or even a person. To my internal radar, it feels (subjective, I understand)… it feels very abstract, impersonal. It’s more like YHVH is an Active Force: so much Not-Like-Human as to be “Thing” in my own vocabulary. It feels very much like the “Eternal Radiant ISness” at the centre of so much Neo-Pagan and New Age theology. It is (as noted in the earlier post) very Reconstructionist: God as “the sum of natural powers or processes that allows mankind to gain self-fulfillment and moral improvement”.

The God I meet in Jesus-the-Rabbi is more like the earthy, Semitic deity I’d expect in Judaism. This God is *not* the God I ran into in Eastern Orthodoxy. That deity was so far above all humanity that proper theology had to make some near-gnostic statements about Jesus’s death. “Well, the Body died… but God the Son didn’t. He was still on the Throne with God the Father… where he always was and always will be…” Argh. No…

God died.
Felt Pain.
Went through puberty. Wet Dreams. Burped. Passed Gas after too much hummus.
Or this isn’t working.

And that Dead, Farting God introduced me to the warm, loving, Semitic deity I expected. Yet Judaism has the warm, homey rituals I’d expect that same deity to have instituted. Hellenic Christianity does not – although it picked up some from various cultures that it has passed through. These rites are simply folk-ways; the Official Rite is all Cold. In Judaism the folk-ways ARE the religion. The rites are incarnational in one, the deity is in the other.

(Full Disclosure: I recycled this material to be the daily posting over on +Z’ev, looking at the following words from Paul: He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. Colossians 1:13-16)