Today Gospel is the Prologue to the Gospel of John. It was probably a Christian hymn in John’s community to celebrate the event of God’s incarnation in Christ. When I reflect on the mysteries of Christ’s life, I ask a question what is salvific in Christ: Is it hs Incarnation, his life and ministry, his crucifixion, or Christ’s resurrection from the dead? I could make an argument for each event listed or take the easily route, claiming “all” these form a picture of what God was doing in the birth, ministry and message of Jesus, his confrontations in Jerusalem, his death and resurrection.
Walter Wink, a gospel scholar, writes:

When Jesus appeared on the scene, the collective unconscious of the age was fully prepared. His life tapped into the massive psychic upheaval that was affecting numerous groups, not only in Judaism but in the Mediterranean world generally. Something seismic was about to happen, and Jesus stood at the epicenter.

This precisely sums up my feelings of what was being revealed in the Christian gospels. God’s incarnation in Jesus is seismic, yet he is born an outsider, outside Bethlehem and outside human abode—a stable or cave. The ancestral grace of creation was bearing fruition of a divine intention of God wll before the universe was created to share divine love and community with others than God’s self. It is the story of the beginnings of our universe, our story and the story of all life as well. God intended to create the universe, teeming with life, but God anticipated that God would disturb this world with God’s self by taking on physical embodiment. This the divine intention to find communion or union together with the universe.

Jesus, in the totality of his existence as a human and beyond both in his incarnation and resurrection, embodies a divine potential within our humanity and mature growth. One of my favorite authors Diarmuid O’Murchu quotes the Canadian theologian Gregory Baum: “God is what happens to a person on the way to becoming human.”

Jesus says, “I am the way…” because he is the gateway for us to become divine. And the paradox is that the path to becoming divine is to become more fully human as Jesus manifested his humanity. Jesus points out that humans are not made for perfection as claimed by the church for centuries, but that we are graced for the wholeness of Christ through our relationship to the risen Christ and, in turn, to God. Think about the phrase, I used, we are “graced for the wholeness of Christ through our relationship to the risen Christ.”

The Spirit lures us with all our brokenness into a love relationship with Christ and helps us to realize that God’s incarnation in human flesh is not only about Jesus but all flesh united with the Spirit who now has given birth to Christ within themselves. The God/human is thoroughly divine and thoroughly human. And that is the good news and the scandal of the incarnation. At this Christmas season, we name God’s incarnation in Jesus as “Immanuel”–“God with us.” God is with us and in us. We incarnate or embody God’s Christ within us, and that is a revelation to us.

Unfortunately, the church for the most of its history stressed “Jesus saves or rescues us.” But I want to tell you that Jesus is more than “savior.” Jesus the rescuer must be replaced with a wider notion of Jesus the Christ, who is the icon of God’s compassion, unconditional love, and forgiveness and grace. Jesus is God’s selfless communication of divine love to us, and there is so much to Jesus the Christ as the communication of God’s unconditional love. God’s love through Christ and the Spirit goes well beyond saving us, for God’s love graces our humanity, that is opens to the pouring the divine life of Christ within us. And that grace of Christ within our bodies and within ourselves transforms us to the core of our being by making us siblings of Christ and children of God.

The Church has suffocated Jesus through the ages: with unhealthy stresses and distortions that made power and wealth church goals; a perfectionism that is unhealthy and disincarnational, denying the our bodies and sexuality as original blessings; domination and exploitation of the Earth and other life with callousness and heartlessness; views of sin originating from legalism, guilt, and shaming; an exclusivism that Jesus fought against and gave up his life; a Christian fundamentalism that tries to control people and access to God; literalist readings of scripture over religious imagination when Jesus spoke in parable and metaphor and re-enacted symbol actions of God presence in our midst. Why stay with such a dysfunctional institution? Great question—you may want to ask this on a regular basis.

