Matthew 8.26-27 (CEB):

²⁶ He said to them, “Why are you afraid, you people of weak faith?” Then he got up and gave orders to the winds and the lake, and there was a great calm.

²⁷ The people were amazed and said, “What kind of person is this? Even the winds and the lake obey him!”

John 10.31-33:

³¹ Again the Jewish opposition picked up stones in order to stone him. ³² Jesus responded, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of those works do you stone me?”

³³ The Jewish opposition answered, “We don’t stone you for a good work but for insulting God. You are human, yet you make yourself out to be God.”

Qur’an 19:34:

That is Jesus, the son of Mary – the word of truth about which they are in dispute.

There seem to have been disputes about Jesus from the moment he started teaching. The Bible portrays Jesus as a faithful Jew and an excellent, challenging teacher, yet, he finds himself in the crosshairs of both the Jewish Temple leadership and the Roman Empire.

The Empire is watching Jesus because of his coded anti-Roman rhetoric. Caesar doesn’t like it when hippie preachers stir up occupied people by convincing them that even their occupiers must bow before the true, supreme power of God. To the Romans, Jesus is a dangerous insurgent.

The Temple leadership finds Jesus’ intimate, affectionate language about God disrespectful. Also, like Rome, they feel Jesus is a threat to their iron-fisted authority over the Jewish people. When Jesus heals on the Sabbath, for example, the Temple bosses get all bent out of shape because “it says in the Bible ‘thou shalt not work on the sabbath’” to which Jesus retorts, “What you claim ‘the bible says’ doesn’t have anything to do with what God wants.” Then, Jesus heals people on the Sabbath. On at least two different occasions (Luke 13.10-17; Mark 3.1-6).

Jesus does this all the time. Some self-proclaimed religious authority says, “You can’t do that” or “You can’t say that” or “You’re misleading your people,” and Jesus responds by doing and saying what he knows God is urging from the soul of the Conscious Universe.

Jesus teaches us that his level of Divine intimacy is available to us, too. Without the need of any priestly intervention, by the way. It’s that independence and the permission to individually be intimate with God— that scared the hell out of the status quo and the state.

And still does.

The Qur’an indicates that five hundred years after those initial arguments about Jesus, people were still arguing about him. However, detrimental to his theology and countercultural, radical, and revolutionary ideology, people were instead arguing about the nature of Jesus himself.

Was he a human being at all? Had Jesus actually just been an illusion, a Spirit pretending to be human? Was Jesus a cosmic sacrifice, or here to teach us about our own spiritual nature? Was Jesus a little bit human, a little bit divine, like the Donny & Marie of the heavenly realm?

The divinity of Jesus argument began to transform politics in the mid-4^th Century, CE and provided a convenient platform for Constantine to reclaim a portion of the Roman Empire he now co-ruled. By codifying a belief system around this new-fangled Christianity, Constantine kept the Western Empire united for a while longer by playing to the popularity of the religion of the unwashed masses. The cost of Constantine’s action was the creation of a state religion that removed all the Jewish rebelliousness from the Bible. The Romans changed Jesus from God’s revelation of cosmic immortality, to God’s sacrifice granting us all human immortality—a genuinely Roman and absolutely not-at-all Jewish point of view. But they say the victors write history and I’m pretty sure the people who first said that were Romans.

At any rate, at that particular historical moment, Christianity became the new Emperor’s cult and Jesus the new Emperor. Church leaders emphasized reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus as pre-existing Emperor of the Universe. Rome changed the story. For many Christians, the lessons of a divine teacher and revealer of spiritual wonders were lost. Views about Jesus that didn’t agree with Rome were intentionally destroyed, declared heretical by the new, self-proclaimed, all-powerful arbiter of opinion about Jesus and the Bible: The Holy Roman Catholic Church. Over the past couple of thousand years, the Roman view of Jesus has become standardized to the point of excluding any other understanding of Jesus. Because, heresy.

By far the majority of Christians in the USA, whether Catholic or Protestant, proclaim something along the lines of Jesus Christ being the Lord and Savior of the world, who through his spilled blood, reconciled our broken relationship with God and saved us from death. This has become Christian orthodoxy. It is not necessarily what Jesus taught. I’m not convinced it’s what he intended.

Remember, there have always been many facets to Jesus, many ways to interpret him. Like any great teacher, his lessons are filled with brain-twisting metaphor, analogy, and mystical language that’s incredibly difficult to decipher. especially 2000 years later, after language has changed and evolved so much. After we’ve learned so much about the universe, both in outer space, and within the core of our being.

Today, making space for and utilizing those different ideas about Christ is generally called Progressive Christianity. Progressive Christians focus on what Jesus teaches about being one with God. In that regard we are very much like the first Jewish followers of Jesus.

We, too, have come to understand that through God’s universal love, all humans, regardless of ethnicity, culture, creed, or religion, are God’s beloved co-creators. Jesus and his Jewish traditions compel us to work toward a peaceful, productive, inclusive community where we share with one another as freely and effortlessly as God shares with us.

Yet, in simply discussing this different facet of Jesus—which doesn’t exclude other opinions—lies the dilemma for those of us today who, like our ancestors, follow an alternative orthodoxy. The universally loving God I believe in allows for other religions and many pathways to experiential Oneness with Unconditional Love. There is a dominant Christianity in America, however, just as there was an authoritative Judaism in Jesus’ era, that doesn’t allow for that sort of open spirituality and proclaims it heretical. For today’s self-proclaimed orthodoxy, Jesus is the only path to God. And in this, they are not talking about his teachings, but instead about Jesus himself. Specifically, anyone who doesn’t recite some creed about Jesus dying for the sins of the world is condemned to an eternity of torment. The orthodox “prove” theirs is the only truth by quoting passage after passage from the Bible, always using the Roman, instead of the Jewish lens.

This inability (or unwillingness) to make spiritual space for differences of opinion is frustrating.

What is it that is so inflammatory about proclaiming a God of universal, loving acceptance? What makes someone incapable of saying, “Hey, we think about this Jesus character differently—in fact, we think about a lot of things differently, but ultimately, it all comes down to love. What can we do, together, to create more love?”

Amen.