Man is stumbling blindly through spiritual darkness in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, and power without conscience. General Omar N. Bradley – Memorial Day 1948
Question: When one third of the world’s population claims to be following Jesus, how can we, two thousand years after he lived and died, still be stumbling through spiritual darkness?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn told this to the Harvard graduating class of 1978. The world has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to its rise from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The fight for our planet, in its present state of spiritual exhaustion, is a fight of cosmic proportions. It will cause in us a spiritual awakening or break us by a relentless crowbar of events. Yet your TV screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is your joy all about?
And what is the nature of the spiritual exhaustion we’re going through? There is a great, almost existential anxiety below the surface of people’s lives today that no one cares to mention lest they have to deal with it. I think I have finally discovered what it is.
We are said to one day be conformed to the image of Jesus. Unfortunately, we have put him on such a pedestal - so high and lifted up - that it has become an unattainable goal envisioned only by an impossible faith. How can we follow someone who is God’s only begotten son, seated at the right hand of the father, a worker of miracles, saver of souls, not subject to death. How can miserable sinners like us follow him when we don’t have the benefit of believing those things about ourselves.
Unless we can.
What if Neale Donald Walsch was right when he said, “The only God we can ever know will be found within ourselves”. That understanding of God could change everything. It may be the turning point of cosmic proportions that Solzhenitsyn said was approaching.
Our first reaction to such an idea might seem blasphemous, like we’re minimizing God or elevating ourselves to a position we’re not worthy of. But such is not the case. It simply means that there is nothing but God. There is no need for an intermediary because we have never been separated from him. That was a misinterpretation of the Bible that has benefitted the Church. The truth is, in Him we live and move and have our being. We used to sing a song in church called Oh Magnify the Lord. What better way to magnify God than embody him throughout the world.
The good news is not just that Jesus was the son of God. But that we are all sons of God the same way. It is the good news of the gospel which has been repressed throughout the history of western religion.
Until it is accepted, following Jesus will continue to be wishful thinking. The only way we can follow Jesus is to become like Jesus. And in two thousand years that hasn’t happened by worshipping him. It can only happen by accepting the truth of our divinity the way he did.
That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Follow me”.
