I have a heresy.
I have a heresy.
There's this thing that happens, to any hierarchical system. The people at the top lose sight of what's going on at the bottom. It's not deliberate, necessarily, and it doesn't always come from a lack of care or desire to understand. It's just one of the problems that tends to crop up when you have a system where powerful peope make decisions for less powerful people based on the information that those less powerful people give them. Intervening levels smooth off the rough edges and apply a little shine and sometimes arrange things artfully, and what starts out as a tree winds up as a bookcase. It's called echelons above reality, and it keeps going because the people who fight it get hurt by the people who depend on it. It's a fact of life that really, really, the only way to understand the suffering of the masses, to really see what's happening to them, is to step down among them and experience it. The only way to really understand why someone might risk his hand for a loaf of bread is to starve yourself until your hand starts to look appetizing. Otherwise, at some level, you just don't get it.
I have a heresy.
If you think about it, who's at the top? Who's really at the top - in the clouds so damn far he could never, ever understand in a million years? Who, of all the beings in the world, has absolutely the least chance to understand what you, or I are going through? Who?
Why, that would be God.
I have a heresy.
Then, he sent Jesus.
Jesus walked among the people. He supped with whores and tax collectors and lepers and the meek and the starving. He survived on the generosity of others, and he tried to understand them, and he knew temptation, and he debated religion even as a small child, and he grew enraged at the moneylenders in his father's house and he had friends and followers who he spoke to every day and he made enemies and he knew despair and he was betrayed by a kiss and he suffered and he suffered and he suffered and he died.
That, then, is the fundamental difference between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the new. That was the God who once transformed a woman into salt for looking back, who struck Israel with plague because David took a census, who hardened the heart of Pharaoh time and time again, because he just wasn't done beating on Egypt yet. That is why this God now speaks of mercy and forgiveness, and lays His hand but gently on this world, in miracles too soft to prove. This is a God who understands.
That, then, was what the Cross was all about. That was the whole point. It wasn't that Jesus was working his way through all the sins of the world. It was that Jesus was suffering, truly suffering, in about as much agony as they could manage in that time, in that place. It was finishing God's understanding of the human condition, so that when he came back, God could say "oh. I get it. Yes, I'll forgive you, if you'll take it. I know what you went through. I've been there."
Just a thought.
the Sanity Faerie
There's this thing that happens, to any hierarchical system. The people at the top lose sight of what's going on at the bottom. It's not deliberate, necessarily, and it doesn't always come from a lack of care or desire to understand. It's just one of the problems that tends to crop up when you have a system where powerful peope make decisions for less powerful people based on the information that those less powerful people give them. Intervening levels smooth off the rough edges and apply a little shine and sometimes arrange things artfully, and what starts out as a tree winds up as a bookcase. It's called echelons above reality, and it keeps going because the people who fight it get hurt by the people who depend on it. It's a fact of life that really, really, the only way to understand the suffering of the masses, to really see what's happening to them, is to step down among them and experience it. The only way to really understand why someone might risk his hand for a loaf of bread is to starve yourself until your hand starts to look appetizing. Otherwise, at some level, you just don't get it.
I have a heresy.
If you think about it, who's at the top? Who's really at the top - in the clouds so damn far he could never, ever understand in a million years? Who, of all the beings in the world, has absolutely the least chance to understand what you, or I are going through? Who?
Why, that would be God.
I have a heresy.
Then, he sent Jesus.
Jesus walked among the people. He supped with whores and tax collectors and lepers and the meek and the starving. He survived on the generosity of others, and he tried to understand them, and he knew temptation, and he debated religion even as a small child, and he grew enraged at the moneylenders in his father's house and he had friends and followers who he spoke to every day and he made enemies and he knew despair and he was betrayed by a kiss and he suffered and he suffered and he suffered and he died.
That, then, is the fundamental difference between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the new. That was the God who once transformed a woman into salt for looking back, who struck Israel with plague because David took a census, who hardened the heart of Pharaoh time and time again, because he just wasn't done beating on Egypt yet. That is why this God now speaks of mercy and forgiveness, and lays His hand but gently on this world, in miracles too soft to prove. This is a God who understands.
That, then, was what the Cross was all about. That was the whole point. It wasn't that Jesus was working his way through all the sins of the world. It was that Jesus was suffering, truly suffering, in about as much agony as they could manage in that time, in that place. It was finishing God's understanding of the human condition, so that when he came back, God could say "oh. I get it. Yes, I'll forgive you, if you'll take it. I know what you went through. I've been there."
Just a thought.
the Sanity Faerie