The Theology of Identity with Christ Taught through the Gospel Narrative

4 Lent             March 15,2015

Numbers 21:4-9  Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10   John 3:14-21

Lectionary Link
    It is true and meaningful to proclaim that Jesus is the origin of the church, even though it is also true that the life of Jesus is presented after the fact of the establishment of the church communities which increasingly had become comprised by non-Jewish members.

  St. Paul did not meet Jesus of Nazareth in his lifetime but he had a spiritual encounter with the Risen Christ.  Others had a variety of different experiences with the Risen Christ.  The experiences were so pronounced that they changed people's life.  The experiences changed their behaviors.  Paul quit persecuting followers of Jesus and became a follower of Christ himself.

  St. Paul originated a spiritual practice program about which he wrote in his letters and this program was continued in the teaching of Paul's disciples.  St. Paul's spiritual practice might best be called an organization of the creative imagination of an identity with the Risen Christ.  In this identity theology with the Risen Christ, one could experience a personal presence of the profound alter ego of the Christ-Person within oneself.  And so the poetics of the spiritual identity with the Risen Christ was born.

  People who are "literalists" have a difficult time in trying to deal with the poetics of a spiritual identity exercise.  The writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians, wrote that we are saved by grace and that we have been by raised by Christ and are seated within in heavenly places.  So how are you enjoying the view?  In our current understanding of the universe where in fact do you think that this heavenly place could have physical location?  So you see it is more reasonable and poetically appropriate to understand such identity with the flight of Christ to heavenly places as a condition of our inner space or interior life.  Our faith receives from the Pauline writer a directed poetics to characterize how we can feel elated and exalted within ourselves even when the external conditions of our lives may not always be completely favorable.  In the tradition of St. Paul, we are also crucified with Christ and our ego-states get altered such that the Christ nature is able to take over.

  After the Pauline identity theology with Christ which was part of the spiritual practice and liturgies of the early Christian community became set, writers then began to return to the theology of who Jesus was in his life time?  But they could not write about Jesus in his own life time without being completely influenced by what had happened to Christ in his risen, ascended and glorified states.  The influence of the afterlife of Jesus as the risen Christ had literally reorganized the entire interior state of being of lots of people.  And these people had to write about this reorganization of their interior lives and one of the ways in which they did this was to externalize it in retelling the story of Jesus of Nazareth.

  The Jesus of the Gospel of John, is not the Jesus of his original setting.  The Gospel of John is an account of Jesus who in the narration is often the oracle voice of the Risen Christ in the later church explaining the significance of the events of the life of Jesus.  The Gospels take the identity theology of St. Paul's spiritual method and overlay it onto the story of Jesus.  So the original story of Jesus is told as if there are eyewitness enlightened wise persons who know the spiritual significance of each of the events in the life of Jesus.  The purpose of the Gospel is the same purpose of the theology of identity of St. Paul.  The Gospel writers want us to know that just as Jesus was born, grew, ministered, suffered, died, arose, ascended and attained glory in his life; this same cycle happens again in each person who is willing to embark upon this spiritual practice of intentionally being initiated into an identity with Christ.

  We have often been fooled to read the accounts of the Gospel as exact history or as precise eyewitness accounts when in fact they are a presentations of the narratives about the life Jesus as method of participating in the theology of identity so characteristic of St. Paul and the early church.

  And when we look at our Gospel lesson for today we can make the following observations about its purpose and function.

  First the context; this is a discourse of Jesus in dialogue with a skeptical Nicodemus, a learned Pharisee.  How is Nicodemus presented?  As a non-poetic crass literalist.   "Nicodemus, you have to be born again."  "But Jesus, how can I at my age get back into my mother's womb?"  Nicodemus is a stand-in figure for all Jews who are skeptical about Jesus.  Jesus says,  "No, It is not literal, it is about birth by water and the Spirit.  It is about the Spirit of the risen Christ who gives one a sense of a new start in life and a gradual reorganization of one's interior life and so that one can know eternal life as a quality of abundant life in one's interior world."

  Second, it is about the nature of God.  The nature of God is to the love this world.  It is the nature of God for God to take on a complete identity with the human world in the person of his Son Jesus.  And in the person of Jesus, when one believes in one's identity with Jesus then one can experience the sense of never perishing and knowing the freshness of eternal abundant life.  The new life identity is not to feel condemned by God or the circumstances of one's life but to feel loved by God and to feel as though God has reached out to us in a deeply personal way.

  Third, the writer of the Gospel of John wants the readers to know that the faith that worked for the people of Israel in the past, can also work again in a new and fresh way.  The people of Israel who had faith to look at the bronze serpent were healed; the followers of Christ who make that inward gaze toward Jesus on the cross, partake of the power of the death of Jesus to die to what is unworthy and addicting within ourselves.

  Fourth, the writer of John is a part of the theology of identity with Christ which is a spiritual practice and wisdom tradition.  A symbol of wisdom is light and in the Gospel of John Christ is presented as the light of the world.  Jesus of Nazareth was the living and walking light of wisdom in his time and place; the Risen Christ is the accessible light of our interior lives as it provides us with insights always to surpass ourselves in excellence.  We always have the choice to live towards our highest insights or to hold on the insanity of doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.  The light of the Risen Christ invites to escape the darkness of doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.

  In conclusion, I would like to remind us that you and I have been baptized and initiated into the tradition of transformation, as we enter into this identity with Jesus Christ as he is accessible to us and to our imaginations.  We are involved in this theology of identity with Christ; can we accept ourselves as being perched with Christ in the interior heavenly space and so be given a panorama of enough of all our lives to know that we will survive and be in tact no matter what happens to us in the free conditions of life?

  By faith, we are invited to live from the perspective of the heavenly panorama in the assurance that we already partake of an abundant and eternal life which provides us with hope and faith to take each step in our lives.

  Let us not be ashamed of taking an identity with Christ.  But let us not be foolish to become so crastly literal about the way in which this wonderful theology of identity with Jesus Christ is presented to us in the Gospel narratives.  So much of Christian disagreement is about people fighting about the physical and carnal nature of what people actually think happened in the biblical events.

  We are a people of faith and imagination and we can embrace the spiritual theology of identity of Christ towards our personal transformation without sacrificing our brute facts mind of modern science.

  I invite all of us to this wonderful faith today, and for our Gospel today, let us imagine ourselves in the interior heavenly kingdom, seated with Christ.  And let us enjoy this panoramic view and by faith proclaim, "We've already made it, even though we still have a long way to go."  Amen.