Richard Rohrs Daily Meditation Jesus, the Christ Jesus and Christ Thursday, July 17, 2014 Most Christians were never encouraged to combine the personal with the cosmic, or Jesus with Christ; nor were we told that we could honor and love both of them. Nor were we told that it is the same love but just in different frames. To love Jesus makes you an initial believer; to love Jesus Christ makes you into a cosmic believer. It is important to place ourselves in the largest possible frame, or we always revert back to a very non-catholic (“unwhole”) place where both the Savior and the saved ones end up being far too small because Jesus of Nazareth has been separated from the Eternal Christ. Here Christianity becomes just another competing world religion, and salvation is far too privatized (and actually ineffective), because the social and historical message has been lost. The full Gospel is so much bigger and more inclusive than that: Jesus is the historical figure, and Christ is the cosmic figure—and together they carry both the individual and history forward. Up to now, we have not been carrying history too well, because “there stood among us one we did not recognize” (John 1:26), “one who comes after me, because he also existed before me” (John 1:30), to quote John the Baptist. We made Christ into Jesus’ last name instead of realizing it was the description of his cosmic role in history and in all world religions. Christ is eternal; Jesus is born in time. Jesus without Christ invariably becomes a time-bound and culturally bound religion that excludes much of humanity from Christ’s embrace. On the other end, Christ without Jesus would easily become an abstract metaphysics or a mere ideology without much personal engagement. Love always needs a direct object. We need them both and thus we rightly believe in both, Jesus and Christ, just as most Christians would verbally say. Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 211-213 Gateway to Silence: In Christ all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 11:07:31 +0000
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