I do understand some of that. My grandmother used to tell me that "you make your habits, then your habits make you,... or break you." Should have listened to her better at times I guess. A line from some old song I like a lot goes: "I can tell your future, oh just look whats in your hand." Which I always took to mean that most people keep on doing what they were doing. Little did I know - and I'm not sure if I would change it if I had - that back when I was 15 and working with Little Princess 109 Lighting, that I'd most likely still be doing it a half century later. Perhaps I might have made different choices. Or not.
That the Christ was sent - not to die for our sins, a rather radical reading of the Gospels no doubt - as a 'signpost to a new space' is a nice thought. Though it seems contra-Christian. That Jesus acted in that way, and in that manner, knowing the final outcome, and kept on doing it anyway has a kind of reassurance to it that mainstream thought seems to lack. I know I'm not alone in thinking that the TV preacher, with the expensive watch, the private jet and all that material stuff is not exactly walking the walk of 'blessed are the poor.'
My favorite theologian, (and I don't have many) Edward Schillebeeckx, as much as argued (though he would pull back somewhat) that the resurrection of Christ was meant to be a metaphorical ideal, one that we could make part of our lives, in that every day, we have the ability to forgive ourselves, and get about with trying to live a good life. To the degree that 'the wages of sin are death' (though the life of Christ pretty much proves that the wages of doing nothing but good stuff is pretty much the same) its we who kill ourselves with guilt and recrimination. "For all have fallen short of the Glory of God" is a given, and we have to forgive ourselves first.
