Jesus Is,
       
       By Rodney J Owen
       
        The question put forth is, who is Jesus and how do you know?
  I think the second part needs to be addressed before articulating the
first.  No one really knows who Jesus was.  We all form our opinions 
and ideas based mainly on what we have been told and taught.  Most 
visions of Jesus are based on the gospels, tradition, and the teachings
 of the Church.  I extend this to include the, documented, similar 
experiences of other holy men from other religious traditions, the Gospel 
of Thomas, and the commentaries and writings of contemporary thinkers.
        It is my contention that Jesus was not what most mainline 
churches and religious movements would have us believe.  Jesus was a Jew.  
He was born into, lived in, and was executed in the Hebrew world.  
This world was dominated by a religious philosophy based on a God very 
similar to humans in disposition and action.  The Ancient Hebrews created 
a mythological God in their image; a God who was male, authoritarian,
vengeful, judgmental, and partial to only a select few of all the 
people He created.  Their religion was based upon the writings of 
their forefathers, a primitive group of hunter-gatherers trying to understand 
the very large, mysterious, unknown world in which they lived.  These 
forefathers were basically cave painters.  They sacrificed their livestock 
and their offspring to the God who made the thunder when He walked, and 
caused floods and plagues when He was mad.
        The ancient Hebrews created laws and commandments, which like 
all laws, were created for the control of society.  They credited 
the inspiration for these laws to their vengeful God, who illogically 
created Satan and Hell for the punishment of those who disobeyed His 
laws.  In time the Hebrews developed a micro-society of priests who 
had special access to this authoritarian God that was unknown to the 
rank and file.
        It was into this culture that Jesus was born and it is within 
it that He discovered that His forefathers were wrong in their 
interpretations of God.  Jesus was an outlaw.  He was not what the 
pious religious teachers of today, with their mighty cathedrals, and 
holier-than-thou attitudes say that He was.  Jesus was the Che Guevara 
of his day.  He championed the sick and poor, 
the dispossessed and the damned.  He flatly told the religious leaders 
that they were wrong, and He defied their laws and traditions.  
He associated with drunks and whores, lepers and tax collectors.  
He denied the existence of a vengeful God, He treated women humanely, 
and He challenged the practice of capital punishment.  He was a threat 
to the established religion of the day, and its leaders had Him executed.
        Jesus took God out of the holiest of holies and put Him/Her 
back into the chests of people.  He claimed that the kingdom of heaven 
was within and accessible to anyone.  But however freeing this concept 
is, it places responsibility on the individual.  God cannot be 
accessed through another, therefore the responsibility is on each individual.  
The Gospels credit Jesus with numerous healings, yet they also credit Him 
with saying that we could do all that He did, and more.  The power of 
healing is, thus, also placed within the chests of each person, not in 
the special powers of some divine other.  Jesus calmed storms and walked 
on water, not to prove His divinity, but to illustrate the main tenet of 
all the world's peaceful religions: All is well.  Peter's attempt to walk 
on water is a good illustration of the power of faith and God's omniscience.
This is not to deny Jesus' divinity; He was divine, so was Peter, so are you and I.
        Jesus was misunderstood in His day as He is misunderstood today.  
His followers expected Him to be a new leader-king and to run the 
Roman invaders out of Israel militarily.  What they got was a 
pacifist preacher who taught them to turn the other cheek and love 
their enemies--totally foreign and unwelcome ideas.  They expected Him 
to be the messiah prophesied in their sacred literature who would return 
their existence on earth to that experienced by Adam and Eve.  What they 
got was one who had reached nirvana, who shared with them the truth that 
heaven is a state of mind available in the here and now.  He claimed to 
be the son of man, they turned Him into the son of God.  He was a proponent 
of peace, yet He has been used to defend all types of atrocities and 
wrongdoings, wars, slaughters, crusades, and executions.  
        Despite the loving and liberating message He brought, His 
followers integrated His story with the Judaic literature to further 
their limited and irresponsible beliefs.  The New Testament, which was 
written by mere humans not God's personal stenographer, molds Jesus' story 
to follow the messianic prophesies, so many Christians still believe in 
the impersonal vengeful God the ancient Jews believed in.  Following 
this chain of thought, heaven is somewhere above the clouds, hell is 
below, and God, who can best be reached through priests, preachers, 
rote prayers, beads, Eucharist, ceremony, and tradition is judgmental, 
moody, authoritarian, and discriminating.  This is not the God presented 
by Jesus.  But it is a God far easier to accept because the responsibility 
for our folly can be blamed on Him and His avarice, and the responsibility 
for accessing and understanding Him can be placed with the clergy.
        Who was Jesus?  Jesus was a liberator, an innovator, a radical 
non-conformist, an anti-authoritarian bodhisattva, a simple man, not God, 
but one who knew where to find God, and who tried to share that knowledge 
even at the risk of His own life.  Jesus personified what the burning 
bush told Moses when he asked for God's name: "I am".  Yet Jesus carried 
it further to let us in on the truth that we are too.