CHAPTER 3

OUR PART IN THE REDEMPTION OF HUMANITY

The new age

The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus is the central event in human history. It was the moment when all history turned round. The age of human disfunction is doomed, and the age of the humanity living in the Spirit of God has begun.

At the Last Supper, Jesus emphasised to his people, who dreaded losing him, that he had to depart from them physically and go back to the Father so that he could return among us spiritually. They would know him in a more immediate way – in their hearts. Now we know him in that same way. This equips us for the next stage of redemption. 

  [If you want to read more

about the primary necessity of knowing Jesus,

CLICK HERE to access Chapter 2 of our book

'A  MESSAGE FOR ITS OWN TIME'. 

Once Jesus had  broken the power of all sin, it would be the time for us to play our part as his sisters and brothers, the children of God who reclaim the wholeness and restoration of humanity.

Our Father had created us to be like him in all his splendour of righteous activity. Now that we were redeemed, he would not diminish the dignity he had bestowed on us by denying humanity the right to retrace the crazy steps that we have taken away from his love.

For that to happen we needed to relate to him in a more mature way. We need to join in his very life, by letting the Spirit reveal Jesus to our hearts so that we can know him and relate to him personally.

Jesus had drawn all of us into himself to redeem us. Now it was time for us to draw Jesus into ourselves to complete the redemption. The final age in the story of humanity began – the restoration of all things in Christ with our full participation. Jesus called this process his “Kingdom”.

The functioning of the Kingdom

In the Trinity there are three absolutely individual persons. At the same time they are one: they live and move and have their being within each other in the mystery of infinite and immaculate love. The Kingdom of God functions in a similar way. Each human being is required to individually take up their role, and, at the same time, they become united in a mysterious communion formed by the Holy Spirit.

God revealed this new two-fold dynamic when the Spirit descended at Pentecost: All those who gathered to hear the apostles heard in their own individual languages the one message spoken by the apostles in Aramaic. God was beginning to replace our hopeless division with his gift of unity.

We are told that on that day about 3000 people “were added to their numbers” (Acts 2: 41). The process they went through was “to repent, be baptised in the name of Jesus”, and  “receive the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2: 38). This was a two-way process. Each had to turn away (Repent) from their previous orientation and give their trust to Jesus; then the Holy Spirit would come to them to empower them to live in communion sharing the life of Jesus.

We are being formed into the Mystical Body of Jesus

The Holy Spirit had formed the physical body of Jesus in the womb of Mary. He is now forming the spiritual (mystical) body of Jesus in the womb of the world. He is drawing mankind together into one mature humanity. This process was first given the name, “the Gathering” using the Greek word “ekklesia”. The English term for it is “Church”.

Jesus said that the Church is like a tiny mustard seed which grows into the biggest bush where all the birds of the air find a home. The Church is growing and developing through time. As the mustard tree sends its tap root burrowing deep down into the nourishing earth, the tap root of the Church is people burrowing down into intimacy with Jesus. 

Just as Jesus called his apostles individually, he calls us individually to know him. The more we grow in his friendship and are inspired by him, the more we mature into who we individually really are, and the renewal of the face of the earth advances. It is a process which is developing over time. We should not be surprised if some of the development seems slow; the Spirit works deep on the interior of humanity, not superficially.

God writes straight with crooked lines

We should not be surprised if there are parts of his work which seem as yet incomplete, because the breath of the Spirit acts through human brokenness. All genuine Christians are sinners who will constantly get things wrong. Our work will always be imperfect, but God accepts our efforts when we try our best, and uses them as stones in the building of perfect humanity.

Anybody looking for perfection in the Church is bound to be disappointed, but if we look at the Church over time and its influence on the development of humanity, we will see the steady progress that God is directing using very unfinished persons. They will also find a continuous flowering of heroic holiness. The frequency of its occurrences are unequalled outside of the Church – proof that here is the epicentre of God’s activity in the universe.

The spectrum of how people are connected to Jesus

We have to see a spectrum of how people are connected to Jesus. At one end, there are the people of good will that the angels sang of at Christmas, who do not know Jesus personally, yet, in pursuing goodness as they perceive it, they are in a hidden way uniting themselves to him. They will recognise him when the time comes for the scales to fall from their eyes.

At the other end of the spectrum there are the great saints who shone with divine life. The spectrum is never static, always developing as the Spirit, who blows where he wills, is intricately fashioning the new humanity.

[If you want to read more

about Jesus being the only way to the Father,

CLICK HERE   to access Chapter 12 of our book 

'A MESSAGE FOR ITS OWN TIME ]