If He Hadn't Been More Into Teaching

Cunning as a serpent, innocent as a dove--

Jesus might have had counselors in mind.

You've got to be shrewd in this business,

schooled in pathology (beginning with your own),

ready and able to intervene and outmanuever.

Cunning.

But knowing statistical probabilities, you then have to

suspend them--

seeing beneath sick label, beyond poor prognosis--

to meet unique human being discouraged by life's

crushing

with freshness of faith and caring.

Innocent.

If he hadn't been more into teaching,

Jesus would have made a hell of a counselor.

What A Balance Struck Jesus

Toughminded needs to balance tenderhearted.

Sometimes hard decisions must be made,

a malignancy must be cut out,

an axe must fall.

To avoid it in the name of lovingkindness

is to misconceive lovingkindness..

If we only warm but never burn we are not fire.

Remember moneychangers and whitened sepulchers

no less than good Samaritan and prodigal son--

what a balance struck Jesus!

Not Jesus More Than Any Other

I can accept "the Word was made flesh"

if by flesh you mean the universe

and by Word you mean the mysterium tremendum et

fascinans antecedent to the Big Bang.

But not Jesus more than any other.

He just experienced it and lived it beyond what any before

him dreamed.

See the stupendous diaphanous exfoliating universe

as the Incarnation on the rise--

mystic that he was Jesus knew it!

Jesus Would Puke

My personal opinion is Jesus would puke

to see what is preached in his name.

Has any man done more to champion the outcast and

oppressed,

to challenge the complacent and hypocritical,

to cry for change of heart, forgiveness versus judgment,

justice and peace and love above all?

How they have crimped his spirit's spaciousness,

hardened his teaching into dogma,

placed him safely out of reach by turning him into God,

murdered his memory and meaning by fostering

intolerance, justifying greed, waving flags of war

all the while praising his name.

After he'd stop weeping he'd puke.

Jesus To Needed Forgiveness

How enamored of the theme of forgiveness if never forgiven?

Let it crash home

that Jesus too needed forgiveness!

That something so obvious is so unmentionable

gives clue into the strength of the taboo.

But it must be mentioned if he's to yield his deepest meaning.

By making Jesus the only son of God we miss the biggest

thing.

If he was "human like the rest of us, sin alone excepted,"

how can we relate to that?

How could he possibly serve as a model for us

if he knew not the humanness of sin?

In kicking Jesus upstairs we lose nothing less

than the saving understanding that unleashing his love

was his ecstasy at being forgiven!

Participating In The Great I Am

To deify Jesus above every other

sadly misses the meaning of his amazed awakening

into an identity with the great I AM,

nullifies his astonishing call to us each

to awaken with amazement to our own participation

in the glory of the great I AM.