The Greatest Lie Ever Lived

Jesus on the cross exclaims, “My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me?”  It is usually taken to be that Jesus is expressing horror at the experience of being the sin offering for mankind.  Of course, the fact that Jesus is held (in most Christian circles) to be fully divine—coupled with the notion that God would not “forsake” a perfect and sufficient offering—makes Jesus’ exclamation difficult for Christians to square.

 

Jesus was not referring to being a sin offering (though a sin offering he was, and one who suffered most horribly.)  Rather Jesus, in the fullness of the divine, was expressing the most perfect sentiment to be held by one fully human: the inexplicable alienation of self from God—“My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me?”  This alienation is intrinsic to man’s created nature, and is earlier than any notion of a Fall: “It is not good that the man should be alone.”  And God’s solution to Adam’s alienation is not a comprehensive one; God does not create anew a creature separate from Adam.  God spreads Adam’s essence over into another person from whom Adam could never be perfectly distinct.  “Man” in the ultimate sense is still a multi-bodied creature blamelessly separated from the God who created him.  Such is the toll of creation—the forsakenness of which Jesus, in the extremity of his torments, complains.

 

Jesus is therefore the perfect human: an embodiment of Man’s created nature come to grips with the tragic reality of that nature.  Here we uncover the great lie of Christianity, the lie that reduces Jesus’ essence into the perfect sin offering, when in reality Jesus’ essence properly understood is the perfect human being.  The sin offering role—though entirely necessary and performed perfectly by Jesus—is simply an inseparable element of Jesus’ nature.  Moreover, the proclivity to seek to be given over as a sin offering must be part of what we should seek to discover within ourselves: our true nature, part of a species of fleshly existence, an organic community separated from God.

 

It is the attraction of that community that most perpetuates our alienation from God, whether that alienation springs from our identification with the proximity of our species, or from our self-identification as individuals that is ratified by the distanced regard we receive from other so-called individuals.  Our common humanity, in most perverse fashion, afflicts us simultaneously with the malign elements both of tribalism and self-absorption.  It should be no surprise, then, that Jesus commands us to renounce particular ties while striving simultaneously to see all humanity—including our divine savior—in each person.  We must give up all to possess all.  In order to truly live we must give up our lives—at least, such must be the template for which we strive, not some formula for the “Christian life.”

 

Such is the only way we can exist in truth—or try to.  Ultimately we will fail, even if only because our very self-reference as individuals—individuals who do more or less well at pursuing truth—is fouled by the inherent self-deception of thinking of ourselves as individuals.  We are Jesus or we are nothing, and in Jesus we are naught but a benign version of nothing.  In either event our lives themselves are but a curse, as God’s own truth should tell us.  This, then, is the real lie, the most great lie that should concern us: the lie that says that falsehood is the enemy of truth.  Not so.  Life is the enemy of truth.  Falsehood can be discovered, but any falsehood of import can be discovered only by trading away part of our lives in the process.

Gates to Paths to Gates

Theologians seek to understand more and more about God.  Cosmologists seek to understand more and more about the universe.  Biologists seek to understand more and more about living things.  Cosmology and biology (along with virtually every other field of study) share a particular basis of legitimacy that theology cannot claim.  Fields other than theology can discover and incorporate new foundational theories without invalidating the substance of prior and less sweeping organizing principles; indeed it is often the case that the ability to explain and contextualize existing knowledge provides the most powerful testimony of a new theory’s value.

 

Biologists did not have to belatedly discover the undoubted phenomena of species and their categorical relationships in order to justify evolution as a legitimate subject of inquiry.  In regard to cosmology, the discoveries of gravity, relativity, and quantum mechanics did not obliterate the basic understandings of relationships between physical objects that have held since the first rocks got picked up and banged together.  Theology, on the other hand, rests on the presumption that the most fundamental ideas of God held by the observer can be expected to control—perhaps to entirely obliterate—every less sweeping idea about existence.

 

If God provides good things, then after this life he will provide for his own; such is the basis for Jesus’ assurance to his followers that he would prepare a place for them, and it is not surprising that his statement would seem to upbraid them for ever having wondered about the matter: “if it were not so, I would have told you.”  Similarly, the question about whose wife a woman would be in the hereafter is a question that Jesus said was obliterated by the power of God.

 

Nothing is left unencompassed by the sweep of Jesus’ teachings.  To lose all—family, possessions, stature, etc.—is not only to gain them in the life to come, but also to have cause to possess them conceptually in the here and now, as a co-heir of Jesus.  In time of drought, a last cup of water given away to a thirsty child remains not only effectually the possession of the giver, but is also the first-fruit of every good thing in heaven and earth, possessed by the giver in every way that really matters.

 

The matter of earthly possessions held as an actual, legitimate inheritance of a believer (think the Pentateuch) being subsequently denied the believer by a development in theology is but one example of what I describe here.  Foundational developments in theology are assumed to have the potential to sweep all before them.  (I trust the reader to know that a simplistic follow-God-to-get-good-things theology had been rejected long before Jesus, by Jews and by others.)

 

The important point, however, is that theology (or, more broadly, religious thought) cannot involve individual elements.  Broken down crudely into the concepts of the divine, the self, and the universe, it must still be said that a shift in the conceptualizing of any one of the elements must affect all the others.  Ostensibly concepts of God will be the drivers, but not even that much need be asserted; the important thing is that the elements cannot exist independently.

 

This is the most likely application of Jesus’ warning about new wine in old wineskins.  We cannot simply change in the universe; the universe—the kingdom—we inhabit must change as well, and change it does, though we might neither recognize nor allow the fact.  That is why Jesus speaks of gates and paths and the kingdom of heaven both nearby and already here.  The spiritual journey is rousings and readyings and reapings—a continual journey to the true kingdom.