Category: Jesus

Jesus Gets It

Jesus Gets It

I pulled the Bible off the shelf a few months ago, with the goal of finding all the awesome Jesus stuff that led Neem Karolyi Baba to weep when asked about him, the stuff the Buddhists and Hindus and, yep, even some Christians, talk about that actually speaks to me. I haven’t entirely given up yet, but Jesus, that book’s a slog. “It’s just so poorly written,” says B. Maybe that’s why the Catholics went the authoritative interpretation route: if they let too many people try to read the Bible themselves, they’d bore them out of the religion. I haven’t entirely sworn off it yet, but for now I will let wiser, more patient interpreters call my attention to worthwhile passages. It’s not like I don’t have enough to read.

For example, I’m halfway through a collection of Dr. King’s writings. In the piece Love in Action, he begins with Luke 23:34.

Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

The Reverend is most impressed with the Then. That after he was condemned, tortured, mocked, and left to die, he begged for God’s forgiveness when he could have asked for revenge, for obliteration; for anything, really. I mean, it’s his dad, and he’s dying, for Christ’s sake.

But Jesus doesn’t do that, because he’s not like his dad. There are so many times in the Bible when that God took the low road, when he destroyed his own people for disobeying him, or others for inflicting harm upon his chosen ones.

If I look at the Bible as a work of literature (focusing on the content, not the godawful style), a noteworthy difference between Father and Son is the difference between Judgment and Empathy.

And I thought, if there were a distinct entity that were the God of the Bible, and Jesus was his son, that father had a fuck of a lot to learn from his kid. And why? What was the ultimate difference between God and Jesus? Jesus was human. God may have loved his people, in a way. He may have pitied them, and occasionally others. But he had no empathy, because he had no idea how hard it was to be human.

Jesus lived as a man. I find it so odd that some Christians honor the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity, because it’s his humanity that makes him exceptional. I assume most Gods could endure torture and opprobrium and temptation pretty easily if they really wanted to, because they’re Gods. Certainly there are Greek & Roman & Hindu and other gods who exhibit human frailties, but the Biblical Judeo-Christian God, omniscient and omnipotent, doesn’t have those problems. So how could it have real compassion, real understanding, for its people? How could it forgive them, when it had no idea what they were going through?

The more simplistic Christian evangelists who’ve testified to me over the decades love to pull out John 3:16 as if it will make me fall out in tears and praise: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. I never understood why this was such a big deal. Again, God doesn’t connect with other humans the way we do, doesn’t feel pain the way we do, doesn’t suffer the way we do, so watching his son die doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it would be for us, especially since God knows he’s not really gone, and is quickly reunited with him. Maybe the big change here is that he now loves the world, and not just the Jews? That eternal life is now open to all, not just those who lucked out through culture or heritage? I guess that’s nice, though “believes in him” is sooooo ill-defined that it could mean almost anything, and does.

It seems to me that the exceptional part of God giving his son to humanity is that God now has to learn from his son’s experience and play by his rules going forward, or even step aside to let the youth assume power. Jesus is so different from the God of the Old Testament that it’s sometimes hard to believe they’re related. And they’re really not: less than the relationship between an absent biological father and the son raised in an entirely different family and culture. Jesus’ culture is largely material, his dad’s is strictly spiritual. So it’s not that the Biblical God changed his mind about how people should act & treat each other & how he would treat them in return and decided to plant a kid on Earth to impart his new message. It’s that living in his adopted family, the family of humans, Jesus gained a completely different understanding of the world, which led him to the philosophy of universal love and forgiveness and interdependence and generosity. Living as a person and with people guided Jesus to a kind of wisdom that the immortal God could never achieve on its own. Christians believe that this newfound grace then became the spiritual law, which would mean that Jesus either changed his father’s perspective, or his dad stepped down and ceded power. Either way, the Biblical God then recognizes the limits of his knowledge or power or both, and must have operated with some level of humility.

It’s not dissimilar to Buddha’s story. While Siddhartha Gautama was not the son of a God, he was a prince, and with his rich and powerful father blocking his exposure to any suffering, the future Buddha lives much like a god. Once he is exposed to death, illness, and aging, his curiosity leads him to escape his confinement of comfort. Only then, living among regular people, experiencing their suffering and their attempts to cope with it, does he come to his understanding of how to live in the world.

Of course, one thing that Gautama’s and Jesus’ humanity implies is that we, fellow humans, could be as good as them. This is a hell of a weight for the true acolyte to carry, even if it is occasionally fortifying. I prefer viewing it from the flip side, knowing that without the hell that being human can be, those dudes would never have cultivated the wisdom they did. They knew how hard it was not to cling to the beautiful and terrible things of this world, which was how they could offer parables and paths to help us out of that attachment. It helps me better understand why we meditators use the body, the breath, sounds, all the things offered only to to the creatures of this earth, as a way to connect with the eternal, the infinite, the entities not of this earth. This fucked up, breathtakingly gorgeous, heartrending, boring, overwhelming life is not a pit stop on the way to enlightenment, it is the only vehicle that will get us there.

