Saint Paul,
who was a highly seasoned scholar in the Hebraic tradition, seriously
acquainted with the Hellenistic culture, and utterly committed to the vision of
the kingdom of God, wrote the following to the ancient church of Philippi:
"And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with
knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in
the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of
righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of
God."
Just blindly submitting to the dominate culture with little
to no questioning of what it might mean in terms of one's true human self or
journey to wholeness, is foolishness. As a gentle cynic steeped in the
Christian tradition, I reflect on a full-bodied expression of sin and the fully human Jesus. This entails taking
into account the reality of sin (metaphor: missing the mark).
A full-bodied expression of sin, according to James
McClendon (Doctrine*), calls for dimensions of divine
proportions. Sin is measured against the “full faithfulness” of Jesus Christ.
Our humanness falls short of “true humanity” as measured against “authentic,
undiminished humanity,” embodied in Jesus, who is “the truly human one.” And if
Jesus is the archetype of a fully
human person, our selfhood, as afar as it is sinful, falls short of true
humanity. Borrowing from McClendon’s clever image, we are “Swiss cheese folk
poked with holes from head to heel.” Possessing gaping holes, we are to be
filled with human wholeness in every aspect of life through the embodiment of
Jesus Christ. Taking the image further into the larger society, sin is a
“puzzling vacancy or disorder in a God-created world” that is too complex for
the concept like “original sin.”
This vantage point knocks the wind out of confusing sin
with being human; for Jesus was human, yet portrayed without sin. Instead, we
see ourselves as lacking in the vital wholeness that God through Jesus Christ
fills with grace and truth. Thus the prayer of St. Paul, i.e., the answer to
it, comes into play. What part does human initiative play alongside the
monumental divine initiative to remedy the human condition in the fully
human son of God?**
*James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Doctrine:
Systematic Theology, Vol. II (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 124.
**"Son of God" refers back to
the original myth of humanity in the person of Adam
Artwork: White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall, 1938, oil on canvas,
Art Institute of Chicago
