Christ-inanity

Christianity would be OK if it weren’t for the Christians.

A “Christian” woman of my acquaintance, for example – let’s call her Grace – tells me often that she’s praying for me: She knows that I drink, and that I never keep the Sabbath. When I point out to her that Jesus himself preferred the company of wine bibbers and whores and Sabbath breakers to that of respectable people, she frowns.

That’s because the real personage of Jesus is an inconvenience to her.

Jesus was impatient with those who stood on formality – those who designated a day as particularly holy, for instance, or who wanted to forbid certain activities, and mandate others. All the rules and regulations, he said – all the fever to formalize and legislate plain love and respect for one another – obscured the simple truth of what he taught.

And what he taught was as stark and uncompromising as could be. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Turn the other cheek,” and “Give up everything and follow me” are injunctions lovely and splendid as theory, but impossibly daunting in practice. Even Jesus had trouble with them from time to time, what with everyone pulling him in a different direction, doubting him, fearing him and finally forsaking him. He was sometimes out of sorts with even those closest to him, his disciples (“Ye of little faith”).

After Jesus was gone, of course, he became a cult figure, and the imbecilities began to pile up, embellishing and encrusting his austere and beautiful creed and sometimes, down through the years, rendering it almost totally unrecognizable. Jesus would weep anew to know that such thundering absurdities as the virgin birth or the doctrine of eternal damnation or the wiping away of sins by Atonement have been, and are being, inculcated in his name.

The Christians beginning with Saint Paul set out to fashion a Jesus who would be popular and palatable to their recruitment base – a Jesus whose warning, “I come not with peace, but with a sword,” would be modified or ignored, and whose assertion that we must be like children would come to justify the utmost credulity and the most infantile beliefs, instead of a rallying cry for what Jesus meant: That we must cast off worldly desires and become like a child again, full of wonder.

I call this perversion of Jesus’s teachings and the subversion of his spirit and character: Christ-inanity.