The Perfect Definition (Perfection, pt 4)

Let us first acknowledge that any idea of perfection was made by humans: specifically, almost always men, and usually White, European man. I’ll start with one of the most influential men: Jesus. (Depending on what culture and century you live in, he may or may not be White.) The religion founded in his name has had an immeasurable influence on European-American culture, though I’d argue that his actual message (even the distorted, subjective transcriptions of his message) is far more universal, far less anthropocentric, and far less judgmental than what Christian, European culture has chosen to latch onto. Still, there is definitely some judgey stuff in the New Testament. This one was occasionally thrown at me when I was a kid, from Matthew 5:48. This translation from the King James Version of the Bible:

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Since I took up with Buddhism, I find echoes of that same nonbinary and compassionate worldview hidden in secret pockets all over Jesus’ rags. So what did he mean by perfect in that quote? It’s difficult and perhaps pointless to parse language in the Bible – the flaws inherent in multiple translations (in this case from Aramaic through however many versions before the English), the inaccurate memory of the people recording his words, their own bias that led them to that memory, etc. But I still think it’s valuable to interrogate the choices in the translation. From my beloved Shorter Oxford Dictionary, at the time the Bible was translated into English (1611), perfect had many different meanings, including

  • Completed; fully formed; adult
  • Having all the essential elements, qualities, or characteristics
  • Not deficient in any particular
  • Being an ideal example of
  • Of or marked by supreme moral excellence
  • (Rare, but thanks to our buddy Shakespeare): in a state of complete satisfaction; contented

All sorts of stuff going on there, but only one aligns with what I, and many of you, have hanging over us: the goal of being exceptional, without flaws, and lacking in nothing. Perhaps older definitions shunned that, because only GOD could be perfect. In our contemporary, more secular language, we have these Google-ready definitions:

  1. being entirely without fault or defect : flawless a perfect diamond
  2. corresponding to an ideal standard or abstract concept a perfect gentleman

Who decides when to apply those adjectives, and how? If we take a moment, we can surely all recognize that an ideal standard or abstract concept is a construct, that there is no universal, objective ideal. But the idea of without fault or defect is just as fraught, inviting all kinds of ableism. Who decides what a defect or fault is? If it’s a variation from the norm, would that also include instances of what we might consider excellence? What if someone is exceptionally fast, intelligent, or beautiful? Is that a defect? If perfect is ideal, what is ideal? Standard? Doesn’t that seem like a low bar? I’m starting to think there are at least two clear problems with the idea of perfection: the burden of the unattainable goal, and the limitations of the standard of ideal. Both too much and not enough.

The World English Bible translates Matthew 4:28 passage as:

Therefore you shall be perfect, just
as your Father in heaven is perfect.

I know I’m a word nerd, but this reads very differently to me. First of all, the structure seems to imply a precursor, something that led to the therefore, whereas “Be ye therefore perfect” stands more easily on its own. The prelude is the Sermon on the Mount, which is filled with mostly groovy stuff, the grooviest of which comes right before this statement. Matthew 5:38-5:47 is all about loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, giving to those who ask and those who don’t. I particularly like his critique of “love your neighbor,” which basically says: any asshole can love their neighbor; that’s amoral. Loving your enemies takes work, and is generative. Stop picking sides: God shines on everyone and rains on everyone. This is how you get to perfect – loving everyone and treating everyone without prejudice. Shall (all you lawyers out there know this) means will. It’s a commitment from Jesus, not a command. It’s already there. If you care for others as you would for yourself, you are already perfect.

Let me circle back to the “complete” definition of perfect. It could be the most fucked up or most forgiving option of all of them. In my monkey mind I have used complete as a standard for a painfully long time. Particularly when it comes to writing. I had to keep editing, keep refining, keep proofing until a work was complete, and despite never getting there, I never abandoned the quest. I was so thankful for deadlines in school or work, because I would eventually have to stop writing, imperfect as the piece always was. But as hard as it is to complete an essay, or painting, or symphony, it is exponentially insane to think of achieving completeness as a person. If at some point one becomes complete – when they have the spouse, home, and child/ren perhaps; or when they break the world record while winning gold in the Olympics, how do we characterize everything after that? Who are you post-perfection? We see people struggle with this all the time. What do you do when you’re “past your prime”? How do you find meaning if meaning is tied up in perfection/completeness and you’ve reached your destination with nowhere else to go? How much more liberating would it be if we held onto no ideals at all? Is that absurd?

In the Buddhism I hang with everything you need, including enlightenment, is available to you at all times because Buddha nature already exists within everyone, and perhaps everything. So we are already Complete, already perfect, with just a wee bit of really fucking calcified artificial frosting hiding all that nutritious goodness.

Ram Dass keeps returning to Completeness in How Can I Help. That is, recognizing that every person on the planet is already complete. When we seek to help people, we may be serving them food or companionship or understanding or shelter, but not because they are lacking in some way; rather because we have or have access to a thing that they need, so it’s only natural to transfer the resource to the area that requires it, like putting lotion on your own dry skin. In a sense, both giver and receiver are just fulfilling our parts as members of the ecosystem, and in that way we are perfect. If we approach others as lacking, imperfect, incomplete, we are not really serving them, we are serving ourselves and our own judgment and rules and fears and ideologies. That kind of help may give someone the calories they need to go on another day, but it can leave them with a feeling of inferiority, of insufficiency, and it doesn’t actually serve us as individuals or us as members of a human and ecological community, because it is reinforcing separateness and contributing to inequitable thinking and behavior. Recognizing everyone’s completeness, everyone’s perfection (as I can so easily do with Vicious) is a path to an equitable and multifarious world.

To be continued. Again. I could go on and on… and I do.

Next time: Creative Imperfection

OJ and I

 

oj2I had just left the Wedge grocery on Nicollet Ave when a man walking by called me over.

“Miss?”

“Yes?”

“Could you buy me an orange juice?”

“Sure.” I mean, how else could I respond to a question like that? Of course I can buy this guy an orange juice. Why had no one ever asked me that question before!? I had never felt more sure of anything. “Come on inside.” Continue reading “OJ and I” →