Jesus for non-christians

An alien visiting from another planet or watching from their own with quantum binoculars might have assumed that Christmas was a good opportunity for earthlings to talk about Jesus, given that so many are ostensibly celebrating his birth.

In fact,  it's harder to talk about Jesus at Christmas than it is the rest of the time. Baby Jesus, safely away in a manger and not yet able to form a sentence, is OK of course. But grown-up Jesus is persona non grata for most people in most western societies, possibly excluding those of the Americas. In Australia we even have a special name for the person who talks too much  about Jesus, except in oaths or jokes: the god-botherer. It has often seemed very apt to me.

Enter at this point a new kind of god botherer, the militant atheist, and Jesus experiences a revival as the meat in the sandwich between the two camps, particularly on ABC websites.

In the past year I have encountered two people talking about Jesus outside the usual parameters. Interestingly, neither claimed to be a Christian. The first was a Muslim, Rageh Omaar, the BBC's correspondent in Iraq in 2003. He presented a three-part series for the BBC called The Miracles of Jesus.  The second was John Carroll, the sociologist, who has written several books including The Wreck Of Humanism, and in this case a book called The Existentialist Jesus.

Neither Omaar nor Carroll make any commitment to a view of what Jesus "actually'' did or "actually" said.  While we have the interesting phenomenon of Christians like Dr Selby Spong delivering their considered judgements on the veracity or otherwise of various biblical stories ("No miracles please, we're protestants"), these two outsiders have the courage and intelligence to keep their minds open and ignore both the current debate between theists and atheists and the efforts of modern Christians to water down the gospels.

Carroll is not primarily concerned with discussing the finer details of the historical Jesus,  although he is speculating on what Jesus actually meant, reinforcing his interpretations with impressive comparisons of various translations in English with his own of the original Greek. Some of these come as revelations to unscholarly people such as I. The fact that there were different Greek words for "time", depending what kind of time was meant was one. Kairos was a special kind of time, outside of the chronological day by day, sequential sort. Mark and John use it in distinction to ordinary time, but the distinction is lost in translation.  I did realise there were several words for "love" , but hadn't realised how often translators had skipped the nuances involved. 

Most interesringly, Carroll compares several versions of the Lazarus story in John. In this story Jesus arrives later than Mary Magedelene had hoped -  "too late " to have healed her sick brother. The original Greek quite clearly portrays anger and annoyance in Jesus at the behaviour and expectations of Mary Magdalene. Successive translations have watered the story down further to the point where instead Jesus is described as being "deeply moved" as he recalls Lazarus from the dead.

Carroll believes the translators missed the point of John's representation of Jesus and what he was on about, here and elsewhere. Carroll's Jesus, or Carroll's Jesus of Mark and John, is not a moralist, nor a revolutionary, nor a lawmaker, nor someone who sought to gather new God botherers to the fold. He speaks only secondarily of doing good deeds, but primarily about the nature of Being, being that transcends the petty accounting of religosity or ordinary human relationships organised around memory, social obligations and cultural imperatives. Goodness flows from this sense of being, and not the other way round.

Although Mark and John present different versions of Jesus - the former tormented and uncertain, the other serene and magisterial in his power - Carroll suggests these two represent two aspects of the Human Being.

Carroll vindicated my intuitions that Jesus' primary work was not to establish a religion as such, but to inspire us to live more powerfully in the everyday, the "eternal now"  rather than codify a new set of rules for living.  With this Jesus, the purpose of the forgiveness of sins is to allow us to live without the shackles of anger, guilt and remorse, and to "have life more abundantly" , fully responsive to the moment both with its transitory demands and underlying timelessness. This is a Jesus from whom atheists can learn f if they are prepared to abandon their literalism.

Omagh's documentary is a very different kettle of loaves and fishes (a story to which he devotes considerable attention). Omagh is concerned to examine the veracity of accounts of Jesus' life, but at least partly in the context of Jewish religious traditions. He also examines the evidence of non-biblical sources including Roman histories, what archeologists have discovered, and does some good investigative journalism.

His Jesus is refreshingly human, but never merely ordinary. Omagh highlights the story in which Jesus responds rudely to a gentile woman's request for help, virtually calling her a "dog". Her reply seems to utterly disarm him, and he gets down off his high horse and cures her son. Omagh suggests this was a pivotal moment in the life of a man with remarkable abilities and insights. 

