Christ, the True Fulfilment of our Desires

The ancient world greedily swallowed every novel idea about the divine and enthusiastically sought out new concepts of God. However, it was not prepared for the upheaval of God making this exciting religious hunt superfluous by inserting himself into the world. Nor were the Jews prepared to receive a Messiah who would repudiate their longings for national unification and revenge against the nations that one by one had subjugated their land, and for a Jewish world empire whose ruler would be a descendant of David, seated on David’s throne.

There were so many people in the inn that there was no room for Mary and her child. And there was so much religion in the world that it had no place for God’s revelation of himself. Jesus stepped forth from the midst of his people and “spoke as one having authority”. He commanded the blind to see, the lame to walk and the dead to live. What’s more, he commanded sinners to go in peace. All the same, he had to die on a cross, lie as a corpse in a tomb until the third day when he came out alive before ascending into heaven. It was only then that even his closest friends and daily associates of many years could completely rid themselves of their preconceived ideas about the kingdom of God and all that pertained to it.

Dreams of a lost Paradise, a golden era, shimmered like a mirage before humanity. The endeavour to depict God – whether as the One God and Father of all, or as a whole host of gods – according to a collective memory had been the highest task of human beings for countless millennia: a new god for every memory of him, for every hint of his unseen presence, for every sign of his power and activity. Left to themselves, but not abandoned by God, they uncovered truths and composed mythic tales around these glimpses of God’s being, or constructed theories around them. This religious impulse was the wellspring of the formation of culture. A hidden God was at work within this impulse, and a fallen human race drew its life from it. Humanity’s ability to establish religions produced exquisite poetry and fashioned sublime worldviews. However, extravagant fantasies warped their poetry into something grotesque or horrific. Under the weight of bitter experience, worldviews collapsed into pessimism, while the most primitive religious notions from the dawn of humanity were piously preserved, long after such primitive thought had been outgrown. Thus, the pagan religions were extensions of man’s own spirit. The inclination to create religions (or heresies) to express our spirit, was, is and probably always will be man’s deepest and purest form of self-idolatry and the greatest impediment to the Spirit of God’s creative work within us.

Then God himself came, born of a woman; the divinity itself united with our humanity. He is the new Adam and the true religion. The actual bond between God and us is himself.

Not a teacher, nor a prophet like the founders of other great religions; nor a religious genius who guessed or glimpsed or understood more about God than others. Christ is the new man who grants the ability to become new creatures through a new birth, as he referred to it himself when he spoke with Nicodemus about the necessary conditions for entering the kingdom of God.

Some modern psychologists claim that the vague anxiety latent within our subconscious mind, surfaces in our conscious mind (often without our knowing why). The jadedness lingering within is an echo of our experience of being birthed into the world and of the dreadful pressure that drove us out from the warm darkness of the womb into the terrifying light and cold of a seemingly boundless room. The newborn lets out a scream that resounds in us for as long as we live. The birth Christ spoke of is a real birth – out of the warm darkness of paganism into the blinding light that he brings to the world; into a space, whose boundaries we cannot fathom and in which we cannot live without using capacities that have lain dormant within us. We have entered a new age, and even if we no longer dare “to think our own thoughts about God”, our ideas must at least conform to the reality. He who is the Way, the Truth and the Life leads us to somewhere beyond the realms of our fantasies.

From "The Burning Bush", 1934.