Take a look at the clip from Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Jesus of Nazareth under ‘Videos’. How close is it to the real Jesus as you imagine him?
Slim, tall, white, middle-class male, with an impeccable British public school accent and baby blue eyes, is not a great start, perhaps, in terms of closeness to the genuine article, but that’s not actually the point of the post.
Is this Jesus the epitome of what a spiritual person looks like?
Notice how ‘Jesus’ never blinks. See how those eyes just stare into the beyond, as if he’s here but … well … somewhere else at the same time, too. He’s ‘in the Spirit’ perhaps?
Does that correspond to your view of how spiritual people are?
It’s not just an academic question, because how we visualize Jesus’ spirituality will influence how we see what spirituality should look like in ourselves.
If that’s ‘being spiritual’, then we will emulate people, leaders especially (and particularly successful ones), who practice that style of spirituality, and assume anyone who doesn’t is ‘unspiritual’.
I’m not suggesting some people just copy a certain sort of other-worldly charismatic demeanor, but our expectations of ‘how it should be for us’ are always going to be shaped by what we assume to be the norm, as reflected in those whose life or ministry we admire and aspire to.
But can a Christian be a little less ‘mystic’, and come across as more ‘ordinary’, yet still be genuinely spiritual too, just as tuned in to the Spirit of God?
Some would say no, because the Bible says Christians should be ‘not of this world’. Well, Zeffirelli’s Jesus certainly fits that requirement! Is it a case that the ‘less of this world’ a person seems, the closer to God they must be?
The key question is whether that really has anything to do with being ‘not of this world’ in a biblical sense, rather than a Star Trek sense. Isn’t the biblical sense more to do with closeness to God in one’s personal walk, and living out a radically faithful lifestyle, than with other-worldly behaviour in Christian meetings?
Can a Christian be truly spiritual (and indeed, spiritual in the charismatic sense) and yet, still come across as ordinary enough to have people who are of this world feel entirely comfortable in their presence?
I guess at the end of the day, it all comes down to how unworldly you think Jesus was …
[...] As An Aside: The Holy Spirit’s ‘spirituality’ (that he wants to work in us) is the same as Jesus’ ‘spirituality’. If we have a misguided perspective on what Jesus’ ‘spirituality’ looked like in the flesh, that will carry across into our expectations of the Spirit’s ‘spirituality’ outworked in us. So, Christology comes into the mix for our understanding of the Spirit. Since Jesus is our role model as the perfect manifestation of the imago dei, how we see Jesus’ own ‘spirituality’ will be the basis for how we expect the Spirit to move in, upon and through us. For more on this, see ‘What’s Your Idea of Spirituality?’ http://faithandstuff.org/blog2/?p=50. [...]
[...] As An Aside: The Holy Spirit’s ‘spirituality’ (that he wants to work in us) is the same as Jesus’ ‘spirituality’. If we have a misguided perspective on what Jesus’ ‘spirituality’ looked like in the flesh, that will carry across into our expectations of the Spirit’s ‘spirituality’ outworked in us. So, Christology comes into the mix for our understanding of the Spirit. Since Jesus is our role model as the perfect manifestation of the imago dei, how we see Jesus’ own ‘spirituality’ will be the basis for how we expect the Spirit to move in, upon and through us. For more on this, see ‘What’s Your Idea of Spirituality?’ http://faithandstuff.org/blog2/?p=50. [...]