In the long run, what does it matter?  Christianity’s biggest split seems to me to be was he or wasn’t he.  Was Jesus God?  Just doesn’t make sense.  To me it seems like he was not.

Don’t mean to stir up a hornet’s nest here (or maybe I do), but I think a ton of people here got it wrong.

For my money, Jesus was the way-shower, the exemplar.  He was sent here to be an example for us on the subject of how to live our lives.  He was a human being just like us and that was the point.  He showed us our potential – what we could be if we knew what he knew and practiced what he practiced.

He taught us how to think, how to treat our fellow man, how to heal, how to live.

He said, “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons: freely ye have received, freely give.”  He was talking to his disciples and telling them to go and do what he had done, telling them that it was possible as human beings to perform miracles – to live their lives on a much higher level.

This is what all way-showers teach.  That’s why they need to be human to start with.  If they were Martians, we would discredit the possibility immediately because we weren’t really the same.

Jesus was a man.  That was the point.

I don’t want Jesus to be God.  I want him to be human and his many acts of humanity throughout the New Testament only prove that.  He had lost faith when he said to his own confused thinking, “Get thee behind me, Satan”.

He had lost his temper when he threw the moneychangers out of the temple.

He had lost focus when he went back to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights to get his act back together.

And he was just plain scared up there on the cross when he said, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

Besides, if he was God, then just whom was he speaking to?  Clearly not himself.

This Easter I celebrate this amazing human being who taught us how to live, who taught us our potential as men and women, who taught us by being an example of the best of what we could be as human beings.

He also gave us great insight as to our spiritual identities, but that’s another story.  I like to differentiate between Jesus, the man, and the Christ – that which he taught and exemplified.  For now I’ll just defend the concept of Jesus, the human man, who brought us the truth revealed and who showed us by his human life a better way of living.

Did God forsake Jesus on the cross?  Not any more than He or It does when we have a cold or get divorced or have cancer or murder.  I believe that God is always right there, right here.  Sometimes, in our humanity, we just lose track of Him or It.  That doesn’t mean that God turns away from us.

A cloud covers the sun, but we know the sun is still up there.

God is ever-present.  What we human beings seek in life is presence – spiritual presence.  It’s what Jesus had mostly accomplished.  He too battled with his humanity, his mortality.  He too had his struggles, his enemies, his loss of faith, his confusions.

But through his living on this mortal plain of existence, he taught us how to handle it by his great example and accomplishments.

This Easter it’s not the scared human on the cross that we celebrate, but the man who overcame.  We celebrate the great mind of the man who triumphed over death and showed us each how we might overcome as well.

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