Now, I’m not the sort of person that believes life is meant to be spent either reading the Bible or telling people about your time spent reading the Bible… I give that as precurser to say that my connection and love with a man named Jesus looks rarely like the pretty picture painted by my evangelical parentage in my early-churched years. I’m just one wordy bastard, that’s all, and because I don’t feel guilty saying bastard anymore, I’m not the Christian I thought I would be at this point in my life. I realized today at church that I never became a Christian. Became, like I was done. I mean, we talked about all this metaphysical perfection in sanctification and atonement and a bunch of other terms that can really skew our views of life and meaning and all that. I’m not getting where I’m trying to go. I mean in the blog. The point, being that I am not a Christian, I am becoming a Christian, because my word, I am an awful Christian. Most are, thankfully. Still not getting to the point. I’m not against the idea or word Christian, I’m against the idea of being done, because if this is as good as it gets, I’m really in hell and I cannot hope for heaven.
That’s where I am going. See, I’m enough Christian, raised or sanctified or becoming or became, to ponder, especially at this time of year, Jesus on the cross. Ponder feels a little disrespectful, but that’s really what it is. Meditate, that’s a bit heavier than I really was. So, I thought about all my “illusions” of Jesus on the cross, thinking of sin like a black cloud pouring into his body as he hung there, taking every lie and hate and evil possible in all time, and flooding his body so that it was all destroyed with him. That’s what I thought God was doing, killing evil with Jesus, because only perfection could take complete evil and destroy it completely. I don’t know if that’s a message that was ever given to me in a tangible sort of way, but that’s a picture I had in my head, a feeling of justification, of all these metaphors and terms loaded on Jesus back as he walked to Golgotha, as though he didn’t have enough with just a cross. This is my thought: What if Jesus wasn’t trying to legally fix something between us and God, even though I’m sure he did if God is really up there in a big black robe with a gavel waiting to condemn us (we well more than condemn ourselves… that might be the gate to hell). I’m wondering if Jesus up there on the cross was not giving himself for us in a buy-a-slave, trick Satan, whatever sort of motif that I put together to understand the whole thing before. I mean, Jesus can do whatever he wants, so if he was buying me back from sin or giving me a clean slate or being the metaphoric Jewish sacrifice (the thing is, I’m not trying to be sarcastic with these ideas, because I’m not against their purpose and meaning, and I can’t say I don’t believe they are real anymore, but I’m not sure we get it when all it is is a metaphor)…
Jesus was on the cross with a couple of guys beside him, both guilty (legallly) of wrongdoing, both losing their lives for it in agony. I tend not to think of Jesus on the cross as legend, because if it was, what an awful thing to occur in somebody’s mind… I’m still not getting there. Maybe when Jesus was lifted up, bleeding and at the edge of death, it was then that the pretenses all fell away. Life seems to be agony and pain and suffering, all ending in death, all really because we screwed up what we were given and even we know it. Neither of the two men beside Jesus claimed innocence, which is amazing when you consider how no human seems to really own up to their wrongs. But we got to see how we all are, one way or the other. We’re either telling Jesus to get down, and get us down with him. We’re tired of the pain and the suffering, and we’re pretty damn sure he can just fix the whole thing. “Fix this shitty mess, Jesus. That’s what I believe about you!” Why didn’t he? Well, people like me with the dirty mouths and filthy thoughts create actual consequences, first of all. But that’s not where I’m going to go with this one. The man, on the edge of death and already in hell, thought that Jesus should make him feel better, should make everything better, just because he could, and since he wasn’t, Jesus wasn’t worth the faith it would take to get past this point of agony. Agony would be all this man could take in. Lewis’ ghosts would be the actual end result.
And then there’s that poor thief on the other side. You can only hope to be that good in life, to be convicted of your crimes and be sentenced to death. That guy had no illusions about making a living or finding a spouse or being important or well known, or liked… And yet, with Jesus dying next to him, he had something that got him the words I long to hear from the Almighty more than anything else I can imagine. “Today you will be with me in paradise.” God never seems to take the pain and suffering out of life, and I think that’s a powerful message, Jesus dying on the cross next to a guy, tortured in death, ready to be saved.
I might not be clarifying my point like I am trying to. Prepositions, I know. I used to think that God set up everything down here to play a game of who can believe the right things, and who will end up in heaven, like it was something you could do out in the vacuum of space because it had nothing to do with breathing or eating or making love or peeing or anything with life, it was just doing right things which usually had nothing to do with making love or peeing. The hard things in life, the heartache and the toothache, they didn’t make sense because I thought I believed the right things, and that’s what God wanted. I was totally with the “God is like a chair; you have to put your trust in the chair before you sit on it.” I didn’t want to really just sit on God and then type at the computer. What a moronic way of thinking about God. Steve is like a chair; just trust in him and he’ll magically make your life better. Life hasn’t been lovely on earth as long as people have been doing what they wanted. I used to have a real problem with God letting people die awful deaths. I even was a bit confused why Jesus had to die in agony. I used to picture my sin being the lashes that Jesus took, or the nails that went through his body. I really think that there were just beatings and nails, and my dirty thoughts or mean words have no direct connection to Jesus being crucified. Now I feel like Jesus wanted to show us what’s the worst thing that could happen - and it scares me. The thought of pain and torture really does scare me. What if Jesus was saying “This is it. Watch what I do with this. Think of what I can do with you.” I mean, my life is like a Berenstein Bear book compared to what happened with Jesus. My life is a lot of illusion. I think I look okay, or that I work hard, or that I love people like I’m supposed to or that I’m independent or smart or funny. Luckily I really am funny. Seriously, what is all this? It’s like the door to heaven was agonizing life and death, with Jesus showing the way to the God that says he’s not going to save us from all pain and suffering until he’s sure of something that I don’t understand yet.
I’m not really that spiritual of a guy. I like singing to God, but I don’t as often as I’d like to think I do. I probably just like singing, and that’s fine. But I’m crap when it comes to being that deep, abiding pool of righteousness that you’re supposed to be when you’re a Christian. It’s like I have a reply to Bertrand Russel - “Hey, I’m not one either! Not yet.” He really could identify with the other guy. He was ticked that Jesus killed a tree for not having fruit out of season. Of course he’ll be the guy mocking and cursing Jesus. I just need to make sure I’m not mocking or cursing him, because, in reality, we are all beside Jesus on the cross, and our legs will be broken and our lungs with fill with our own bodliy fluids, and we’ll die cursing Jesus for not making life pleasant, or shake with sordid anticipation of that paradise that he promised, even if life now or then isn’t what we thought it should be.
This was an impressive post. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but that is something you could preach. To the right group anyway.