These are A Part of Me

From The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic by John Shelby Spong -

One cannot be fully human while continuing to violate the humanity of another which is what all prejudices encourage us to do. (p108)

The human and the divine are not two separate realms.  God is not external, God does not have to enter the world from some other realm.  When a human life is open to all that humanity can be, humanity and divinity flow together as one. (p171)

We are not fallen; we are simply incomplete.  We do not need to be rescued, but to experience the power of an all-embracing love.  Our call is not to be forgiven or even to be redeemed; it is to step beyond our limits into a new understanding of what it means to be human,  It is to move from a status of self-consciousness to a realization that we shave in a universal consciousness.  John's rendition of jesus' message is that the essence of life is discovered when one is free to give life away, that love is known in the act of loving and that the call of human life is to be all that each of us can be and then to be an agent of embowering others to be all that they can be. (p 206)

...Jesus reveals in his life the freedom to live and in that living not to be at the mercy of every distorting force in life.  It means that in Jesus there is a refusal to hide personal identity inside the security of tribal identity. It means that each of us can step outside the superiority that we think gives us a survival edge. It means that we can refuse to live inside the boundaries of a religious system that tells us that if we practice the things which our religion requires, we can win the favor of the one who has the power to guarantee our survival. It means that the drive to survive can no longer distort our humanity, nor can it compromise our existence.  It means that the life of God lives in us. It means that the love of God flows through us. It means that no one is placed beyond the boundaries of that love. It means that, like Jesus, we are free to give our life away and that this is what the experience of God is ultimately all about. That is John's understanding of the mystic reality that is met in Jesus. (p 232)

A door has been opened into a new meaning of life, a new humanity, an new being.  I have shown them the way to a new life, says Jesus. I have revealed God's glory, the glory which calls us to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be.  As we saw earlier there is no atonement here; there is just expanded humanity - humanity that enters into the love of God and shares in the eternity of God. (p 260-61)

... It [the resurrection] is the experience of the indwelling life of God in the form of the spirit. It comes as the life-giving breath of God flows to the disciples from Jesus, who has passed from death into life because he could five his life away in love for others. He could live the life of God. He could share in the oneness of God. He could open the door for us all to stem into the reality of God. the glorification of Jesus was in the crucifixion; the return of Jesus was in the imparting of the spirit on Easter evening.  From Friday to Sunday is in fact " a little while." There is to be no further wait for the second coming.

This is what resurrection means for John and it is not something that occurred just in the life of Jesus; it occurs or it can occur in each of us.  The Christian life is not about believing creeds and being obedient to divine rules; it is about living, loving and being.  Resurrection comes when we are freed to give our lives away, freed to love beyond the boundaries of our fears, freed not only to be ourselves, but to empower all others to be themselves in the full, rich variety of our multifaceted humanity.  Here prejudice dies. Here wholeness is tasted. Here resurrection becomes real. (p 298)