Sometimes I wonder if God came on down to earth just to shut us whiny humans up. I sort of see the whole faith relationship thing as a struggle between my desire to be as capable and autonomous as possible with my necessary recognition that at times I’ve got to ask for help. But it seems like the Israelites and the Jews were tougher folks to please in the Bible.
So basically, Jesus was sent to redeem us. Perhaps that redemption can take on another form by relieving us of any excuses for complaining about our lot. Jesus did not have an easy time, by all accounts. So, by coming down and living among us, suffering horribly, and dying bereft of all power and solace, God can effectively tell us to shut up and buckle down when we complain about how rough our life is.
For some reason I can easily picture religious folks pre-Jesus [and maybe still] complaining that God can’t really understand the lot of humans because he has never been one. I guess the distinction here would be between knowing and understanding. God knows what it means to be human, but the argument could be made that he didn’t understand what it means to be human until he was one himself.
What I’m getting at is the fundamental sense of aloneness, or need of fulfillment that most humans seem to have. You could accept it [like Buddhists I guess], deny it [secular folks] or fill it with something [like most religious faith]. So unless God understands just how humans feel alone, how could he effectively know what is best for us? So Jesus shows up, lives as a human, is tortured, and kicks the bucket. There are plenty of accounts showing that while most of this occurred he was in communion with God the Father, so not really alone in the human sense. Because no other human has had a direct line to God.
But the key to understanding for God [from the standpoint of those who complain that he does not understand] is removed when Jesus asks, in the midst of his crucifixion, why his father has forsaken him. That is its own epiphany and a most effective example of just how dedicated God is to his creations. God leaves Jesus for the first time in his life, at the worst possible time in Jesus life and Jesus gets overwhelmed with the terrible weight of loneliness. That seems pretty effective in silencing the complainers to me. And the true lesson comes after that, when Jesus, though now utterly alone, is able to immediately have faith in his father and ask forgiveness on those who have hurt them and placing his spirit in the care of his daddy.
Of course, I might have just created a straw man to attack it.
In another possibly heresy, it is sort of clich say that God has been created by Man. Well, why not? And what is wrong with that? Why does God need to appear ex nihilo? If there is a spark of divine in all of us, who is to say that by doing good we don’t in some way create God. If you are Hindu or Buddhist this seems rote probably. All are part of Krishna. Why not the Christian, Jewish or Muslim God then? It is the same God, we could not attain the divine unless we had it inherent to ourselves [another assumption for another post]. Who is to say that God isn’t split among us all and that only by our own actions can we reach paradise by creating God again?