Jesus the Asshole

Posted on June 22, 2006 in Myths & Mysticism

Missing quotation restored.

Suppose Jesus was an asshole, a god like that worshipped in the American state religion?  Imagine a zealot or a sophisticated Fundamentalist who humiliated priests and rabbis.  God the All-Knowing and Unfeeling.  Maybe the people of Nazareth shunned him or drove him out with sticks.  Lonely Christ-to-be wandered out into the desert, perhaps to die.

The Bible does not say that he went there to find wisdom:  he found Satan.

Consider the three temptations:  the promise of bread which is security.  The wealthy giveth and the wealthy taketh away.  The promise of health even though you suffer grievous wounds.  Consider, among other things, the gunshot victims raised from the dead by the unappreciated angels of the emergency rooms.  And last, think of the empires.  Oh, how we covet oils under Middle Eastern sands and pride ourselves in being the world’s peacekeeper.

Why, oh why, are Robert Schuller and Rick Warren not preaching against this?  Why is Warren wasting money on audiovisual shows that come packaged in a truck covered with every bit of scripture except the Beatitudes and the subsequent chapter of Matthew which warns against hypocrites and eschews the temples of this world in favor of closets?

Jesus went into the desert, my myth goes, an asshole and came out God-made-man.  He seldom engaged in debates and he sat with the ostracized.  Who could stand the stink of the fishermen who paddled about on the Lake of Galilee.

It was in the desert that the God of the Old Testament died.  Jesus understood what it was like to be human, just like a businessman stricken with a debilitating disease might suddenly come to understand what it was like to be one of the sick poor.  Many don’t get to that point, however.  In our myth, Jesus did.  God showed that God understood pain and suffering.  God showed that temptation was powerful.  And God promulgated the doctrine of the Supremacy of Kindness.

I was introduced to this quotation from the Dalai Lama here:

If you want to make others happy, practice compassion.

If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

That I think is what the Temptation in the Wildness and Christ’s subsequent ministry yielded. And so many choose to stay there, accepting the materialistic offerings of the searing claw.