A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

June 2019

This year alongside my Bible reading I have also been using ‘The World Religions Bible’ edited by Robert van de Weyer. It contains readings from a dozen faith traditions, one for each month. I’m only half way through but already it is obvious that there is a great deal of common ground in their wisdom and teaching. We should not be surprised. The Prologue to St John’s Gospel tells of the Word of God [the Cosmic Christ] that “through him all things came to be, without him no created thing came into being. In him was life, and that life was the light of mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it………He was in the world, but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognise him.”  So the Cosmic Christ is the light of every human being: the divine spark within everybody. It is not then surprising to find this common ground. The man from Nazareth, the Risen Lord, ascended back into heaven whence he came, to sit at God’s right hand as the Cosmic Christ, where He is the indwelling light of every human being.  Again, the faces overlap, are one and the same, but are known across the earth by a variety of different names.

But there is more.  John’s Prologue makes it clear that the Cosmic Christ is involved in the creation of everything. Every thing in the universe has the Cosmic Christ’s fingerprints all over it. So it is that the Celts argued that there are in fact two Bibles. The Good Book and Nature.  The Cosmic Christ meets people of any and no religious belief system, through the natural world, again, without necessarily being recognised.

To me this is a source of wonder and awe. But everything has its downside. One of the downsides of the overlapping, is the loss of the full humanity of Jesus of Nazareth.  We project the Risen Lord and the Cosmic Christ, back onto Jesus of Nazareth, and lose something of his humanity. It gives us the glories of John’s prologue and the Birth stories of Matthew and Luke, but we forget that he was a human being exactly like us: born like us, he grew up just like us, he faced all the problems and opportunities that we face, he faced suffering and doubt as we do, and had a faith journey just like ours. 

There seems to be a human tendency to do this with any figure whom we deem to have done great things: we tend to read that greatness back into their story, as being present from their birth and childhood: and we see echoes of the greatness to come, that were almost certainly not obvious to people who knew them at the time.  We put them on a pedestal, and in doing so make them different from the rest of us, when in reality they’re not.  In doing so we encourage ourselves to forget that we too can do great things.

We have done that to Jesus of Nazareth.  Believing him to be the Risen Lord and the Cosmic Christ its inevitable and to some extent right that we do that. But it comes at a price. He ceases to be a fully human being just like us.  He becomes somebody who has done something for us, rather than somebody who shows us the way. Following Jesus is about living a life modelled on his. He has shown us that this is both possible and what God calls us to.