A New Christmas Story: God in 3D

Share

Christianity’s familiar and beautiful Christmas story depicts a heavenly father sending his son to be born into the world to save people from their despair and who sends them his spirit to comfort and guide them. This is a warm image of God as a loving father, a self-giving son, and an ever-present, encouraging spirit.

However, this traditional story only portrays a one dimensional God—an intimate divine source in metaphors of personal relationship limited to the male images of father and son and a gender-neutral “spirit” (although feminine in both Hebrew and Greek). It is true that God is revealed in these images. It is also partial. Today’s cosmically-informed world longs for a God who is bigger than “the man upstairs,” closer and more real to us personally than just an ancient story, and more like us than only a heroic figure from the past.

The new Christmas story pictures a God in 3D. These three dimensions of God begin with the Infinite Dimension of God, who is everywhere, in everything, and much more. This God, who is beyond us, is born into this world in a breakthrough way as the Intimate Dimension of God in Jesus of Nazareth. This baby boy grows up to embrace and manifest his own humanity and divinity, lives, dies, and lives again to walk beside us. He continues to lovingly whisper into our souls the magnificent revelation that every person, like him, carries the divine image within them as the Inner Dimension of God.

Listen to Paul Smith talk to Ken Wilber about his latest book, exploring how Christianity has grown through several distinct stages of maturity, and the way each of those stages interprets the eight major elements of Christian thought. Integral Christianity: Answering the Call to Evolve

Since it is the Christmas season, I will focus on Jesus as an expression of the Intimate Dimension of God, leaving the other two dimensions, Infinite and Inner, to the later posts.

First, the often claimed and supposed exclusivism of the Jesus as remembered in the New Testament must be addressed lest one hear something different than what I am saying.

Jesus was a universal person living in a specific time and place. His adoring followers made claims about him that he did not make about himself. The language of love often says to our beloved partner, “You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” or ‘You are the most handsome man who has ever lived.” So, too, the early Christians, lost in their passionate love for Jesus and saved from small ideas, called Jesus the only son of God.  In the ancient world, rulers were often said to have been born of a virgin and called son of God. It was natural to understand Jesus in these terms in that culture and incorporate this into the stories about him.

Yet, Jesus called himself son of man and, as pointed out in the Gospel of Thomas as well as the four canonical gospels, we are all called sons and daughters of God.

While progressive Christians find that God is beautifully defined by Jesus, we know that God is not confined to Jesus. We are comfortable following Jesus while affirming other authentic spiritual paths and persons and being enriched by them. We model how all traditional religions can evolve to higher levels without having to leave their unique path. Jesus didn’t dismiss his religion. Instead, he offered a more evolved version of it for his time. His model is relevant for all religious traditions today.

Writers of New Testament sometimes left the universality of Jesus and regressed to a narrow understanding of him. When they do, we can then confidently follow Jesus’ own model for interpreting his bible, the Hebrew scriptures.  He embraced parts of them, ignored parts of them, and rejected parts of them — namely, those portrayals of God that were less than loving. Jesus said, “You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say that you should love your enemy, too.” To follow Jesus is to make him the discerner of all things biblical and reject those things that are less that Christ-like.

Once we let go of all claims to exclusivity and narrow theologies, we can embrace God’s light in many loving paths. We can embrace a truly universal Jesus whose Christ (anointed) consciousness flows through all creation by whatever name. Then we can genuinely enjoy the lovely stories around the birth of Jesus as pictures of adoration and love.

Jesus is central in the Christian tradition in our understanding and experience of God. However, even in the Christian path, the Intimate Dimension of God goes beyond Jesus and includes all the meaningful ways God may come close to us such as Mother, Father, Beloved, Sacred Presence, Holy One, Lover, or Friend. Jesus did not limit his divine guidance to the One he called Abba, but sought heavenly guidance from his (long-dead) heroes Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop of transfiguration. Mother Teresa found it in the desperate folks living in the gutters of Calcutta. Saint Francis found it in the birds and animals of the forest. We can find this intimate dimension of God and divine guidance in any meaningful relationship.

In the new Christmas story the God of Three Dimensions came from beyond us, to walk beside us, to bring alive the reality of God as us. The new story is that God has been incarnating for 13.7 billion years, and God continues to take human form in you and me. That’s the wonder of Real 3D!

People of all religious traditions and those of none can join Christians as we celebrate the birth of Jesus. As a prototype of evolved humanity he came to tell us all that, as our deepest, truest Self, we are timeless, transcendent spirits walking an earthly path for a brief lifetime in the span of eternity.

Dear Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for coming into our world to show us who we are in a stunning story of cosmic love.