Yesterday’s Daily Meditation was about the need to emphasize again — or perhaps for the first time in America — the Empty Tomb as a primary Christian symbol. It is striking to me that the Gospel accounts of the Empty Tomb present a very specific detail: the linens in which Jesus’ corpse was bound are left behind. They stay inside the tomb. “Peter saw the linen wrappings lying there.” (John 20:6) A quite clear message of letting go, leaving behind the trappings of death.
Yet, people for centuries have clung to those linens and made them into a relic. The city where I was born, Turin, welcomed indeed the “holy shroud” in the 16th century. True or false as this relic may be, the duke and the archbishop built around it a whole apparatus of religious and political power.
The “Shroud of Turin” has corroborated historically a vision of Jesus as “man of sorrow” and has presented Christianity as a religion exalting pain and death. Early Christians did not feel or think in this way. The highly developed mysticism of Paul of Tarsus, for example, does not deny the pain of the world, yet it images all suffering in the context of the resurrection.
The notion of the Cosmic Christ, which almost disappeared in modern Christianity, meant that the presence of the Risen Life was felt everywhere, in all creation, as well as within the individual and the community. A thorough exploration of this topic is found in Matthew Fox’s The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, where he writes about the deep need for a mystic consciousness, the fact that Jesus himself was a teacher of mysticism, the early Christians’ belief in the Cosmic Christ, and about putting this concept to good use today.
Jesus offered connections to the dispossessed, not only by conversation and scandalous association at meals, but by undergoing the death of the unconnected, the death of the dispossessed. Paul’s genius, in turn, consisted in stressing the identity between the Cosmic Christ and Jesus-on-the-cross, underlining that Christians revere the most humiliated one — precisely him and not somebody else — as ruler of the cosmos.
Did Paul mean that Christians, through their head, Christ, should claim domination and power? No. That’s yet another mistake that Christians have made and — if we look at reports about the “White House Faith Office” — they keep making. The identity between the Cosmic Christ and Jesus-on-the-cross means instead that the lust for power of any (wannabe) emperor has been emptied and ridiculized by the cross of Christ.
Real cosmic power resides instead — according to Paul and his first-century communities — in the most humiliated. In their eyes, this is what“saved” them, this is what connected them in community. Were they fools? Maybe. But God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:25)
All quotes from Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance, pp. 73, 135
Banner Image: Leaving behind the tomb and grave wrappings: “The Resurrection of Jesus.” Painting by Sebastiano Ricci, ~1715. Wikimedia Commons
Queries for Contemplation
What is the apparatus of oppressive power built today around the cross of Jesus? How can we counteract the manipulation of the Christian message by people who are in love with power and money?
Recommended Reading
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
In what may be considered the most comprehensive outline of the Christian paradigm shift of our Age, Matthew Fox eloquently foreshadows the manner in which the spirit of Christ resurrects in terms of the return to an earth-based mysticism, the expression of creativity, mystical sexuality, the respect due the young, the rebirth of effective forms of worship—all of these mirroring the ongoing blessings of Mother Earth and the recovery of Eros, the feminine aspect of the Divine.
“The eighth wonder of the world…convincing proof that our Western religious tradition does indeed have the depth of imagination to reinvent its faith.” — Brian Swimme, author of The Universe Story and Journey of the Universe.
“This book is a classic.” Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work and The Dream of the Earth.
6 thoughts on “Retrieving the Cosmic Christ”
In answer to your second question my answer would be to live one’s own life authentically, with one’s own understanding of Christ’s message. Done well, a natural radiance will develop for others – if not the world – to see. To live as Christ taught is to become a saint.
Somewhere in Richmond, Virginia, USA there is a Greek Orthodox Church with a cave which includes the shelf within for the body representing Jesus’ tomb. The entrance was low so one had to stoop to enter. The first and only time I ever saw the commemoration of the empty tomb in a church. Thank you for emphasizing this significance.
I have a dear friend, a religious Sister, who agrees with John Dear that no war is justifiable. I think that people who don’t hold this view might be wrong, in terms of faith dicta, but they are likely pardonable for thinking that risking death is better than servitude, as for example in defending Ukraine against the unjust aggression of Russia. One might argue (for the peace position) that servitude is bearable and probably transitory, that being persecuted and subjected to oppression and brainwashing without freedom at least lets a people live in hope. Resistance could also make the Russian occupation of Ukraine not worth the effort to dominate motivated Ukrainians. Further, a tyrant like Putin won’t live forever, and sooner or later the spirit of democracy will grow strong enough to prevail in a defeated land. (This assumes that the United States keeps aloof from NATO beyond the current administration and NATO does nothing for Ukraine indefinitely.) Does this line of thinking seem compatible with Christian faith and practice?
As I see it, “the Cosmic Christ” is a principle and a potential (an archetype) at the heart of every human being, not unlike, in Goethe’s view, the archetypal or cosmic plant that lies at the heart of every plant. “To all who receive him, he gave the right to become children of Elohim, to those who believe in his name.” (John 1:12)
The Cross of Jesus and the COSMIC CHRIST symbolize to me our human and Divine Natures on Our spiritual journeys together. Every unique human being’s life journey and human experiences are our Eternal Soul’s growth in awareness of the Flow and Presence of DIVINE LOVE~WISDOM within, through, among Us in LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS with one another and All Evolving Creation in the physical and nonphysical spiritual dimensions of the COSMOS,
including our Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth….
To counteract the distortions of the Christian message…
— has been my focus for the last 3 years, as I’ve written about the Biblical Mysticism (“a.k.a. “Christ Consciousness”) that’s hidden in plain view in the Bible. I’ve written about it in these “comments sections”, in this forum for the last 3 years. It’s a Mysticism I know about from direct Mystical experience and from subsequent extensive research.
This is the Mysticism that John’s Gospel opened with, in his majestic Prologue, but it was in the Bible long before that, in the Genesis 1 Creation narrative (especially the “made in God’s Image”). It was blatantly in the Moses “I AM” Revelation, and hinted in Jesus’s parables frequently. It’s woven into the New Testament and the Nicene Creed.
It is egalitarian and non-dualistic. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful, complex and nuanced set of ideas and intuitions. Its Truths are universal, but this specific Mystical Revelation, and the deepest aspects of its Path, are shared within Judaism, Sufism, and the Upanishads/Hinduism. (It is recognizable within them).
We do not own God. Males do not own God. The rich and powerful do not own God.
God Loves and shares with the people we do not care to see, those we label as undeserving and “other.” The Bible says this, Jesus lived this, and (Biblical) Mysticism unveils this.