By Jim Palmer‘s Facebook post.
Christianity did not simply misunderstand Jesus. It reversed his message.
Instead of preserving Jesus as an example of what it means to become fully human, Christianity steadily elevated him beyond humanity itself. It transformed him into a cosmic exception: born of a virgin, the only begotten Son of God, uniquely sinless, God incarnate, whose death atoned for the sins of the world, resurrected, and enthroned in heaven.
And then Christians are told to become like him.
The contradiction is breathtaking.
How is anyone supposed to become like someone whose humanity has been defined as fundamentally unlike everyone else’s? If Jesus is literally God in human flesh, then he is not an example of human possibility. He is divine impossibility clothed in human skin.
The more Christianity exalted Jesus, the less his humanity functioned as a model for our own. It created a figure to worship rather than a life to embody.
Jesus never claimed to be *the* Son of God in the exclusive sense Christianity later demanded. He spoke of God as Father in ways that invited others into the same relationship. When accused of making himself equal with God, he answered by quoting the Hebrew Scriptures: “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” Rather than defending his uniqueness, he expanded the conversation to include everyone.
In John 17, Jesus could hardly have been clearer. He prayed that others would be one just as he and the Father were one. The union he experienced was not presented as an exclusive privilege. It was held out as humanity’s shared inheritance.
Jesus most often called himself the “Son of Man.” Paul later described him as the “second Adam.” Both titles point toward solidarity with humanity, not separation from it. Jesus stood with the human race before Christianity enthroned him above it.
I have come to believe that Jesus awakened to something available to every human being: that each of us participates in a reality infinitely larger than the separate selves we imagine ourselves to be. Whether one calls that reality God, Being itself, the Ground of Being, ultimate reality, Brahman, Buddha-nature, or something else entirely is another conversation. The names differ. What they point toward may not.
Jesus did not say, “Worship me because I am unlike you.”
He invited people to discover what he had discovered.
He did not point to himself as the exception.
He pointed through himself to a possibility present within every human life.
Nor was Jesus alone. Across civilizations, Buddha, Hindu sages, Sufi mystics, Jewish mystics, Christian contemplatives, and Taoist sages all pointed toward the same underlying unity beyond the illusion of separateness. Even modern science increasingly challenges the notion that reality is best understood as a collection of fundamentally separate things.
You may reject every one of these claims. You may believe there is no God, no ultimate reality, and no transcendent dimension to existence. That is a perfectly legitimate conclusion. I have no interest in persuading anyone to adopt my metaphysics.
What continues to puzzle me is something much simpler.
How did a movement that began with a man proclaiming the nearness of God become a religion built upon humanity’s separation from God?
What transformed a teacher who dissolved the distance between the human and the divine into the centerpiece of a theology that widened that distance beyond imagination?
And how did someone who pointed beyond himself become the object of worship?
Perhaps the most unsettling possibility is that Christianity’s greatest heresy was never the rejection of Jesus, but the transformation of Jesus into someone no ordinary human being could ever hope to become.
By making him a supernatural exception to the human condition, Christianity obscured the very possibility he embodied. The path became a pedestal. The invitation to awaken became an object of worship. Rather than encouraging people to discover in themselves what Jesus discovered in himself, Christianity taught them to venerate the very possibility it insisted they could never embody.
That reversal did more than reshape Christian theology.
It concealed the very possibility of what Jesus believed could set people free.
Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy
Read his book https://tinyurl.com/y8zaxcmr
