"Jesus the exemplar": what could that mean?

[This may be long and rambling but I would appreciate your comments: one of my supervisors has asked me to "open myself to the kiss of imagination"(!) and write something "wild" in order to hone in on my thesis topic.]

Well, then, what role has/does/should Jesus of Nazareth in moral theology?

"Jesus plays a normative role in Christians’ moral reflection."

"Jesus lived a particular life that has universal meaning; the analogical imagination recognizes how to be faithful to Jesus in ever new situations."
William C. Spohn Jesus and Ethics p.2; p. 186


It is scarcely disputable that Jesus plays “a normative role” in the moral reflection of Christians.
What is in dispute is what that normativity consists of. I like Sphon's observation, that Jesus lived a particular human life - located in space and time quite precisely, and not repeatable, unique in many ways, but that it has a "universal meaning". Jesus' human particularity must be upheld: he is not the instance of a type, or the first of many Christs. You cannot paint an African Christ, or a female Christ, or a Western, blond Christ (more to the point) without doing real violence to true meaning of Christ. He was "like us in every way", but precisely in being himself: he couldn't have been just any of us for exactly that reason.

This means that Jesus' life is made available to us as a pattern of life but only in a way that is conditioned by this particularity and uniqueness. However, I would want to strength the "analogical imagination" idea and say that Jesus is still present, but in a way universally present. He has overcome that particularity by being pneumatologically present in the members of the body and by incorporating them into himself, so that they are at home with him, his brothers and sisters under the Fatherhood of the Father.

Karl Rahner writes:
The imitation of Christ does not consist in the observance of certain moral maxims which may be perfectly exemplified in Jesus, but which have an intrinsic value in themselves independently of him…[but] in a true entering into his life and in him entering into the inner life of the God that has been given to us.

The great Roman Catholic theologian gets it right here: following in the way of Jesus Christ is not a matter of pursuing the values that Jesus represented or embodied, though it is often presented as such. Discipleship of Christ is not merely a matter of resembling him in actions but of "participation" in his life: living with him. "Entering into his life", as Rahner puts it.

The resurrection is a key here because an exemplar can be dead, a mere memory we invoke. But Christ - according to the fundamental Christian testimony - is not dead: he is risen. The resurrection explodes the regular use of Christ as a pattern, because in seeing him resurrected by his Father in the Spirit we know that we can never without external aid follow him in this. We could conceivably even suffer a more a tragic death than Christ's, on behalf of others even: but the resurrection is his and his only to share with us by faith.

Interestingly, the New Testament has a role for a mediated pattern of the way of Christ, in that the apostles and saints were to be afterChrists - I think this Stanley Hauerwas' term.