Darin asked me to say something about the Christian metaphor, and then I didn’t do it and now Darin has a sinus headache. Will teach me to quit being lazy? Maybe.
Just kidding. Our actions cannot cause the sinus headaches of others.
But before I really get into how my Jesus is different from Darin’s Jesus, I want to say I just realized how much god and Jesus is on this blog and it disturbs me greatly. I want you to know that I am not unaware. Probably actual Christians don’t even go on about god and Jesus this much, for chrissake.
OK.
So Darin said that his gospel told HIM that “by constant christlike love and sacrifice, one may have some small impact on individual lives.”
Whoo. That stresses me out just to read it. It also sounds like a good way to avoid one’s calling. One of Jesus’ central qualities is his willingness. He knows his job, and he does it. And his job isn’t to act like god. It is human-ness. From his first act of bloody humble human birth to his mob death his job is to be a person.
That is your job, too.
The truly christlike sacrifice is to sacrifice the safe position of being god, and be a person.
The Christian story is about a god who lives as a human, dies and yet still lives. So if this your model or your metaphor, step one is living as a person. The hardest, the ickiest, the most embarassing, the boringest and most trite the most frustrating and humiliating work; the only work that is actually worth doing, the work that all other work depends on.
Oh but we don’t want to do that. Like a student in the beginner class who says he ‘knows this already’ and wants to be moved to advanced, we want to skip this boring ass person stuff and be a god. A savior. A martyr. To be good. Jesus never tried to be good. He kept at just being him. Sometimes that was transcendent (sermon on the mount) and sometimes it was shitty (Caananite woman.) Christlike means human.
And because we don’t want to do it, life just keeps trying to murder us. With illness and pain and emptiness. With nastiness that seems somehow especially designed just to be what we can not handle. With depression, and divorce and addiction and helplessness. Life will keep banging our fucking heads against the wall until we are so broke down that we start being christlike.
Jesus’ story is this story. God’s head made corporeal so that life could bang it against the fucking wall.
Jesus suffers. He suffers on the cross, sure, but more importantly he suffers all the indignities of being a person. He loses his temper. People don’t get him. The people he loves turn on him. He disobeys his parents. He’s never sure he’s doing his job totally right. He has an imposter complex. He’s lonely. He has anger problems. He gets itchy. His feet hurt. This is what we call christlike suffering.
The call is to feel it. Not to escape into some kind of godliness and ignore all that angry itchy humanness. To be present, as he was.
Jesus dies. The ultimate surrender. Jesus gives up control. He carries his cross to the place of his torture. Jesus hits rock fucking bottom.
And then he rises again. Because when you are human, that is what you do. Life finally hits you so hard that you surrender, and then you rise again. And you can not believe you got through that. And it is not over, because you will die again. But you’re going to die better next time because you’re going to live better-- live more human-- in the meantime.
The more christlike, that is, the more really uncomfortably human you allow yourself to be as you drag your cross towards some new death, the more often and readily you rise.
It’s a good story.
And that is how the impact on lives and the world happens. You do your job, and god can do gods. If you get christlike and live your portion of life down in the dirt where people belong and get out of god's business in the heavens, god can set you about the work of helping others and making things better.
Jesus could not have done his work without being human, without itching. Neither can you.
