Understanding the New Jesus Paradigm / Tom Colgan

UNDERSTANDING THE NEW

JESUS PARADIGM
The Jesus Paradigm would be an attempt to catch a glimpse of what Jesus was trying to teach as a new way of understanding and relating to God's reality and presence. The success of Jesus ministry shows that people were listening to what he said and its truth was impacting their existence. These were people who were estranged from God, outcasts and outsiders, and yet, after hearing what Jesus proclaimed, they soon began to experience what Jesus lived out before them, which was God-closeness, the opposite of the problem of God-estrangement. This problem, which they had been told and taught was impossible for them ever to overcome, was suddenly gone and existing no more. God's favor, which was so illusive among these people to whom Jesus chose to minister, was suddenly being shared in the lives of any who would respond and accept it. This active intermingling with the presence of the divine was a new paradigm, confronting an old paradigm that saw God as distant and unavailable. In a society where religous emphasis was on your status of purity, according to the purity laws, and where this status defined your possibilities of ever finding Gods favour, Jesus introduced new truths and new possibilities.

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Understanding the New Jesus Paradigm / Tom Colgan So how do we begin to catch sight of this new paradigm that Jesus taught to those who were in his presence? How is it different than what we have seen before? The Jesus Paradigm is a paradigm about the possibility of God-closeness for all people. This is a condition that removes the problem of our separation from God, and the reality of God-estrangement that ends as the result. This is the truth that Jesus took seriously as the real hope for those who thought it could never happen. Jesus proclaimed it. And Jesus had to admit that this was a different message than what they were being told. It would have been a message that was opposite of all that even his hearers believed. They had lived all of their lives under a different paradigm, a pre-existing standard that had taken away all of their hope. We can know this because we know why these people were considered outcasts. The ones hearing Jesus had to decide whether he was wrong (because he was saying something different than what they had been taught) or whether Jesus could be right and society, the priests, the temple rules, and all the scorn they had been shown for their whole lives was through a wrong set of truths being taught. Their decision to believe Jesus was accompanied by great transformations in many areas of their lives, including physical healing. This brought amazement and enthusiasm

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Understanding the New Jesus Paradigm / Tom Colgan that caused his movement to grow rapidly on an amazing scale. But, how is this a new paradigm? Can our eyes still not behold a difference? Can we see yet, the remarkable nature of the truth of God-closeness that Jesus brought in his ministry to the people? How does it fit with the paradigm that we hold, today? And, first , how did it fit with the paradigm held by the Jewish authorities of Jesus' day? They held that God-closeness was probably an impossible thing for people. (On just one day of the year, the chief high priest enters the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God.) You were not to even say the name of God. God was too holy, and too beyond mere mortals. God's favour is what you want. And to see how that is going, just look at your situation in life. If there is a major negative, God is responsible, and is showing disfavour. God-estrangement is caused by God, and is therefore impossible to correct or change. Into this kind of world Jesus brought his new paradigm. We, today, often hear the paradigm that separation from God, or God-estrangement is caused by our sinful nature and the sin that is in our lives. We are told the paradigm that Jesus takes away our sin and this God-estrangement because of his death on the cross. He was a sacrifice for our sins. And if we just believe this, he can become our saviour,

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Understanding the New Jesus Paradigm / Tom Colgan and it can go away. Hopefully, it is replaced with a God-closeness that sees an intermingling of human and divine spirit. This paradigm of taking away our God-estrangement accomplishes the same ministry that Jesus seemed to be sharing with his new paradigms of truth. But there is a difference. This tradition has a focus upon the cross, and death, and sacrifice, and blood, and none of these were a part of what Jesus was sharing as he brought significant change to the lives of the people to whom he ministered. If our paradigm of the essence of Christianity, and what it is about involves believing in salvation acts of sacrificial death, and specifically on a cross by shedding blood, we are probably missing seeing the paradigm of the availability and accessibility of God-closeness that Jesus taught and introduced that used as a foundation an awareness of the incredible magnitude of God's love for all humanity. A problem is that our traditional paradigm can be so entrenched that we are blind to the possibility that Jesus was teaching something even more remarkable than our old paradigm, which could easily be described as the best understanding and interpretation of the early Christian writers, but still something different than what Jesus was actually saying. God-estrangement is the problem. God-closeness is the possibility.

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Understanding the New Jesus Paradigm / Tom Colgan Incredible, unconditional, universal, unending, and unlimited divine love was the resource that made it all possible. It was a transforming message brought by Jesus to those who needed it the most. It involved the introduction of the simple paradigm of God-closeness that removes and takes away our God-estrangement. It presupposed accepting God's incredible depth of love for each of us, and a knowledge of how this interaction can transform all parts of our lives. For todays world, seeing the Jesus Paradigm would only re-emphasize the importance of developing the human-divine relationship. It would involve allowing the presence of God to transform and change inner attitudes. It would mean letting the Jesus Experience show the example of having a God-focus, letting yourself be God-directed, letting your life be God-centred, and realizing that living in the kingdom of God meant achieving God-closeness. Tom Colgan 16-April-2012 https://twitter.com/#!/tom_colgan http://www.facebook.com/tom.colgan3?ref=tn_tnmn http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vision-Mountain-Publishing/130985920302134 http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Jesus-Paradigm/118112368305851

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