Christmas

I have just recently moved from Louisiana to Mississippi; it's funny how Mississippi can seem like an upgrade.

I live in the Jackson area, which is inundated with religous radio programs at the low end of the fm dial and virtually all over the am dial. They take Jesus seriously here.

On one of those programs, some talking heads wh0 were obviously not biblical scholars but rather those people who pour over the bible looking for a verse to match every one of live's possible events, were ridiculing some un-named scholars on the issue of the story of the virgin birth in Luke, and on the issue of who Matthew wrote his gospel for.

They sneered about the statement by this un-named scholar that Luke's story of the virgin birth was one of many in the Roman Empire of the first century, most notably the story that Augustus was born of the union of a mortal mother and a god. The scholar was most likely John Dominic Crossan, an Irish priest who has written extensively on first century Gallilee and the Middle East. Caesar was divii filius, the son of god. Crossan's point was if we are going to believe one first century story about a conjugal visit of a god with a mortal then we should give credence to them all, and then try to determine which god is more authentic. As Crossan put it: which god would be your god? the god of the Roman Empire, of the rich, of the conquerors, of the haves against the have-nots? or the god of justice and righteousness even for the poor and the destitute. You decide. Perhaps this was the problem since our radio experts had already chosen their god..the American Jesus whom they believe existed before he was born...in other words was god before he was human and then became god again and bears an uncanny resemblance to Augustus. I was impressed by the utter arrogance of ignorant people.

They also derided the idea that Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience and that he included a lot of references to the Tanakh to justify his opinions. Of course, for our radio Pharisees this couldn't be because for them, the Tanakh doesn't exist, it is now the Old Testament and it's not history but prophecy.

The twentieth century philosopher Eric Voegelin had the notion that when the old ways of trying to gain meaning in the world become obsolete, some individual or individuals will journey deep into their soul, to that point in between the human and the divine and pull up a new understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the divine. Now is the time. Socrates said over 2400 years ago that when the gods become unseemly, it's time to find new gods. He was referring to the Olympian gods who fornicated with humans prodigiously. Socrates didn't think that was the way God acted. So the Athenian democracy killed him. Don't fuck with god, they said. Well, other than Zeus and Aphrodite and Apollo, remember any of the rest of those musty crusty gods. The current understanding of Jesus needs to end up in the same dustbin.

Why? Because the Jesus that is worshipped by right wing Christians in America isn't the actual living breathing Jesus who was killed by the Roman Empire. Their Jesus triumpans is a creation of the Roman emporer Constantine who, on the eve of a battle, had a dream about a cross leading his legions into the victorious fight. Until then, the cross was not an important religious symbol. It was simply the weapon of choice of the Roman empire to kill insurgents. Constantine's wife sealed the symbolic deal by going to the holy land and discovering the actual cross upon which Jesus was killed. Convenient, eh?

And another thing. Give up with this end of the world shit already. If Jesus was God when he said that he would return during the lifetime of his apostles, then he was sure a dumb one. My guess is he was more like us than Christians really want him to be and he was wrong. Jesus wasn't coming back 2000 years ago, and he's not coming back now. This kind of apocalyptic thinking is based upon an idea that the world is too evil to contain the new truth of existence. Well, truth and evil have a long history of coexistence. That, my friends, is the dynamic of life.

We can recover our spirits only by recovering the real Jesus. It will require a lot of strife. The search will be opposed by a lot of gnashing of teeth, and accusations of who knows what. But they'll get over it. God always finds a way to correct our fucked up notions of God. Sometimes God speaks Lakota, or God forbid Arabic.

As the old understanding dies a death not unlike that of a fish flopping around in the bottom of the boat, a new one will rise from that in between place where the human and divine converse.