Omagh resists the temptation to take sides in a debate over Christ's divinity. This is a rare achievement in its own right: to recognise that there was something curious going on here, whatever it was, and whatever the explanation for it might be , rather than simply putting aside these stories, with their elaborate and sometimes unnecessary details, as complete fabrications.

Both of these works invite the reader to take their own looks at Jesus, unfettered by their Jesus baggage if possible. 

Why bother? At least as intellectuals or "thinking people" who claim to respect "culture", we ought to be interested in the single person who has arguably shaped Western thought more than anybody else (as Carroll reminds us), so much so that whole nations at one time have described themselves as "Christian."

Maybe we have missed something.  Despite the message we get from God-botherers of both sorts, here was a man with a far more sophisticated notion of God than either Christopher Hitchens or John Dawkins. What is God, according to this man? God is love. Where is God's kingdom? "Within us," comes the reply. Claims to divinity? When about to be attacked for allegedly claiming to be the son of God, he points out that according to scripture, we are all gods.

This doesn't sound to me like the "Supreme Being" humanists postulate as the only possible definition of God.  Perhaps it's more like the actual state of  supreme being to which, mystics suggest, we all have access if we are prepared to give up our habitual and conditioned thought processes for the odd moment of kairos. In our abstracted, intellectualised world it is message with some relevance.

 

The Trappings of Christmas : a meditation

Every year it happens, like one of those dreadful bites that supposedly reinfect you on the anniversary of the original attack. I begin the season with a mixture of apprehension and muddle-headedness, looking forward to the whole strange business as if this might be the Christmas that really does it for me after so many disappointments. 

As the days rush by, my annoyance grows and my goodwill wavers. Why is everyone in a bad mood - or is it just me? After nearly  50 years of practice, why do I still get stressed out worrying about what Christmas presents to buy? Just as often it is the lack of Christmasness that affects me as much as its pervasive commercial presence. This year I have to say, a little to my disappointment,  I have noticed no badly dressed, underweight Santas smoking in secret corners out the back of the shopping centres, and not many decorations in the stores, nor even the smell of freshly cut pine trees in Woolies. ("I think there are some plastic ones up near the cheeses," the check-out chick informed me when I inquired.)

I suspect, if my sons' attititudes are any indication, that Christmas is losing its magic - however tenuous and forced that magic may have become. And this year, when our local Carols by Candlelight was cancelled on account of a few desultory morning showers, I began to wonder if the whole thing was becoming too much trouble for everyone.

Perhaps as a consequence of all this, I found myself thinking of the old Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" and that oft-quoted line:  "What rough beast is this that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

What kind of birth might we be celebrating in these unholy days of ours, I wondered. Yeats spoke of a beast with the head of a man moving through the desert. When we believe in nothing but what we can see with our eyes, when there is no divine spark nor even the possibility of one, are we allowing ourselves to become simply another animal with no special knowledge or claim on God's attention ... what or whoever that may be? If we are just another animal, how we can "celebrate" the birth of a child who claimed a direct connection with that God? 

Even the pagan elements of Christmas, carried over from the festival of the summer equinox, held a sense of the numinous, but now they too are threatened as the widespread obsession with climate change replaces our sense of the rhythm of the seasons with an anxiety that we are embarking on one hell of an endless summer. The scientists have told us it is so; so it must be so. The scientists tell us there was no Christmas star; so it must be so. No resurrection, no eternal life, no miracles, no God. The 'priests' of our time have declared it; so it must be so. 

In my own way, like most of us, I have joined in this frenzy of negation in various periods of my life. But now I find myself in the final stage of a Christmas ritual, a compulsive affair that changes slightly each year. I realise the simple exchange of gifts, the early morning phonecalls far away, and the big Christmas dinner will not be enough.  What will I do this year? I don't think I could seriously cop another session with Pastor Basil and the Lutherans. The summer festival at the Steiner School was something, but the children were left to sing the carols while we adults wimped out.

Now, like the hapless quarry of vampires gathering all the garlic, crucifixes and sharp stakes he can lay his hands on to keep the evil at bay, I find myself rummaging in the storeroom with my wife,  for ancient plastic bags of decorations, and rushing to pin them up around the living room. We must protect ourselves from a world without soul.

Photo: Christmas night market in Alice Springs.