The Medium is the Message

We become the God we worship

For a long time, I have wondered what it means to be human. That is why I wrote A Human Catechism. I’m not the first one to think about this matter. I am just one in a long line of people from many different cultures, geographies, and times.

Being human is quite difficult. Our lives entail constant movements between beauty and affliction. Some times, these movements are so overwhelmingly abrupt that we forget how to human (yes I am using human as a verb here). In the last decade, we have gone from releasing the first steps of AI to wars in Ukraine and Gaza that have left thousands of dead, displaced, and traumatized human beings.

It is amid the current realities that I wonder if Christianity still has something to offer to our world. Beyond Christianity, however, could it be that Jesus has something to offer? I believe so.

In the mid sixties, Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. This created a revolution in the way in which we understand media. I find that this statement has profound implications beyond marketing and media. Perhaps, McLuhan had some kind of devine revelation that gave him the power to see a truth that permeates all of life. If the medium is the message, then God chose quite an interesting message to communicate and show us what it means to be human in Jesus. In the words of St. Ireneaus, “the glory of God is humanity fully alive.”

As I reflect on this, I can’t help to think about the disciples as they encounter God’s medium and message in Jesus. They learned how to imitate Jesus, and in doing so they were rescued from the images that distorted their true humanity. It is almost as if Jesus nudged them to keep becoming more human. Could it be, then, that Jesus’ invitation goes beyond just being human? Could it be that Jesus invites us to be human becomings? in other words, we become human as we enter in relationship with one another in imitating who Jesus truly was.

For many years, I thought that imitating somebody else was bad. I was taught that imitation would lead to disappointment. However, Jesus himself asked his followers to mimic the way he was. As a result, the disciples earned the nickname of Christians, or little Christs, as they became the medium in which Jesus kept revealing who he was to the world. This process has very little to do with having the right Christian ideology. It is all about induction. In other words, it is the process of learning in community how to be otherwise, in radical inclusion, imitating one another in a positive way, and opening the space for deep joy amid the difficulties of being human.

That is why I believe that when people call Christians hypocrites in today’s society, they are actually referring to the fact that Jesus’ message is not being modeled and shared by the medium of our lives. We talk about love, yet we exclude others. We talk about forgiveness, but we weaponize it against those who are vulnerable, oppressed, and marginalized. We talk about salvation, but we are willing to imagine eternal torture for those we consider impure and do not agree with us.

So, could it be that we are the medium and message of the image of God we believe in? Perhaps, Meister Eckhart prayed “God rid me of God” because the God we worship tends to be an exaggerated version of ourselves. If we believe in a wrathful and vengeful god, we will represent that God through our actions. If we believe in a God in whom there is no violence, we will learn to be otherwise. In the end, we become the God that we worship.