Jesus said,"I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word."
In what later came to be known as his "high priestly prayer," Jesus is shown in John's account as giving his disciples back to the Father and praying for their future. His intention, he said, had been to make God's "name known" so that his followers could go forward in truth and protected by that name.
Earlier efforts to tell God's story had gotten distorted by intermediaries who took a message of unconditional love for humankind and made it into a mean-spirited, elitist, legalistic drawing of ethnic lines.
Once Jesus departed, intermediaries again took charge of his story and again distorted it. Their motives may have been pure. But the message received was this: salvation is a prize that will be won by only a few, and those few
will be determined by obedience of the Church's rules.
Religious history became a process of debating the rules. In time, God was depicted as one who toys with people, as
a fickle friend, easily alienated, and prickly about small things.
God became a dread force threatening one day to destroy it all, as the radio preacher said last night in a blistering assault on modernity, a warning of the "rapture," and an invitation to buy his tapes...
It is time for those of us on this message board to ask: What did Jesus himself say? What story did he live? It is time to look beyond the self-serving motivations of distorters and to discern, as best we can, the name that Jesus actually made known.
Speaking for myself, what I hear Jesus pointing to is his circle of compassion and respect, his embracing of women and men as equals, his blurring of family and ethnic lines, his focus on persons and not laws, his call to serve and not to rule, his sacrifice of self for the good of the other.
In what later came to be known as his "high priestly prayer," Jesus is shown in John's account as giving his disciples back to the Father and praying for their future. His intention, he said, had been to make God's "name known" so that his followers could go forward in truth and protected by that name.
Earlier efforts to tell God's story had gotten distorted by intermediaries who took a message of unconditional love for humankind and made it into a mean-spirited, elitist, legalistic drawing of ethnic lines.
Once Jesus departed, intermediaries again took charge of his story and again distorted it. Their motives may have been pure. But the message received was this: salvation is a prize that will be won by only a few, and those few
will be determined by obedience of the Church's rules.
Religious history became a process of debating the rules. In time, God was depicted as one who toys with people, as
a fickle friend, easily alienated, and prickly about small things.
God became a dread force threatening one day to destroy it all, as the radio preacher said last night in a blistering assault on modernity, a warning of the "rapture," and an invitation to buy his tapes...
It is time for those of us on this message board to ask: What did Jesus himself say? What story did he live? It is time to look beyond the self-serving motivations of distorters and to discern, as best we can, the name that Jesus actually made known.
Speaking for myself, what I hear Jesus pointing to is his circle of compassion and respect, his embracing of women and men as equals, his blurring of family and ethnic lines, his focus on persons and not laws, his call to serve and not to rule, his sacrifice of self for the good of the other.
