Yesterday's lecture that touched on "person" vs "identity" and "work" vs "mission" makes me a little melancholy when I stop to think about it because our terminology does reveal our thought processes to an extent. And the way we have talked about Jesus has objectified him; but what came first, the chicken or the egg. We reduced Jesus to a product that churches sell, as Sherman said, a sort of antidote to sin, so no wonder we have talked about him in terms of his work.
Sometimes people get ridiculously touchythough, about using politically correct speech. I was in a lecture once in the States where a lady started hissing and booing the professor for reading something out of the bible that didn't jive with her ultra feminist ideology. Her behavior was rude and embarrassingly out of place because the guy reading was really an above board, sweet person, and I wished she saved her hostility for a situation or someone that might have deserved it.
The heart of the terminology issue might be how to change a mindset, and I guess using "identity" and "mission" might help turn the tide, but it will take more than that because I think we like religion to be very utilitarian. How can we be a friend to Jesus when we are obsessed with the bottom line of getting eternal life out of the relationship? This is where other religions might conceivably help us out by providing Christians with a model for following a leader without trying to get something out of him. I don't know really, but I don't think Buddhists exploit Buddha the way we do Jesus in order to get to heaven. I wonder how many Christians would still follow Jesus if salvation wasn't a promise. Maybe a non Christian who does the right thing because it is the right thing is more spiritual than a card carrying Christian who does the right thing because they are afraid not to.
The whole idea of the atonement seems to work against genuine friendship because there is so much riding on the outcome. Maybe that is part of the reason Jesus kept his identity under his hat for so long, he wanted to hang out with guys who not conniving or phony, just real people talking about everyday stuff. Maybe that is why he blew off the guy asking how he could get eternal life... I bet he didn't want everyone around him constantly worried about that topic when maybe he would rather talk about the equivalent of soccer for a change.