Jesus a Historical and Cultural Look.

Jesus As Spirit Person and Mediator of The Sacred

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The first stroke in my four-stroke sketch is foundational to everything else Jesus was. The most crucial fact about Jesus was that he was a "spirit person," a "mediator of the sacred," one of those persons in human history to whom the Spirit was an experiential reality.

It took me a long time to see this. The process began with the realization that there really are such phenomena as experiences of Spirit and spirit persons. The realization came to me initially not from the study of the bible or the Christian tradition, but from the study of non-Western religions and cultural anthropology. This illuminating category helps us see much about Jesus that we otherwise might miss.

We begin with what a spirit person is. The older, semitechnical term is holy man, but spirit person seems better. The change to person reflects the fact that such figures come in both genders, which makes a gender-inclusive term desirable. The change to spirit (Spirit person rather than holy person) seeks to avoid the connotations of holy, which there is a natural tendency to understand as as adjective denoting a moral quality, such as righteous or pious or revered or saintly or even sanctimonious. Such a reading would profoundly obscure what the phrase is meant to convey: a person to whom the sacred is an experiential reality.

Spirit persons are known cross-culturally. They are people who have vivid and frequent subjective experiences of another level or dimension of reality. These experiences involve momentary entry into nonordinary states of consciousness and take a number of different forms. Sometimes there is a vivid sense of momentarily seeing into another layer of reality; these are visionary experiences. Sometimes there is the experience of journeying into that other dimension of reality; this is the classic experience of the shaman. Sometimes there is a strong sense of another reality coming upon one, as in the ancient expression "The Spirit fell upon me."  Sometimes the experience is of nature or an object through it. Bushes burn without being consumed; the whole earth is seen as filled with the glory of God (where glory means "radiant presence":). The world is perceived in such a way that previous perceptions seem nothing more than blindness.

What all persons who have these experiences share is a strong sense of there being more to reality than the tangible world of our ordinary experience. They share a compelling sense of having experienced something "real." They feel strongly that they know something they didn't know before. Their experiences are noetic, involving not simply a feeling of ecstasy, but a knowing. What such persons know is the sacred. Spirit persons are people who experience the sacred frequently and vividly.

It is experiences such as these that have led the religious traditions of the world to speak of "the sacred." The sacred (or the numinous) refers to the other reality encountered in these experiences. Most often, of course, the religious traditions do not speak of the sacred abstractly; but rather, they name it - as Yahweh, Brahman, Atman, Allah, the Tao, Great Spirit, God. This is not to suppose that all these names (and the concepts associated with them) mean the same thing. But it is to suppose that the impulse to name something as sacred flows out of the experience of the sacred. Because the most common name for the sacred in the Jewish-Christian tradition is God, I shall from on most often use God or (the) Spirit when referring to the sacred.

Spirit persons share a second feature as well:  they become mediators of the sacred. They mediate the Spirit in various ways. Sometimes they speak the word or will of God. Sometimes they mediate the power of God in the form of healings and/or exorcisms. Sometimes they function as game finders or rainmakers in hunting-and-gathering and early agricultural societies. Sometimes they become charismatic warriors or military leaders. What they all have in common is that they become funnels or conduits or the power or wisdom of God to enter into this world. Anthropologically speaking, they are delegates of the tribe to another layer of reality, mediators who connect their communities to the Spirit.

It is important to note that the experience of spirit persons presupposes an understanding of reality very different from the dominant image of reality in the modern Western world. The modern worldview, derived from the Enlightenment, sees reality in material terms, as constituted by the world of matter and energy within the space-time continuum. The experience of spirit persons suggests that there is more to reality than this-that there is, in addition to the tangible world of our ordinary experience, a nonmaterial level of reality, actual even though nonmaterial, and charged with energy and power. The modern worldview is one-dimensional; the worldview of spirit person is multidimensional.

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"What lies behind us and what lies before us are but small matters compared to what lies Within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson

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