Again, “We adore God Who is love, who in Jesus Christ gave Himself for us, Who offered Himself on the Cross to expiate our sins, and through the power of this love, rose from the dead and lives in His Church. We have no God other than Him” (Pope Francis, 6/21/14)
As I was saying in the prior FAST FOOD Helping, lest it be thought that it was being suggested that attacking, de-legitimizing, questioning, mocking, humiliating, denying and annihilating of a possible Nonviolent Messiah, e.g., Jesus, is a level of darkness to which only the religious and political power-people of Jerusalem in the AD 33 could fall in their lust for power, and in their desire to protect and enhance their positions of dominative power, and in their determination to hang on to the psychological and physical gratuities that attach themselves to such positions, consider the institutional Constantinian Churches over the last 1700 years.
What the religious and political power classes of these Churches—Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant—have done historically and are doing presently to the Nonviolent Messiah, Jesus, whom they not only proclaim is the Messiah of Israel and Savior of the World, but whom they also proclaim is God Incarnate, equals in spiritual darkness what the Jewish Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, Temple priests and their Roman power-accomplices did to Jesus.
Since “Messiah” is a category of Jewish thought and since “Jesus is the Messiah of Judaism and can only be understood as the Messiah of Judaism” (J. L. McKenzie, ibid), the most telling question a Jew can place before a Christian is, “If Jesus is the redeemed, why doesn’t the world look more redeemed?” The most common response given by Christians at a popular level is the old chestnut from Chesterton: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Talk about “being hoisted by your own petard!”
Not trying to implement what the Messiah taught as the Will and Way of God for the Jew could only result from not believing that this is the Messiah speaking or from choosing to do evil, i.e., deciding not to do the Will of God. Since the faith of the Jews, and that includes Jesus, is an emmunah-faith, “total trust and reliance on God, where one shows trust through actions,” and not pisitis-faith, “a more intellectual belief in the cognitive truth of something,” to say I believe Jesus is the Messiah and then leave untried what He said, would either be nuts or evil. When God or God’s Messiah speaks, to try to do what is communicated is the “imperative of imperatives.” In other words the “do as I say, and not as I do” proclamation of Jesus Messiah and His Way has as little credibility among emmunah-faith Jews, yesterday and today, as it would have had little credibility for Jesus. This is why the most employed verb by Jesus in the Gospels is “do.”
To not do what God is communicating by His Word through His Messiah would be sin, if a person believed that what was said was God’s Word. But to believe something is the Word of God and then perform an Orwellian double-speak lobotomy on it and make it into the opposite of what it unequivocally means would be an abomination. To then spread this lobotomized Word as the true Word of God would be wickedness that matches what was done in Jerusalem on Good Friday in AD 33. It would be attempting to destroy God’s Plan for the salvation of Israel and for the salvation of all humanity as conveyed through God’s choice of a Messiah. It would be killing the messenger to kill the message that one does not want to hear or to be heard. This is about as evil as evil can get because it is not only flying in the face of God, it is also depriving Israel and humanity of the only Way out of the otherwise no exit world of evil, sin, suffering and death.
Why is the Nonviolent Jesus’ teaching of the Way of Nonviolent Love of all, friends and enemies, “left untried,” to use the words of G. K. Chesterton? The primary, if not exclusive responsibility for this lies with the Churches’ power people, rulers, leaders and those who control the Churches’ wealth and communication avenues. They are the human beings who are primarily responsible for not allowing the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies to be born in the minds of Christians, and if born, to mature in the minds of Christians. And, if somehow the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels is born and matures in the minds of Christian, the religious power-holders will do all in their earthly power to kill the thought and make sure it is never resurrected.
Daily they crucify Jesus in the minds of those in their Churches by means of attacking Him as unrealistic, by de-legitimizing Him as a Utopian idealist, by questioning the exclusive absoluteness of His spiritual and moral authority, by mocking His teaching as absurd in the real world, by humiliating Him by belittling the teaching He faithfully lived unto His own torture and death, by denying that His teaching is for all who choose to be Baptized, and generally, by annihilating all conscious thought about Him as the Messiah of Nonviolent Love of all under all conditions, even unto death.
Thoughts that people never hear, or if heard are relegated by trivialization to a state of preposterousness, are thoughts that people cannot choose or will not choose. Information control has always been a tactic of those driven by the lust for power, if a piece of information will raise serious questions about them and what they are about. But in this case it is information needed for their salvation, for the salvation of Israel and for the salvation of all humanity, that is airbrushed out, that is systematically century after centuries withheld from human beings who have a need and a right to hear it—and to hear it properly presented.
One can kill the messenger in various ways, thereby assuring that the message never gets to the ears of those who need and/or want to hear it. Contemporary examples of the use of this tactic by power people abound. But, when the message is the Word of God inviting people into God’s Way of removing evil, sin, suffering and death from the human condition for all, as well as God’s Way of inviting human beings into eternal communion with the Holy One, killing it by refusing to let it be heard or killing it by lobotomizing it is the maximal evil in which religious leaders can engage, whether in Jerusalem in AD 33 or in Rome, Constantinople, Canterbury or Geneva in AD 2014.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
(To be continued)