{"id":10777,"date":"2014-12-22T14:41:38","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T19:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=10777"},"modified":"2014-12-22T14:41:38","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T19:41:38","slug":"christ-is-an-outlier-and-should-have-been-counted-pope-francis-bookclub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2014\/12\/christ-is-an-outlier-and-should-have-been-counted-pope-francis-bookclub.html","title":{"rendered":"Christ is an Outlier and Should Have Been Counted [Pope Francis Bookclub]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In 2014, I\u2019m reading and blogging through Pope Francis\/Cardinal Bergoglio\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus<\/a>. \u00a0Every Monday, I\u2019ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you\u2019re welcome to\u00a0peruse them all<\/a>\u00a0and\/or read along.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the second to last chapter of\u00a0Open Mind, Faithful Heart<\/em><\/a>, Pope Francis draws heavily on the letter to the Hebrews as he discusses Christ\u2019s role as priest to his people. \u00a0In fact, I think\u00a0most<\/em> of the chapter is simply quotations from that letter. \u00a0But this part is from Pope Francis directly:<\/p>\n

That body, those wounds, that flesh\u2013all are intercession. \u00a0What is more, there is no other way of access to the Father except this one. \u00a0It is in beholding the flesh of the Son that the Father grants salvation. \u00a0It is through the wounds of Christ that we encounter the father. \u00a0Fully alive in his glorified flesh, Christ is bringing forth life in our midst as we take part in his flesh and enter in patience into his passion so as to share also in his glorification.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Christ breaks with the former priestly tradition by being\u00a0both<\/em> priest and sacrifice. \u00a0He offers himself, rather than a calf or a dove. \u00a0He, who is already whole and holy, is broken so that we can be drawn up after him into healing and life.<\/p>\n

Part of the way I understood the Incarnation, as I started learning about Christianity, is that Christ, both fully human and fully divine, is a conduit for us (just plain human) to the divine. \u00a0There\u2019s no part of our lives that was not shared by Christ (including suffering, sorrow, and death), so we constantly lie tangent to him in his divinity, and the distance to God is always infinitesimal along the interface he provides.<\/p>\n

\"wrinkle<\/a><\/p>\n

(I was pretty heavily influenced by the diagram of the ant and the tessaract from\u00a0A Wrinkle in Time<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The other math-y way I tend to think of it is that, by being incarnate, Christ alters our understanding of what it means to be human. \u00a0At baseline, when we start trying to decide what humans\u00a0are<\/em> (social animals? political animals?) we wouldn\u2019t include\u00a0anything<\/em> that looks like Christ\u2019s own divinity or intimacy with the Godhead. \u00a0But, if he\u2019s a member of the set \u201chumans\u201d albeit a very unusual member of the set, the general definition has to be large enough to cover him.<\/p>\n

I can imagine the sudden recognition of Christ\u2019s membership in the \u201chuman\u201d set suddenly distorting all our metrics for briefly summarizing what the members of the set\u00a0are<\/em>. \u00a0Regular outliers (let alone Georg-ian ones<\/a>) are bad enough for skewing the mean, but add in someone who\u2019s\u00a0infinitely<\/em>\u00a0good? \u00a0The math on the morals of an average human gets\u00a0ridiculous<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It feels a lot like the same kind of absurdity that underlies the divide-by-zero logic of the Christus Victor understanding of the atonement<\/a>. \u00a0Including Christ in a category tends to shatter the category, and, by the time it reforms to fit him, it\u2019s gone through a \u201csea change, something rich and strange.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christ\u2019s life and death distorts our old understanding of what it means to be human, like the heavy ball that pulls down a rubber sheet<\/a> (and starts pulling everything else\u00a0on<\/em> the sheet toward it, along the incline). \u00a0We\u2019re freer to move toward him, following his example, as he makes all things new.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2014, I\u2019m reading and blogging through Pope Francis\/Cardinal Bergoglio\u2019s\u00a0Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. \u00a0Every Monday, I\u2019ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you\u2019re welcome to\u00a0peruse them all\u00a0and\/or read along. \u00a0 In the second to last chapter of\u00a0Open Mind, Faithful Heart, Pope Francis draws heavily on the letter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":10778,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[227],"class_list":["post-10777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-parsing-catholicism","tag-pope-francis-bookclub"],"yoast_head":"\nChrist is an Outlier and Should Have Been Counted [Pope Francis Bookclub]<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In 2014, I\u2019m reading and blogging through Pope 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