Jesus teaches the art of metanoia, or “going into the larger mind.”
.. While Jesus is typical of the wisdom tradition in his vision of what a whole and unified human being looks like, the route he lays out for getting there is very different from anything that had ever been seen on the planet up to that point.
.. Many of the difficulties we run into trying to make our Christianity work stem from the fact that we haven’t realized how different Jesus’ approach really is.
.. What name might we give to this center? The apostle Paul suggests the word kenosis. In Greek the verb kenosein means “to let go,” or “to empty oneself,” and this is the word Paul chooses to describe “the mind of Christ.”
.. Here is what Paul has to say (Philippians 2:6-8):
Though his state was that of God,
yet he did not deem equality with God
something he should cling to.
Rather, he emptied himself,
and assuming the state of a slave,
he was born in human likeness.
He, being known as one of us,
humbled himself, obedient unto death,
even death on the cross.In this beautiful hymn, Paul recognizes that Jesus had only one “operational mode.” Everything he did, he did by self-emptying. He emptied himself and descended into human form. And he emptied himself still further, “even unto death on the cross.” In every life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way, descent: taking the lower place, not the higher.
The Kingdom of Heaven
Many Christians, particularly those of a more evangelical persuasion, assume that the Kingdom of Heaven means the place you go when you die—if you’ve been “saved.” But the problem with this interpretation is that Jesus himself specifically contradicts it when he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (that is, here) and “at hand” (that is, now).
.. The other approach people have consistently tried is to equate the Kingdom of Heaven with an earthly utopia
.. When his followers wanted to proclaim him the Messiah, the divinely anointed king of Israel who would inaugurate the reign of God’s justice upon the earth, Jesus shrank from all that and said, strongly and unequivocally, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
.. Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. [1] It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place.
Loving both Jesus and Christ
It is important to place ourselves in the largest possible frame, or we always revert back to a very non-catholic (“unwhole”) place where both the savior and the saved ones end up being far too small, where Jesus of Nazareth has been separated from the Eternal Christ. Here Christianity becomes just another competing world religion and salvation is privatized because the social and historical message has been lost.
Richard Rohr: Jesus was not Plan B
The Christ Mystery is thus the template, model, and goal for all of creation. The end is included and the trajectory set from the very beginning. Likewise for Duns Scotus, Jesus is not plan B, or a mere historic problem solver; he is Plan A from the very start.
.. The theology of Francis, Duns Scotus, and Bonaventure was never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. They were all about cosmic optimism, deep time, and implanted hope! Salvation was social more than individual, just like the Old Testament covenants. Once we lost this kind of inherent mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than delighting in an all-pervasive plan that was already and always in place.
As Paul’s school says, “Before the world was made, God chose us, chose us in Christ” (Ephesians 1:4). The problem was solved from the beginning. Any Gospel of hope must start with the “original blessing” announced in Genesis 1 instead of the problem described in Genesis 3. It invites us beyond the negative notion of history as being a “fall from grace” to the long and positive view of history as a slow emergence/evolution into ever-greater consciousness.