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An Alternative View of Jesus' Incarnation.
[This article appeared in a church newsletter, author unnamed and no copyright. If something similar went into other church publications it may help prepare the way for the Urantia Book's message.]
Several members of our congregation have asked for more information about my comment in the parish newsletter that said, "semi-dormant underneath the surface of our religion, there is a beautiful alternative that keeps peeking through."
One way to discover this alternative is by asking ourselves what our religion might be like if our Bible consisted in only the four Gospels and was without extraneous background information into which the meaning of Jesus and his teachings had to be made to fit.
Confronted with this task, one of those Bibles having Jesus' spoken word printed in red ink is a great help. My first act would be to familiarize myself with Jesus' spoken word to the point that I would know most of it by heart. In fact something similar to this did happen to me, for which I am eternally grateful. Stripped from the ideas and theories of others, the more I learned of Jesus from his word and life, the more impressed I became with his utter uniqueness.
Here was a man who spoke and thought entirely differently from ordinary humans. He is reported as saying, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." We are told he used the Aramaic word, "Abba" which, in English usage, is closer to "Papa" than to "Father." The Jews of Jesus' time were not permitted to even to say the word "Yahweh," their name for God. But here was a man who not only spoke freely about the Father but also spoke to God in the familiar vernacular of a child-parent relationship.
It took me a long time before I saw the links between Jesus, his child-parent relationship with God, and the parable in which he says, "Would any of you who are fathers give your son a stone when he asks for bread? Or would you give him a snake when he asks for a fish? As bad as you are, you will know how to give good things to your children. How much more then will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him."
Eventually it struck me that Jesus, whose life and teachings I already believed were a revelation of the nature of the God, in this parable was giving me a way to discover for myself what the Father might think or do, or what his will might be, in particular circumstances. All I had to do was ask myself how I thought the best of all conceivable earthly fathers might react, and know that whatever I came up with would still be far short of the love, mercy, and wisdom that my heavenly Father would show.
I suppose the most important personal thing coming from my journey of discovery via the gospels was my rediscovery of "God-within." This concept received little mention during the many years of my relationship with the church prior to my journey with the gospels. I found what I needed in John: "And I will ask the Father, and he will send you another Helper to continue with you forever--the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You will know him, however, for he will remain with you, and will be in you." (14:16,17.), and "Whoever loves me will retain my message. My Father will love him and my Father and I will come to him and make our abode with him." Luke adds the comment "...for the kingdom of God is within you." (17:21).
And so my awakening--you and I are indwelt by the spirits of the Father and the Son, you and I are children of the Father, hence we are brothers and sisters from one family, and we all can have an individual, personal, and continuous relationship with the indwelling spirits of God and Jesus to guide our lives and our thinking. Surely that is liberation.
Paul made it clear that in fostering such a relationship we are liberated from the "Law." For me that means that morality and ethics, right and wrong are no longer definable in legalistic terms. From my reading of the gospels, particularly parts like the sermon on the Mount from Matthew and from the parables, I can learn what Jesus meant by love, unselfishness, humility, and service, not as rules but rather as principles. Then I must rely on the spirit forces within me to translate principle into practice. My old religion was dominated by law, guilt, sin, and sacrifice--a life of penance and self-sacrifice. My new religion is dominated by love, spirituality, the simple joy of service (which is its own reward), and the desire to strip away all lingering traces of selfishness and self-assertiveness.
Since undertaking my adventure with the gospels I have also learned that my religion has no elements of exclusivity. All men and women everywhere are my brothers and sisters in one family of God. For me, this is true whether they follow Buddhism, Islam, or are Hindu, Christian, any other, or even of no religion. After all, why else did Jesus recount the story of the good Samaritan? And what about theology? I don't need it.
"Jesus advocated that we devote our lives to proving that love is the greatest thing in the world."
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