With this teaching, this series on Diana Butler Bass’ book, Freeing Jesus, concludes. Our journey, however, does not. This also happens to be Mother’s Day and the Sunday before Pentecost. What a nice synchronicity that a chapter on the dwelling of God dovetails with a text serving as a prelude to the dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit also lands on a day that we honor the gender who is capable of carrying a “dweller” and eventually giving birth to something (someone) new! Here is the text:
Acts 1:1-8 (CEB). Theophilus, the first scroll I wrote concerned everything Jesus did and taught from the beginning, right up to the day when he was taken up into heaven. Before he was taken up, working in the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus instructed the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he showed them that he was alive with many convincing proofs. He appeared to them over a period of forty days, speaking to them about God’s [kin-dom]. While they were eating together, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for what the Father had promised. He said, “This is what you heard from me: John baptized with water, but in only a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
As a result, those who had gathered together asked Jesus, “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?”
Jesus replied, “It isn’t for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has set by his own authority. Rather, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Question: As Spirit bearers, what will be said of our witness?
Bass offers wonderful research well communicated in the following quotes (page numbers are from the Kindle version). Take your time. Let each quote sink in…
In the scriptures, the Spirit is called the ruach, pneuma, and the shekhinah, the “wind,” the “breath,” and the “dwelling.” Theologian Marjorie Suchocki refers to these as God’s power, wisdom, and presence. Those three things are the heart of redemption, of experiencing the full life God intends for all: God as presence answers alienation and loneliness with love; God as wisdom answers the loss of time with trust; God as power answers injustice with empowering hope. This vision of a redemptive God of presence, wisdom, and power comes from the biblical revelation of God’s presence in Jesus of Nazareth, named the Christ (222-223).
Jewish historian Amy Jill Levine says, “Judaism has the idea of the Shekhinah, the feminine presence of God descending to earth and dwelling among human beings.” She continues, making the point that the possibility that a person could somehow be the presence, the dwelling among us, was not out of line with ancient Judaism: First-century Judaism was sufficiently fluid to allow even the idea that an individual could embody divinity. We know that because the earliest followers of Jesus who recognized him as divinity incarnate—such as Paul or James, the brother of Jesus who’s running the Jerusalem church—still called themselves Jews. Everybody recognized them as Jews (223-224).
Jesus was born male, the Son of God. If, however, Jesus is inhabited by shekhinah, Jesus brings the divine presence to the world, then, in some way, the man Jesus also embodies the sacred feminine. (238)
In the Old Testament, there is maternal imagery for God—including that of a mother bear, an eagle hovering over her nest, a woman in labor, a nursing mother—and verses like this: “I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them” (Hosea 11:4). In the New Testament, Jesus continues this tradition claiming motherly concern as his own: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matt. 23:37). Although often ignored, there have been important Christian thinkers who have explored the idea of Jesus as Mother. The most notable of these gender-bending reflections came from Julian of Norwich, circa 1390: “And so Jesus is our true Mother in nature by our first creation. And he is our true Mother in grace by taking our created nature . . . He is our Mother, brother and savior” (238).
Theologian Grace Ji-Sun Kim puts it well: The Christian faith is different from what the world teaches. The Christian faith is not “seeing is believing,” but rather, “believing is seeing.” We must open our eyes and hearts and see Jesus’s presence in our lives. We need to see him in the places that we dare not to look and dare not to think about (245).
Everyone is born of flesh and spirit. The problem is that we forget.
Question: How are you relating to the Presence of God dwelling in this space today?