Day Twenty-four

Did Jesus have a message relevant to our times? We know that the Earth is not flat. We know that the Earth is not the center of the Universe; indeed, infinity has no center. Our eschatology is now based on science which makes the End Time a matter of nuclear annihilation, global warming or a viral pandemic, and the probability of the entire Cosmos coming to a screeching halt is virtually nil. Jesus walked the earth and spoke his mind to a radically different worldview than ours and this legitimately raises the question of his relevance to ours. Once again we are challenged to determine what Jesus’ message actually was by peeling back the layers of interpretation that surround it.

G.A. Studdert Kennedy (1883-1929) wrote, “We have seen that sin is always at its root a break in the unity of man with God, and it was to that root of all sin that the Son of Man was tempted in the Garden.” This echoed Walter Rauschenbusch’s (1861-1918) statement, “The Kingdom of God is largely a matter of right relations, just as sin is largely wrong relation to God, to ourselves and to our fellows.” Paul Tillich (1886-1965) synthesized thoughts such as these into his definition of sin as that which separates us from the love of God. It is not by accident that these giants of 19th and 20th century Christianity were coming to agreement on the revolutionary nature of Jesus’ timeless message. Buried beneath two millennia of orthodox dogma and creed was a fresh, new understanding of what humankind needs to do to save itself.

We are not expected to blindly accept such thinking, any more than we are expected to mindlessly digest what has over the centuries deteriorated into religious pabulum. Jesus was not dictating scripture to be eternally regarded as inerrant and infallible. He was instead presenting a radical new way of understanding our relationship to God, revelation so profound that it is still not completely understood to this very day. Rather than passively await a supernatural event that defies all reason, through the Christ we are invited to enter into a perfectly natural way of life that defies the sin of separation and alienation. Should we be successful in cultivating the same kind of relationship with God that Jesus had—and he assures us that such a thing is possible—we shall discover genuine salvation that transcends even the grave.