A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

June 2019

I’m attempting here to join the dots and link a number of things I’ve written about. When we talk about Jesus we need to know which ‘face’ of Jesus we are talking about. Is it Jesus the man from Nazareth?  Is it the Risen Lord?  Or is it the Cosmic Christ?  In a sense they are one and the same. But in another they not. If we asked a question, we might get slightly different answers from each of them.   [See ‘Which Jesus?’,  ‘Which Jesus: a further thought,’ ‘The Cosmic Christ’.]

While we can in theory distinguish between them, in practice they overlap.  So the earliest followers of the man from Nazareth, knew that he had been killed, but they also knew that he had overcome death because he was still present with them, appearing to them, teaching and guiding them. They knew that the man from Nazareth and their now Risen Lord were one and the same and so in the Gospels where they later wrote down Jesus’ words and actions, its not always clear whether it’s the man from Nazareth or the Risen Lord that they are speaking about. That would not have been a distinction that would have made any sense to them: to them they were one and the same.

Once those who actually knew the man from Nazareth began to die out, it became important to record his words and actions not least because otherwise those who continued to experience the presence of the Risen Lord would not be able to make the connection between the two and thus name it.  Hence the Gospels were written down, where previously memory had sufficed, and they have served as a crucial reference point ever since.

Today we are faced with a similar problem. The majority of people claim to have had an experience of ‘something greater to and beyond themselves’, although most are cautious about talking about it. Many would not use religious language in describing it, but the accounts that people give sound much the same whatever language they use.  My personal experience has led me to assume, using the Gospels as my reference point, that at least some of these experiences that I have had are actually encounters with the Risen Christ, and my assumption is that that must be true for others too. But it took me a long time to make that connection, and I doubt if many people do, not least because we do not expect there to be one. I believe that the Risen Christ is alive and well and appearing to people of all faiths and creeds on a regular basis, while remaining mostly unrecognised.  Roy Gregory and I edited ‘The God you already know’ partly out of this conviction.