Christ: every person

Lifted from Barbara Cawthorne Crafton's website The Geranium Farm, this appealed to me, a substantial theological notion emerging from the pious metaphor that I think Bonhoeffer intended. The essence of Christian life where Love Neighbor is the ONLY way to Love God. The fourth promise of our Baptismal Covenant, "Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?" People as temples of the Holy Spirit, the foundation of Christian Being.

So, I'm wondering about it literally as a corrected faith assertion, perhaps Christianity Realized, what the church calls the Mystery of Faith: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ HAS COME AGAIN", a realized parousia. Christ not at all, by no means, piously anticipated to be coming again in some future never happen non-event Child of Bethlehem scenario, but literally has come, is fully and completely here in every person in every age, as Bonhoeffer says, as long as there are people. Every person is Christ, and there will be no Other. Don't watch the clouds, just look around at people. Including and especially in the mirror.

The mirror, for what is laid on each of us is mind-boggling, staggering: Christ comes in and as you or not at all and never.

Taken literally instead of as clever religious proverb, Christ walking the earth as your neighbor and yourself, is obviously something else than a classical theism in which God is wholly other and distinct from the world yet in touch with the world as a semi-connected spiritual and sometime human presence. It would be an acceptance of our commission, רָדָה radah, the dominion conferred on us at Genesis 1:26 & 28.

Genesis 6:5f redivivus, our continuing failure at it, yet another second chance conferred by the Incarnation and ministry of correction, "No, THIS is how you do it, let who has eyes see, and ears hear!" and, as Gospel John has it, the creating Logos comes to instruct. Faithwise, we kill him, he comes back momentarily at Easter as an act of affirming love, then returns to the eternal habitations, and leaves us, with the Holy Spirit, Entrusted.

It's Sunday evening. Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

In every person, as long as there are people, Christ walks the earth.

IDK. What I do know by faith is that Christ did not come to die for our sins and save us into heaven, Christ came as the divine show and tell to charge us to be what he was/is: people walking the earth as Christ.

RSF&PTL