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.