Jesus Christ, Superstar

Daddy, you asked for just thoughts, not a paper. Well, this is a stream of thoughts I had today... completely raw and unedited! lol just for you. so if it's crazy... and bold... well... it wasn't really meant for publishing :) haha

Moral standards change over time; through generations and within lifetimes. Personal experiences and social events affect our morals. Virtue: behavior showing high moral standards. It has often been said that morality and the human conscious of good and evil has derived from the existence of a higher being, or God. Christianity as a religion points to God as the source of wisdom in determining good and evil, and Jesus Christ embodies this wisdom in human form. If God is the Christian’s source of wisdom concerning good and evil, then Jesus is the ultimate virtuous person, and being such he becomes the symbol &/or representative of our faith.

But, is it the historical person of Jesus Christ, and all the virtues he embodied that plays the role as our representative? Or is the Scriptural depiction of Jesus traded in for a more culture-conscious Jesus?

As moral standards change over time, or even as some virtues become more emphasized than others, the human embodiment of a virtuous person looks different. This may be compared to the acknowledgment that the definition of a “beautiful woman” changes over time as perceptions of beauty and sexuality are transformed. This may explain how one generation viewed Aphrodite as the depiction of female beauty and sexuality, while another looks to Marilyn Monroe. This, experience and event informed worldview/morality theory may also be revealed in one generation’s veneration for someone who has “accomplished the American Dream” compared to another’s admiration of the apparently contradictory globally-aware justice-advocate.

Seeing Jesus as a virtuous person in perfection, the church adapts his image to fit the most admired virtues of the day. During WW1 the church promoted Jesus as a Grand Soldier, a 1999 campaign add for a church event depicted Jesus as Che Guevera, and shirts declaring “Jesus is my Homeboy” were mass distributed in 2007. Whether or not one receives these statements as blasphemous or not, she must ask if these depictions have been developed by the culture or for the culture? And, is it possible to distinguish between the two?

not all is lost

i feel so tired. sin looks so different these days. the law of sin and death.

For when we were controlled by the sinful nature the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit of death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.

Romans

it's shocking. sin, not being simply a reality- which would be horrific in itself- but a law that is at work against us. This law has power over us. It causes us to inflict pain. It gives us the power to engage in awful acts of evil, causing so much more pain than we could ever think of intending to cause on our own. Similar to the way we cannot comprehend God with our finite minds, we cannot comprehend the miracle of human influence.

it's painful. to see this law of sin and death reign in the world. it's sobering.

Jesus looks different these days.

The sins we commit, the pain we cause one another, has the potential to literally sever our ability to relate to one another. In other words...

sin brought death. When someone dies we are no longer able to be in relationship with them. I think of the aching I feel for lost loved ones... I just want to talk again. I want to rewind time. I want them to return from the dead, be alive again, resurrect. I want reconciliation to happen in the form of a miracle, so that I don't have to live without them.

i wonder at how God experienced sin. in the sense that it separated us from him. we hear about the bridge analogy, you know ... we are separated from God and Jesus is our bridge. And we hear scriptures saying we were dead in our transgressions.

This looks so real to me now. I imagine us being dead to God, unable to be in relationship with God, in the same way that I am unable to be in relationship with a friend, a human, who has physically died. Who I have absolutely no hope of seeing again.

We are dead to God. It would take a miracle, like the one I pray for with my Grandpa, already buried, for us to be able to have a relationship with God. As impossible as it is for me to bring my papa back, it was impossible to bring me, you, (creation), back to life.

This is everything that Jesus Christ is.

This is why Jesus had to be fully God and fully man. No other being would do.

"In Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy scripture, we are not dealing with man in the abstract: not with the man who is able with his modicum of religion and religious morality to be sufficient unto himself without God and thus himself to be God. But neither are we dealing with God in the abstract: not with one who in His deity exists only separated from man, distant and strange and thus a non-human if not indeed a inhuman God. In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man. Rather, in Him we encounter the history, the dialogue, in which God and man can meet together and are together, the reality of the covenant mutually contracted, preserved and fulfilled by them. Jesus Christ is in His one Person, as true God, man's loyal partner, and as true man, God's." Barth

"why did the Word, who is God, make a virgin the mother of his own flesh with a conception straight from the Holy Spirit? ... in order to reconstitute our condition with himself... This was why he himself became the first one to be born of the Holy Spirit so that he could trace a path for grace to come to us. ... He is from God, from on high, and naturally God, and yet he came down to our condition in a strange and most unusual manner, and was born of the Spirit, according to the flesh, so that we too might abide in holiness and incorruptibility like him. Clearly grace came upon us from him, as from a new rootstock, a new beginning."

St Cyril of Alexandria

how can i go on? through sacrifice and death... restoration was brought about.

This law of sin and death. This evil that is working against me. against you...

the pain we cause one another every day.

It is redeemable. It has been made right. so that when our worst fears come true... when we cause the worst pain, inflict the worst evil, separate ourselves from all that is good...

it can ALWAYS be made right.

our worst fears will happen... but they will be redeemed, and the consequences we deserve from these fears will not come.

i long to rewind time. God won't rewind time. but God will restore us.

friends will die. my mama and daddy will die. and it will break my heart. I will experience their absence. and i'll cry, and long to be in relationship with them again... just to have another conversation, another hug... another meal another laugh...

and I will. God will give them back to me. Christ has made reconciliation.

not all is lost.