NATIONAL DAY OF SLAYER ADDRESS: Jesus Is Not All Right With Me

 

We are informed that this week featured a “National Day of Prayer” in America? I’ve been a member of this nation for my entire life and was never once consulted about this, so it’s anybody’s guess how it ended up on the calendar without proper review. Also isn’t that just a Sunday? Unless you’re Muslim of course, in which case every day is a day of prayer.

Anyway, in the interest of fairness, we are proposing a subsequent National Day of Slayer, marked by the traditional reading of Reign In Blood 1-4. You know. For unity.

As long as we’re speaking of prayer though, I actually do have something to confess. I know, right? I always wondered what that would be like…

Here’s the deal: In any vaguely spiritual, pluralistic, non-committal religious and political Millennial space, it’s common to be rear-ended by the sentiment that Jesus was just a nice guy saying kind things and the real tragedy is Christians aren’t more like him.

“I like your Christ–I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ,” Gandhi told the Harvard Crimson in 1949. 

Except actually he didn’t, Gandhi died in ‘48 and Snopes says nobody has ever figured out where/when he said anything like this. But you still see Internet memes attribute this quote to him anyway.

Gandhi is exactly the kind of guy this loose, pop cultural, hippie-dippy spirituality loves to sign onto, less because of Gandhi himself and more owing to his broad totemic status as a figure of wisdom, like Einstein, Martin Luther King, or Gandalf.

 

A particularly venal variation on this comes in the form of social media saws proclaiming that these days “the Satanists are better Christians than the Christians!”

I guess people think they’re being helpful when they say things like this, but I have to wonder, which part of Christian doctrine are we allegedly better at? 

I have never met a Satanist who believed that Jesus Christ shed his blood for the remission of our sins; or who insisted on the bodily resurrection of Christ (as opposed to a heretical spiritual resurrection); or who insists on the divine inspiration of the Greek and Hebrew scriptures.

This is not the Christianity that people have in mind when they make such comments…which is odd, since it’s the only kind that exists. (Rest In Parchment, early Common Era Gnosticism.)

Instead, many people imagine Christianity as being hazily about generosity, kindness, charity, and supposedly being non-judgmental. Which is kind of like imagining the primary characteristics of the Iraq War were desert colored fatigues and Jeremy Renner movies.

Now, I’m not here to peer down my nose at pop history and lackluster source attribution. Well, okay, I am–actually I’m a robot sent back in time from the future to do specifically and only those things. But I get that that’s an annoying vibe.

Point is, when it comes to the gospel message recorded by our various anonymous historical sources in the name of Jesus of Nazareth (whomever that may turn out to be, historically speaking), by and large, I’m not a fan, and I’m actually glad more Christians don’t act like Christ. 

I admit, it would preclude some of their more annoying behaviors, but it’d be like, I dunno, cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin–what happens if I just start sinning with the other hand, how am I going to cut off my only hand one-handed? It’s just not practical.

Consider token Tolkien frenemy and pioneering Christian furry enthusiast Clive Staples Lewis, whose 1952 apologia Mere Christianity I initially read because it’s too brief to serve as a doorstop instead.

Presumably not quite realizing what he was really saying, Lewis keenly observed that the message credited to Jesus only really works if he’s, you know, god: otherwise his teachings don’t make any goddamn sense. 

Jesus, for example, made a very big deal about forgiving sins, but as Lewis observes, “Unless the speaker is god, this is preposterous.” After all:

“What should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other mens toes and stealing other mens’ money? He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct.”

Well Staples, you said it, not us. 

Reading the gospels, you can’t help but notice that Jesus struts around the Holy Land like he owns the place–which of course he allegedly does:

“Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe him, not noticing that, if he were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of his sayings,” says Lewis, again skewering his messiah ahead of the appointed hour.

 

The LAST thing anyone should ever do, Lewis says, is argue that Jesus was a great moral teacher. And, well, good news for the late CSL, because we’re certainly not here to do that.

Much of Jesus’ alleged moral teaching is simply bad advice: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven,” and “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.”

Well that’s certainly high-minded, but when does anyone ever do this? Most Christian fellows argue that these instructions are not to be read literally and that it’s just an exhortation to be charitable in general–because of course they do, that’s what they WANT for them to mean.

Similarly, “If any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also” is not even so much high-minded as just being a rube. And while many people will say to “turn the other cheek,” our Christian sisters and brothers have historically been quite bloodthirsty, at least at the policymaking if not necessarily individual level.

“Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” Um, why the hell not? 

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus, are you having an episode or something?

This kind of talk is, as Lewis had it, either insane gibberish or just plain evil, depending on your read of the person saying it. 

In reality of course, this is just apocalyptic preaching: “Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalypticist who anticipated that God was soon to enter into history to destroy the forces of evil and bring in his good kingdom,” Ehrman holds.

Like many of his contemporaries, Jesus believed god was going to come blow up the world any day now, and by that standard, sure, it doesn’t do you much good to own more clothes or even think very hard about the future–because WHAT future? 

You may have noticed god did not blow up the world on schedule. Nor did he do so in the 10 or 50 or 100 years after Jesus died, or the first 1,000, or the second, or any of the other times people expected it with one degree of seriousness or the other. So of course, we should not be living as if he is. 

We can imagine people saying: Well all right, but didn’t Jesus say some good things anyway? Surely there’s some good sense in loving your neighbor and being kind to strangers, and so on?

And yes, I suppose there is–-which is probably why moral teachers were advising this for thousands of years before the Common Era. Not that you need a lot of moral teaching to arrive at such a conclusion, of course; just living with other people for a short period does it for most of us.

Good news (euangelion) though: Our old friend Lewis swoops in at the last second to assure us that Jesus definitely was really god after all. How do we know? Well, it’s “obvious,” he says. So that’s a relief. 

Not so obvious that he didn’t have to write a whole book about it, seemingly–even though there is in fact already a whole other book about it. 

But hey, he had bills to pay–which is more than you can say for the lilies of the field.