We initially read and experience everything through our cultural and linguistic prejudices. However, we achieve higher levels of consciousness when those prejudices are exposed and we move beyond them. Copernicus and Kant offered a higher level of consciousness and a better way to see the world. Jesus also offered us a higher level of consciousness by replacing rational justice with love and mercy. This divine level of consciousness threatens to destroy our sacred prejudices. So we worship Jesus as God, telling ourselves that we cannot ascend to this level of consciousness. But Jesus tells us to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect, knowing that our failure to achieve perfection will bring us to the experience of God’s mercy, and it is the repeated experience of mercy that in time begins to make us into his merciful likeness, and we find that our conventional concepts of faith, love, and justice are transformed.