Status Updates From The Universal Christ: How a...

“Mary Magdalene serves as a witness to personal love and intimacy, which for most people is the best and easiest start on the path toward universal love. Then in the garden at Easter, she experienced a sudden shift of recognition toward the universal Presence of Christ. He, in fact, is the gardener! He has become every man and every woman!”

“If your Jesus remains too small, too sentimental, or too bound by time and culture, you do not get very far at all. For Jesus to become Christ, he must surpass the bounds of space and time, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Frankly, he must rise above any religion formed in his name that remains tribal, clannish, xenophobic, or exclusionary. Otherwise, he is not the "Savior of the World" (John 4:42) at all”

“she knew and trusted Jesus's voice, even when she couldn't recognize him. How different that is from…common empirical knowing, which limits itself to … proof, to its own form of reason, and to… specific divine revelation. …if we don't learn how to send people on inner journeys or love journeys, the whole religious project will continue to fall apart, because we have no living witnesses of a transformed life.”

“It is also worth mentioning that the twelve men are consistently portrayed in the Gospel accounts as very slow to respond, and usually filled with doubt and hesitation (Mark 16:11, 13-14) and even resistance, denial, and betrayal, yet that is not brought up as an impediment to their leadership. But Mary seemed to recognize Jesus's new kind of Presence the moment he uttered her name.”

“Most still imagined that all of the apostles were male, and therefore priesthood and ministry should be reserved for men (as if gender were a quality of the True Self, the restored Self, or the ontological self in God!). This argument is undone, it seems to me, by Christ appearing first to Mary after the Resurrection, and by his charge for her to be his first witness.”

“If God is God, then the Divine Presence must necessarily be everywhere and universally accessible. If you can physically "touch" God, it's easy to think God is just here and not there, mine but not yours.”

“like Mary, we usually need to start with the concrete encounter before we move to the universal experience… Spiritual knowing is an inner encounter and a calm inner knowing… We need this intimate inner knowing because we can't be left at the visual level or we will always think we can localize, limit, or capture God as a private possession (see John 20:29), or as something that can or must be "proven" to others”

“He was saying that the Christ is untouchable in singular form because he is omnipresent in all forms as we soon see as the "gardener" at the tomb (John 20:15), as a wayfarer on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-15), and as a man tending a cooking fire by the side of a lake (John 21:4, 9).”

“What happens next? Translations say "she turned," or "she knew," or "turning to face him," she cries out, "Rabonni!" which means "Master" (John 20:13-16). Instantly, Mary sees the one before her in a different way, you might say relationally instead of merely physically. She realizes it is still Jesus, but he has fully become the Christ.”

“In John's account, two angels appear and ask her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She replies, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." She then turns around and sees a man whom she doesn't recognize. Mary supposes he is the gardener (John 20:15) and asks him where he has taken Jesus. Then, in one of the most dramatic moments in the Gospels, the man simply says her name, "Mary!" ”

“In…Luke (8:2), Mary Magdalene is described as a woman who became a follower and friend of Jesus after he had cast seven demons out of her. Not a terribly auspicious start for a person who's then mentioned as many as twelve times throughout the Gospels (more than most apostles). By the way, prostitution is never mentioned as one of her demons in any account. I suspect sex is our demon and we projected it onto her.”

“No Gospel will ever be worthy of being called "Good News" unless it is indeed a win-win worldview, and "good news for all the people" (Luke 2:10)—without exception.”

“As long as you operate inside any scarcity model, there will never be enough God or grace to go around. Jesus came to undo our notions of scarcity and tip us over into a worldview of absolute abundance or what he would call the "Reign of God." The Gospel reveals a divine world of infinity, a worldview of enough and more than enough. Our word for this undeserved abundance is "grace"… ”

“Yet we remember collectively the admittedly harsh judgments that usually come earlier in all these texts, which I have to believe were the prophets' own way of teaching the principle of karma. (Goodness is its own reward, and evil will always be its own punishment.)”

“The church was meant to be an alternative society … We see this alternative model of justice acted out in scripture—famously in Jesus's story of the Return of the Prodigal (Luke 15:11), but almost always in the prophets (if we can first endure their tirades). God's justice makes things right at their very core, and divine love does not achieve its ends by mere punishment or retribution. ”

“The systems of this world are inherently argumentative, competitive, dualistic, and based on a scarcity model of God, mercy, and grace. They confuse retribution—what is often little more than crass vengeance—with the biblically evolved notions of healing, forgiveness, and divine mercy.”

“we have been slow to notice how God grows more and more nonviolent through the Scriptures…how this evolution becomes completely obvious in Jesus. Infinite love, mercy, and forgiveness are hard for the human mind to even imagine, so most people seem to need a notion of hell to maintain their logic of retribution, just punishment, and a just world, as they understand it. God does not need hell, but we sure seem to.”