The gospel within human frameworks — We tend to use the term “human” in the negative: “Well, he’s only human.”
But what if we added to our mental vistas of humanity a positive idea of what it means to be human.

I know this is a stretch for many of you because we so often think of humanity as the problem. But what if being human is not the problem but the goal.

We strive to be less human and more divine. But what if the quest to become human was in our eyes (and in God’s) a very good thing. After all, God embedded His divine image upon the human. He declared his creative act of adding humanity to the whole of creation as “very good”. Humanity is not something good. It is very good. For the ultimate expression of this remember Jesus.

When Jesus calmed the winds and the waves, the disciples asked, “What kind of man is this?”

Now be honest, how many of us, at one point or another, have spoken to nature? I don’t know about you, but I speak to nature and usually nothing happens.

So, we turn to an episode like the one in which Jesus speaks to the winds and they obey him and tend to say something like, “Well, he’s the kind of man who is God.” For us, this explains why the wind obeys him.

But what if Jesus converses with the winds because he is human, like we are designed to become?

The Genesis story tells us that humankind is an embedded part of the natural world. We are created in God’s image to oversee this world of which we are a part. This function is what being made in the Image of God is for, according to the story.

Humans are a part of nature and designed to be a force of nature on behalf of God. The way Luke, one of the gospel writers, tells the story of Jesus, Jesus was a human characterized by an ultimate and intimate communication with God. He was the one upon whom the creative spirit rested and through whom the creative spirit works.

Jesus was not “only” human, he was The Human. In him we see what we were designed to be and what we will be: creatures living in intimate communication with God.

It’s not true of you that you are “only” human. That’s nonsensical like saying you are “only an ultimate mystery”. You are human — a creature capable of contact and communication with God, the creative force behind the universe.

So speak with the winds.
Anticipate what it is that in Christ we are becoming.

Are we becoming more like God?
Are we becoming human?
And, are these two questions ways of asking the same thing?

What do you think?

See you in the mystic…