Whether We Like It or Not

One of the most difficult aspects of "roused, readied, reaped" lies before me.  The multiple and varied arcs of our lives are dominated, in the substance of Jesus' teachings, by two great elements of our existence.  We are God's creations, and we are human.  We are also presented with Jesus as the divine Son of God, and with Jesus as the human Son of Man.  I think--as I must endeavor to show--that both titles for Jesus are reflected in our own natures.

The gospel basis for my description of these phenomena will be especially the extended discourse of Mark 11 and 12.  The conceptual basis is more wide-ranging, and therefore attended by more pitfalls.  The upshot, however, is this: We, along with Jesus, are children of God and children of Man.

To say that we have equal duties impinging on us from these two natures is nonsense--not because such an assertion is demonstrably untrue, but because it is immeasurable.  We fail in all our duties to God.  A failure that is not nearly so unavoidable, however, is the failure--which I believe the churches indulge themselves in--to credit Jesus' assertions about how we can approach our two main duties.

We think of ourselves as utter failures as children of God.  We choose, however, to be such failures, even to the extent of not even trying.  Children of God determine which mountains leap into the sea, and children of God determine who will enter heaven.  These truths can be demonstrated from the gospels.  Instead of confronting those realities, we flop helplessly before Jesus as the Son of God.  Jesus will have to work the miracles, and Jesus will have to forgive us the innumerable violences we commit against each other even as we congratulate ourselves on our reverence for our leper-healing, sea-calming Savior.

What we need to be doing most of all, however, is looking to Jesus as the Son of Man--an exemplar of how we should behave as parts of the family of Man.  Healing the sick, even raising the dead--these we ought to be able to do with a word or a thought, yet (in insolent disregard for the gospels) we cast these things back in the face of Jesus The Son of God.  We cap this insolence by imagining that the gospels are mostly about Jesus The Miracle Worker, rather than about Jesus The Perfect Man--who shows us how to behave toward our fellow children of Man.

The fact that Jesus is the true and perfect Son of God is most immediately a matter between Jesus and God, a matter that is presented to us at God's pleasure and for our edification.  The fact that Jesus is the true and perfect Son of Man, however, ought by the fact of its very existence be both a gall and a goad to us.  This gall and this goad, however, will be largely unavailing until we reckon that our sibling relationship to the Son of God is--by the gospels' direct demonstration--a simple thing to establish and a simple thing to try.

We are children of God whether we like it or not.