Anointed
“Here,
in such a simple thing as oil, we have the perfect clue to the whole point of
Jesus’s teaching. He wanted to raise up our lives a considerable notch: from
unconscious, moralistic, self-interest to a highly civilized and spiritually sophisticated
life based on love and community…Jesus brings the oil of a soulful and
spiritually elevated awareness to ordinary life, which otherwise tends to be
full of unnecessary prejudice and aggression.”
Thomas
Moore (The Soul of Christmas, p.20; Franciscan Media, 2016)
In his
book, The Soul of Christmas, Thomas Moore explains the origins of the word
Christmas—which of course comes from Jesus, who was also called "the Christ." In
Greek, the word is Christos and means anointed. Moore explains that if you go
back far enough, it also means "olive oil." The Messiah was “the anointed one,” a
spiritual leader anointed with olive oil. It is still part of several Christian rituals—including
confirmation, Ash Wednesday, and Last Rights.
Jesus was born into a legalistic society—one that used the rules of the temple to identify and isolate the Hebrew people, who were frequently captive or occupied. These rules helped the early Hebrews to survive as a race, separate from others in their sphere of the world. But often the laws caused hardship, just as they do now, for poor people. So, Jesus was a rule-breaker, too; he wanted to serve the people and not the powers that oppressed them.
Thomas Moore wrote:
“Here’s an important law of life you probably didn’t learn at school: It’s
just as important to break rules as it is to keep them.” This is especially
true when the rules are unjust, and punitive to a certain segment of the
population, like the poor. Jesus healed on sabbath, ate, and encouraged his
disciples to eat on sabbath, overturned the tables of money lenders and
released the animals being sold for sacrifice. Here’s what he said to the religious
leaders of his day: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape
the sentence of hell?” (Matt. 23:33) Yeah, the anointed one believed in and
practiced civil disobedience when he saw injustice.
In this
season when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, let us raise our consciousness of
what it means to be a follower of the Christ. If we want to bring
Christ-consciousness into our world, we cannot be self-serving. We cannot be prejudiced.
Our job is to create justice in a world that is stacked against the poor and
disenfranchised. We cannot just worship Jesus, and feast on the high, holy days, and
call ourselves Christians. We must also serve the people he came to serve;
create communities based on love and service. Perhaps this year, as we are
ravaged by pandemic disease, that infant in the manger will be born in us, and we will bring about a more just world just as he did so long ago.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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