Something that is difficult is when others put you in a box. That is, because of some external appearance or situation, people ASSUME that you will act or respond in a certain way. For example . . . because of your age, or background, your weight or height, or voting record, your sexual orientation, your job, your looks, etc . . . we assume to know how you will act or what you are thinking. None of us like, but we do it so often. For example when we hear a news report and the name sounds Islamic and we think “Oh yea” . . . we are making assumptions.
[JOKE] It is like the story of the man who was having too much to drink at a bar. He was a diehard Vikings fan and he was going on and on about how awful and stupid Green Bay Packers fans are. Finally another man who was sitting near-by couldn’t take it anymore. He was a big man. He stood up and went up to the man face to face. “Hey I’m a Packer fan. What were you saying about Packer Fans?” The man said, “OK, I’ll repeat it and go real slow this time so that you can understand.”
You know we even put Jesus in a box. Most of us have Jesus’ appearance looking like us. But nearly all historians point out that Jesus would have olive colored skin, dark hair, probably a big nose, his eyes wouldn’t be blue – they’d be dark. I am 5’ 9” he would be shorter than me, probably more like 5’ 5”. And for his hair, it wouldn’t be like most of our pictures or statues. The style of hair would have been short.
Most paintings put Jesus in a box by portraying him to resemble the people looking at the painting. Hence with so many European painters, many of our depictions of Jesus have him look European instead of Middle Eastern. There’s NO way that he’d have blue eyes or white skin.
And Jesus was a Jew. His mother was a Jew. All the disciples would have been Jewish,
His last name is NOT Christ. That is his title. A better way of identifying Jesus is to say Jesus THE Christ. Or if it would be me, you’d say Kevin the Priest. Back then, people didn’t have last names. They would identify a person by their hometown or their parents. Hence Jesus of Nazareth. Or Jesus son of the Carpenter. Or Jesus son of Mary.
Anyway, the story that we heard from Acts (1st reading) is for his followers to be staring up into heaven as he was ascended. It says two man dressed in white (presumably angels) says, “Why are you staring up into heaven?” It was like challenging them to stop putting Jesus in a box. For I could the disciples say, “Well there he goes. Now what?”
Jesus the Christ is more than Jesus the person. We could get all caught up and argue about what Jesus looked like and the length of his hair, but the Christ is not limited to the person of Jesus. The Christ starts with Jesus, but is bigger than Jesus. The Christ existed at the beginning of time, as it says at the beginning of John’s Gospel, “In the begging was the word.”
And Christ didn’t stop with the person of Jesus. But the Christ exists in ALL OF US. We are the body of Christ (as Paul wrote in the second reading). Not the body of Jesus, the body of Christ. We are the place where the message now resides.
The Christ presence is in every living thing and in every living person. And what have we done? We have try to put Christ in a box . . . and declare that Christ only can be with people who think like this, or act like this. When we do that, we end up doing the exact opposite of what Christ is . . . . not a separator but the force that brings up together.
Christ is the great unifier. This was exemplified in what Jesus taught . . . that is, he was always trying to get people to see their connectedness rather than their divisions. Notice that he always turns the outsider into the good guy (like the Samaritan, the leper, the prostitute) and those who thought that they were good (the priests, the Levites, those who followed the laws), he points out how rotten they are . . . because they BOXED GOODNESS IN. They stifled any possibility that God could be anywhere except in their “preconceived ideas’ of what a good person was like.
Jesus told the disciples in the gospel, before he was lifted up, “I want you to go teach everyone. Give them MY commandments, not the Jewish laws. Make them followers. And how do you do that? Well, one way if you to stop putting others into a preconceived box. Instead of only seeing differences, start seeing similarities. Don’t presume that you know what a person is thinking or doing because you know someone else similar.
Look for the Christ in others. Expect to find the Christ in others. Receive what St. Paul describes in the second reading . . . “for you to gain a Spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in your knowledge of Christ.”