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I say that Jesus was every bit a man of his day. He could keep up with anyone who displayed the least bit of spiritual receptivity. Now, there are some pretty weird characters in the world today, and I'm sure that in Jesus' day the typical man on the street was much rougher, much weirder, and much more dangerous than today. Two examples (out of many) come to mind, of Jesus' melding of contrasts. One is the time he stopped a man from beating his wife in public, the other is the occasion of Jesus talking to Anaxand in the shipyard.
I'd like to confess here that I attended high school with a boy who was raised by his grandmother, in a very small town. We were very good friends, but as adults, he took a somewhat different path than I did, though we kept in touch for many years. After getting caught in some silly interstate theft thing and doing a few months in the Texas prison system, he returned to his wife and two young children, and made a life for himself.
Now, my friend Arley (not the one who reads The Urantia Book) was a good guy at heart, but his experiences in the Navy and in prison caused him to associate with a very rough crowd--bikers. He'd go to biker bars, and biker weddings. In case anyone doesn't know it, the "code" of the American Old West still lives on in the biker sub-culture. Might very often makes right in these circles. There are plenty of drugs, and plenty of scoundrels. I remember one time when Arley told me that he'd taken his motorcycle to a guy for a major overhaul, and it was over two months later and he hadn't gotten it back. He told me that he (Arley) was afraid that this guy, this backyard mechanic, might be trying to get into the "Banditos," a motorcycle gang that requires, as the price of admission to their club, that the bike the candidate is riding be stolen from another biker. Arley summed up his dilemma by saying, "I might have to kill him." I thought he was speaking figuratively, but when I started making a joke of his comment, he let me know that he didn't appreciate me making light of his very real moral dilemma.
I rather suspect that many of the persons Jesus dealt with in his day were like Arley. I read a lot of Arley in the character of Anaxand, the young man in the shipyard working on the steering paddle alongside Jesus. Here we see Jesus making some kind of series of comments that causes Anaxand to ridicule Jesus, but to do so with a hint of sincerity.
Jesus knew that Anaxand's comment of, "if the gods are so good then how come..." could not be answered directly. A discussion of free will, the real answer to the man's verbalized question, would have been wholly inappropriate. Jesus correctly saw the man's comment as a challenge to the assertions that Jesus had been making over the course of the morning--Jesus' assertions that God is good and that God cares for us. Jesus also correctly ascertained that such a challenge could only be addressed by a counterchallenge, one that would "one-up" the original challenge issued by the young man, Anaxand.
I'm picturing a bunch of bikers sitting around, one of whom is bragging about his friend. Another biker gets tired of listening to him, and calls his bluff. Now the bragger has to defend himself, or be made a fool. Imagine if biker #1 manages not only to defend his friend's honor, but at the same time to call his challenger a coward, and to do so in such a way that biker #2 actually agrees! This, I believe is what happened that afternoon in the shipyard as Jesus challenged Anaxand to accept his (Anaxand's) superior vision of justice, and act upon it to save the poor foreman who was drowning in spiritual darkness. Jesus even implied that if Anaxand didn't, he would be a spiritual coward!
If you read the passage on page 1430 you will notice that Jesus "puts down" Anaxand at least three times--twice at the beginning of his brief discourse, and then again at the end, where he challenges him with the following statement:
"Surely you are not the coward who could stand by on the seashore and watch a fellow man who could not swim perish?"
These are mighty strong words to use when dealing with an aggressive young man, one who hangs out in shipyards. But under the circumstances, they were exactly what needed to be said.
But, what does this have to do with art? Simple--it is a unification of contrasts. Jesus accepted this man exactly as he was, and still managed to unify spiritual growth and beauty with the rough and aggressive world of a common shipyard laborer. Truly, a unification of contrasts, creative beauty in the most amazing way.
However, this short passage illustrates a larger issue. Jesus lived a unique, spontaneous, and highly creative (artistic) life. The canvas of Jesus' life was the environs in which he happened to find himself at the moment. Jesus epitomized life in the era of light and life, a time when fashion will cease to dominate the lives of every mortal, when our clothes, our music, our ideas, our vocabularies, our reactions, and our thoughts will be unique expressions of the beauty of God, rather than being dictated by the acceptable norms of society.
In short, I believe that one of the hidden messages in The Urantia Book is the importance of ART. Not art as in paintings, sculpture, and music, but rather art as in "the art of living," as Rodan so aptly phrased it. We are each to become a unique and artistic expression of the infinite personality of the Universal Father. That infinity will not be fully expressed, a portion of it will be lost forever, if we do not fulfill our potential. God depends upon us, in partnership with him, to CREATIVELY work out a new addition to reality as we know it. That, I believe, is
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