The highpoint of the “sacrifice of the Mass” during my Catholic youth was the point at which the priest would raise the consecrated Host (now deemed mystically the body of Christ) three times pronouncing (in Latin) that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again!” As an altar boy I would ring the bell next to me as I knelt on the lower step below the altar each time the Host was raised. Members of the congregation would bow silently at this solemn moment.
Now, during my Presbyterian late maturity, I have a pastor who has made the same proclamation during the “Prayer of Thanksgiving” as part of our monthly communion service. This time it is in English and without any bell ringing. It is still a significant moment.
It only recently occurred to me that this statement of the “mystery of faith” (as both Catholics and Presbyterians now call it) could be significantly improved by making the following change:
Why not “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ is here now”? This formulation would make our duties as followers of Jesus more immediate. Too many so-called Christians today, it would seem, are ignoring the “kingdom of God” in which Jesus intended us to live as humans, and putting off salvation (and the obligations appertaining thereunto) to a post-death Heaven.
Of course, if traditional Christians are reluctant to give up all that “end of time” millennialism, and other notions particularly attractive to nineteenth-century American protestants, found in the Book of Revelations and in the imagination of my Evangelical friends, they could just rewrite the new statement with that included at the end.
“Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ is here now, Christ will come again.”
Either version would be an improvement over what we are now repeating in our communion services. While there is legitimate mystery in any religious faith, that sense of mystery has much less to do with what happens after we die and much more to do with how we respond to the Divine Presence and love offered to us while we are still alive.
The term “incarnation” has too long been used to mean only that God assumed human flesh in the body of Jesus; like many historical theological dogmas, this one has been used to limit our understanding of divinity rather than expanding our consciousness. As progressive Christian thinker Franciscan Richard Rohr noted in one of his mediations about the Apostle Paul, “like Paul, we only know the Christ through observing and honoring the depth of our human experience and gaining new eyes.”
Rohr, in his book The Universal Christ, (2019) asserts that there are two incarnations. The first was creation itself, the “big bang” or whatever term suits you. The second incarnation occurs when Jesus shows us what God is really like—for us humans. The term incarnation refers to the divine presence or “cosmic Christ,” or spirit of God (pick your favorite term) in all creation as well as in Jesus. This divinity exists in and is available to every one of us in “the depth of our human experience,” as Rohr put it. He also says “the Divine DNA of the Creator is therefore held in all creatures.”
Another way of announcing this truth is the expression “we are spiritual beings having a human experience,” rather than “human beings having a spiritual experience.” One corollary of this idea should then be, in the words of my pastor, that we must find God by “sinking into our humanity,” as Jesus did when being tempted by the Devil at the start of his short career. He did not take the bait by using his “God powers” to defeat temptation and “prove” his divinity, but instead said “it is written” (in human books, by the way) that one should not “test God”—especially in the way Jesus was being tested—with promises of earthly power and glory.
If Jesus had to prove his divine incarnation with miracles of power and might, I suspect he would have considered his mission and ministry a failure.
We can’t find God when “he/she or it” comes to us or “comes again,” but only by allowing the spirit of God within us, our sense of goodness or (or “godness”) within to emerge. Our goal isn’t Heaven but the creation of a better or holier world (isn’t Kingdom a misleading and dated term today?) here and now by being fully human, and part of that is somehow allowing our divine incarnation to show itself.
So “Christ” is not the last name of Jesus, as I have heard several preachers say. It is instead the spirit within all of us, and in al creation. Now that is, to be sure, as “heavy thought,” perhaps even an example of “the mystery of faith” that we should acknowledge more often, and especially when we announce our union with the rest of humanity in a communion or Eucharistic service?
Changing our liturgical language won’t change our heads or our hearts, but such changes can at least mark a beginning.
March, 2019; revised, June, 2020