Does the church follow Christ or follow its own wayward path? Pope Francis delivered his Christmas message to cardinals and bishops in the Vatican bureaucracy speaking in very strong terms that the leadership of the church suffers a “spiritual Alzheimer’s.” We have been engaged in a cultural and religious war between the above forces against our ancestral notions that God’s creation, incarnation, and the energy of Spirit is one continuous flow of divine grace and love, surrounding us and living within us, and freeing us to serve God’s people with gratitude and joy. We hear echoes of the cultural/religious war in the words of today’s gospel:

What has come into being in him was life, and the life and the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
Or,
He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who placed their hearts in his name, he gave them power to become the children of God.

These are the everyday struggles we experience in our world and in our churches as we hold to an ancestral grace that we are God’s children and siblings of Jesus the Christ. But other church agendas distract us from the good news of God’s incarnation.

Ancestral grace is what we may describe as the divine matrix of love from which all creation was born. It is the most primal impulse and energy of love within the whole universe. It is the divine milieu of unconditional love, our relatedness to God, our interconnections with all life and the Spirit of God within all life. Through this ancestral grace, we recognize that we are siblings with all peoples and especially, those who are different from ourselves and those in need. We are siblings with the Earth and all life on the Earth. Grace is the ocean of divine love where we realize abundance, our original blessedness as children of God, our reason for existence, working for the gospel, living compassionately, and caring in the world. Gratitude, a word originating from the word “grace,” expresses our thanksgiving and gratefulness to God’s continued “gifting” to us. Gratitude emerges from God’s grace as a natural response of ‘Saying thanks.”

We cannot define this grace, but we know it when we live within the stream of God’s abundant grace surrounding us and flowing within us.
A little known historical fact is that images of the crucified Jesus on the cross did not appear until 965 CE in the Cathedral of Cologne (now Germany). Prior to this introduction of the crucifix, Christians were devoted to the cross—in earliest time Egyptian ankh as a disguised cross or the Greek letter “Tau” or “T” in the first couple of centuries of Christianity. Christians called themselves “devotees of the cross.” The risen and glorified image of Jesus was placed on the cross. The stress of Christians was placed on the resurrected Christ, not the tortured Christ on the cross. They recognized that ancestral grace burst forth on Easter in the risen Christ. The God of life transformed the deadly element of the cross into the resurrected life. God’s incarnation– that was intended before the advent of time and the big bang explosion into universe– came to its fruition in the risen life of the Incarnate God.

Jesus points the path forward towards this ancestral grace that reached its fruition in the resurrection. Resurrection life is wider than the risen Christ because it models what we human beings will become from the ancestral grace of divine love unleashed in creation. We call this unleashing of divine love the Holy Spirit—who harnesses the power of resurrection for us and all life. St. Paul describes Jesus as the “first born,” the “new Adam” because he embodies what we will become in the future—divinized by the power of resurrection and humanized to our greatest potential by God’s love and grace. Jesus as the “new Adam” means he is the prototype of a new race, the first born of humanity and all life destined to live in a graced relationship with God. What is this ancestral grace expressed here when we speak of Jesus as the pioneer of new life or a new creation? It means ancestral grace is the grace of the risen life of Jesus.
Jesus invites us into resurrected life as co-creators, working with the Spirit to bring the messiness of human living, the struggles we all face, the flaws of our lives—knowing that our relationship with the risen Christ and the Spirit will provide the love and motivation for us to mature in our grace-filled humanity. We are graced by the risen Christ. Our humanity is transformed by our relationship with the risen Christ.

What does it mean to live in a graced relationship with God in Christ? I have shifted the terms with which you have grown up in Christian churches —“rescued and saved” to the transformed and amzing notion of resurrected and risen. Salvation is about our transformation, graced into the divine life of triune community of love. This is what resurrection means—graced companionship and participation in the risen life of Christ. We move beyond the guilt and shame model of being rescued to the graced relationship with the risen Christ. This means we no longer beat ourselves up when we fall back into our flaws and failings but listen to our companion the risen Christ who encourages us that we are not alone but that he is with us.

Here is what I believe that companionship in ancestral grace means:
It first means that Christ lives in and through us—God with us, Emmanuel:
This is the incarnational prayer of Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

We become incarnated presence of the risen Christ; we continue to be the arms; legs and feet of Christ in the world, eyes and ears of Christ; we become the heart of Christ making compassion and forgiveness of Christ real in the world. We are beings in a graced relationship, and we put Christ on and live