The Path of Conscious Love: A Crucified Christ

In the Christian calendar, today is 'Good Friday', a day set aside to remember the crucifixion of Jesus . Today, I sat with my spiritual community and reflected on the significance of this event and the implications therein.

The message I've always heard is how grateful we should be for Jesus' sacrifice on our behalf, dying for our sins as an atonement to the Father. I don't know how that is supposed to work, nor am I very concerned with it anymore, though the gratefulness I completely endorse!

This morning I was struck by how little sense this interpretation made to the perspective I now have of the message of Jesus. Not that it doesn't make sense at all, only that it no longer makes sense from where I now stand. It is a valid and valuable understanding of Jesus' death and yet it is still incomplete. It leaves out our role in the unfolding drama. Our tendency is to make it all about Jesus and what he did for us. We want to applaud his humble and righteous efforts, but from the sidelines, of course.

We want a Jesus who was crucified in our place...so that we don't have to be.

But that's not the Jesus I've come to understand. Yes, we can be grateful - and every drop of gratitude we could offer would never be too much -and give unending thanks for his heroic willingness to face the agony of abandonment and the torture of crucifixion for our sake. But for what reason? To what end? Jesus' message was not one of doctrinal belief but one of self-sacrificial love and he offered us an awesome and beautiful example of how far this love can really take us, how it can literally change the course of history. His life, death, and resurrection offer a clear picture of the path of spiritual transformation.

Jesus didn't climb the mount of Calvary to take our place on that cross, he climbed up to show us the way. There's a tendency to see Jesus as so separate, special and divine that his life is relegated to being an exception to the rule rather than as an example of the one Rule to follow. To follow Jesus is to embrace our own crucifixion, the death of our compulsive identification with the fears and desires of our narcissistic ego. If we take Jesus seriously we are faced with a terrifyingly simple message that demands everything from us if we are to heed his words and follow in his path: surrender to God.

The kind of surrender Jesus lived is absolute. It leaves no room for half-measures or compromise. Is this the path we're grateful to discover? I personally find it distasteful yet undeniably compelling. My ego will always resist it's own death as the focal point of my identity and existence, and yet the Spirit of Christ - which transcends any individual - continues to emerge within my life as I choose to give it more and more space, guiding me forward as I surrender more and more to the impulse of the Divine within my own being.

Jesus gave his life for all of us but did so by showing us how to give our lives to God. Jesus did not die to simply be resurrected as an individual but for the Spirit of Christ to be resurrected in this world through all of us. But before we give rise to new life we must face and embrace the reality of death.

There is a cross laid out immanently before us all in every moment and yet how many of us are willing to offer our hands and feet to be pierced for the sake of Love? I must confess, often I am not. Often I want to run and hide, to leave this 'dying' business to the professionals, to a messiah. But there is no one else to do it for us. Jesus showed us the path in the clearest way he could and in every moment it is we and we alone who decide whether to walk it or not.

The cross is now empty to make room for each of us.