The One Commandment
In the midst of a rather heated email exchange a few weeks ago, a person commented that I had said nothing to lead him to believe I might actually serve on the executive board of a church. I actually laughed out loud at that one – as if there is some secret code that board members use to identify themselves (there is a secret handshake, but I fear the secret Anglican good squads would send an albino African bishop to off my entire family if I disclosed it). Anyway, I replied that, as far as I was aware, no one had asked about their opinion.
As you can see, this was a very muckety-muck academic discussion.
This eventually moved towards a discussion of exactly what type of person Jesus was. Which is what this post made me think about again. I’m not sure my Jesus is listed there – or, more precisely, he’s listed in part in several of them. For me, the most important aspect of Jesus was that he was a truth-seeker. I know there are any number of atheists who would take umbrage with that statement, but I don’t really care – so save the email.
Jesus, as I read the Bible, was quick to tell people that he saw through their bullshit. At times he was eloquent and intimately concerned with the emotional state of the person to which he spoke. But at other times, he really didn’t seem to care.
I mean, he called the leading priests of his day “vipers”. When it is understood that the viper was a synonym for Satan – or is at least a synonym with “serpent” and that’s a slur all the way back to Eden – that’s a pretty big name to go tossing around. He may or may not have meant it exactly that way, but I’m sure that the religio-political consultants of the day (like good old Saul) spun it that way. Insulting the priesthood was taken pretty close to insulting God himself. So it helps understand why Caiaphas and his buddies didn’t really like Jesus.
He also called people “foolish” and/or talked about what “fools” do. No matter how you spin that, it isn’t a complement. At best, it means someone is likeable, but engaged in dumb, dangerous, and possibly evil actions. He doesn’t mean to kill entire families – he’s just a bit of a fool, you know?
I bring this up because I consider “asshat” and “dumbass” to be kind of modern synonyms for these ideas. But maybe that’s just me wanting to be a bit unfriendly when I want to be.
The whole point is that people want to make Jesus into a perfectly non-insulting figure. He was obviously charismatic, but he was killed for a reason, and it wasn’t that people liked him so much that they wanted to send him back to his Heavenly Father as quickly as possible. The white-washing of Jesus is just another part of the sterility of Christianity – well, actually of all religion. We don’t want to know if Jesus had jock-itch and we would really like to forget that Lot’s daughters got him drunk and had sex with him and Moses sounded more like Mel Tillis than Charleton Heston. We don’t want to hear that Jonah, after finally bending his will to God’s, was not rewarded, but had to sit outside the gates of Ninevah in the hot sun – even the gourd he found shade under was whithered.
And, while we’re being honest, doesn’t the Apostle Paul sound a bit asshatish at times? “Shut up the women, ban the queers, and, while we’re at it, be glad you aren’t in jail like me!”
Nice guy.
Our pastor, Mark, has told me that he doesn’t feel it is his job to police other adults’ behavior – and I agree wholeheartedly. Among other things, this makes him a better pastor, in my eyes. Because he isn’t the behavioral cop running around, we don’t feel like we have to put on a false “best behavior” in front of him. He doesn’t have to be perfect, either. We can see his flaws and, rather than trying to pretend that he is somehow above us, we understand that he is involved in the same worldly struggles that we are.
All in all, it’s a very freeing experience.
But it’s also a very spiritually demanding one. If I discuss a personal problem with Mark, I am much more likely to hear something along the lines of “Why do you think you reacted in that way?” or “Well, I guess I can see your point,” than I am to hear “What would Jesus do?” or “You know, the Bible says…” It has made our relationship a lot deeper and more satisfying (for both of us, I hope) than it would be otherwise. But that’s because it cuts past the facade everyone puts up and gets to the truth behind it. We rarely find ourselves in situations where we cannot tell what “a good person” would do – but we often find ourselves in situations where we just don’t want to do it. From schadenfreude to the perverse enjoyment of seeing someone veer around you in traffic only to be cut off by a semi, we don’t rise to the sublime as often as we’d like to pretend.
But Christianity’s entrenched mythos keeps us from seeing things clearly. Jesus, after all, never said, “Thou shalt not tailgate. Verily, I say that no man who flips the bird at a fellow motorist knows the Father.” So we focus on little things, antiquities, and woe be unto the man (or woman) who takes it upon themselves to say that we might be called to understand things just a little bit differently.
Isn’t the miracle of Jesus’ birth not so much that God loves us – for how many of us don’t love our own children? – but that, in all the world, a manger was decreed to be as glorious as the most opulent palace? Do we not understand that paradigm? Even the feathers of a sparrow are numbered, yet we would wipe out entire species as if they had no place in our world.
Look, I’m not anything close to an enviro-nut. I like my flush-toilet (when it works) and I like my air conditioning and I’m learning to deal with $4 a gallon gasoline. I’m not advocating a radical lifestyle that ignores modernity. I’m just saying that maybe we’re too busy cutting down the trees to see the forest.
I really don’t think that, if something like a Biblical judgment day occurs, Jesus will be saying, “You know, I’d really like to let you in, but that potty-mouth of yours…I mean, ‘asshat’? What is that? Sorry, bro, no place for you in here. Maybe in the barn…”
I do think that he will be much more likely to say something like, “You know, that winter night when you went out into the park and gave that bum a coat with a $20 bill in the pocket and a sandwich? I appreciate that.”
He won’t say, “Man, it meant so much to me when you filled out the bass-line in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlement.” But he will say, “I’m glad you made a point out of shaking hands with every visitor in the church. You don’t know how some of those people were barely holding it together.”
I saw a clip of George Carlin recently where he observed that the Ten Commandments could be reduced to “Always be honest and kind to the person from which you get your nookie.” Jesus said his message could be distilled as “Love your neighbor as your self.” Which, in modern terms, might mean “Don’t be such an asshat, you dumbass.”
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