subject: What "Savior" Really Means [print this page] I am riveted by the words in English composer John Stainer's oratorioThe Crucifixion:
Cross of Jesus, cross of sorrow,
Where the blood of Christ was shed,
Perfect Man on thee was tortured,
Perfect God on thee has bled!
You mean that God canbleed? Jesus, in his humanity, yesbutGod?
If you see the creation as separate from God, as something God manufactured out of nothing, then this makes no sense. Clearly the immortal cannot experience the loss of mortal blood.
But if you see the creation as an expression of God, a manifestation of God, emerging out of the "no thing" that is Godform springing from the formlessthen the crucifixion of Jesus is indeedGod bleeding.
The great insight of Jesus was that humanity isone with God: that we are each unique expressions of the divine. Tragically, the mainstream of Christianity leaped the tracks on this key insight of the one on whom the entire faith is supposed to be built, although there have always been mystics such as Meister Eckhart who have perceived this truth.
When Jesus' claim to be divine was challenged by the religious authorities of the Judean people in his day, his response was to quote a statement from a psalm in the Hebrew scriptures that says of humans, "You are gods."
Do you see what is being said by Jesus in this statement? He isn't setting himself apart from all other humans, claiming to be divine in contrast to everyone else in the human race.
On the contrary, he's saying that the reason he can say he is divine is becauseallhumans are manifestations of the divine.
The unique difference with Jesus is that he is the first one who got it,really got it in all its fullness. And that enabled him to become an archetype, a symbol, the representative of what humanness is all about.
So the uniqueness of Jesus isn't inkind, but in the degree to which he "got" the divinity of humanity and was thus able to become the one who shows us what divine humanity is really like.
It's this that makes Jesus the "savior," a word that was a quite secular term used of the Roman emperors, who were the "savior" of the Roman world. The word literally meansdeliverer.
Most humans have little awareness of their divine origin and destiny. We live in a blinded, ignorant, unaware, unconscious state. Jesus delivers us from this by showing us what humanityreally isthat we are, as St. Paul would later put it, "divine offspring."
So to be "saved" is to wake up to who we really are. It's to beenlightenedto be delivered from our impoverished view of ourselves, and all the mental chatter and emotional turmoil that goes along with this view, and to realize the magnificent beings we are as the divine Presence in incarnate form.
To be human is to be divine. This is what the life of Jesus shows us. So when he was crucified, it's indeed true that on the cross that day "perfect Man on thee was tortured, perfect God on thee has bled!"
We are seeing in these words the essential meaning of our humanity, shown to us in Jesus, the representative of our true being.
We are the spitting image of God, the divine likeness. We are the formless expressed as form.
