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The historical Jesus as an epiphany of God
As an epiphany of God, Jesus was a disclosure or revelation of God. He did not reveal God only in his teaching but in his very way of being. What he was like discloses what God was like.
God is spirit--spirit personality; man is also a spirit--potential spirit personality. Jesus of Nazareth attained the full realization of this potential of spirit personality in human experience; therefore his life of achieving the Father's will becomes man's most real and ideal revelation of the personality of God. Even though the personality of the Universal Father can be grasped only in actual religious experience, in Jesus' earth life we are inspired by the perfect demonstration of such a realization and revelation of the personality of God in a truly human experience. (TUB 1:6.8)
In traditional language, Jesus was a revelation of the love of God. For Christians, as the "Word made flesh" he was the love of God incarnate. His life thus provides particular content to what the love of God is like giving concreteness to what otherwise can only be an abstraction.
The particular quality of that love is seen, above all, in the compassion which we see in the historical Jesus. It is the compassion which moved him to touch lepers, to heal on the Sabbath, to see in the ostracized members of the human community, "children of God," and to risk his life for the sake of saving his people from a future which he could see and they could not.
From The Urantia Book: "As Jesus passed his door, the leper knelt before him, saying: "Lord, if only you would, you could make me clean. I have heard the message of your teachers, and I would enter the kingdom if I could be made clean." And the leper spoke in this way because among the Jews lepers were forbidden even to attend the synagogue or otherwise engage in public worship. This man really believed that he could not be received into the coming kingdom unless he could find a cure for his leprosy. And when Jesus saw him in his affliction and heard his words of clinging faith, his human heart was touched, and the divine mind was moved with compassion. As Jesus looked upon him, the man fell upon his face and worshiped. Then the Master stretched forth his hand and, touching him, said: "I will--be clean." And immediately he was healed; the leprosy no longer afflicted him." (146:4.3)
There is a social dimension as well as an individual dimension to the compassion of God as we see it in Jesus. For him, as for the prophets before him, the divine compassion included grief about the blindness, injustice, and idolatry that caused human suffering. As an image of God, Jesus mirrors the care of God for what happens in the world of history itself. The life of culture matters to God.
As an epiphany of God, Jesus discloses that at the center of everything is a reality that is in love with us and wills our well-being, both as individuals and individuals within society. As an image of God, Jesus challenges the most widespread image of reality in both the ancient and modern world, countering conventional wisdom's understanding of God as one with demands that must be met. In its place is an image of God as the compassionate one who invites people into a relationship which is the source of transformation of human life in both its individual and social aspects. (TUB 169:4.3, 4, 11-13)
Jesus as a model for discipleship
To be a disciple of Jesus meant something more than being a student of a teacher. To be Jesus' disciple meant "to follow after." "Whosoever would be my disciple," Jesus said, "Let him follow me." What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? It means to take seriously what he took seriously, to be like him. It is what St. Paul meant when he said, "Be imitators of Christ."
That vision is a life lived on the boundary of Spirit and culture, participating in both worlds. It has three core elements. First, its source is a "birth" in the Spirit. That birth involves a 'dying to the self" of which Jesus spoke and which he himself experienced: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me." Such death leads to a new life, a rebirth out of the world of conventional wisdom and preoccupation with the self and its securities, to a new way of being. Being "born of the Spirit" creates a radically new identity, one no longer conferred by culture. It is an awakening to that "place" where one may address God as Abba, the intimate one.
The second core element of life in the Spirit is its dominant quality, compassion. Compassion is both a feeling and a way of being. One feels compassion and is compassionate. Not simply a feeling of benevolent goodwill, it is a tenderness and "embracing-ness" which makes empathy possible.
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