This new blog is not a blog but
50 blogs in one. It has many pages… I
admit that it's a bit crazy, but I can't find anything better to light up or
intensify in those who have the courage to read me a few sparks of the immense
energy that emanates from the gospels of Jesus.
Energy, as we know, does not
fragment. It passes through tombs, through walls, through data, notions, plans
and specifications. It goes beyond speeches, words, laws, rules. It crosses
what is already built and goes beyond the reasonable, the well-polished, and
the well-ordered. Nothing stops it. This is why what matters in this blog is
the overall movement and not the number of pages. What counts is the ball
flying in the wind, and not primarily the marks and boundaries of the playing
field.
This blog is titled: Jesus, a man of risks. It could as well
be called: Jesus at loggerheads with the
Dinosaurs. Or: A Jesus according to
the “new paradigm” of a world that is moving further away from the geography of
religion.
It is hard to lock the wind in a few pages only…
Eloy Roy
JESUS,
A MAN OF RISKS
Part 1
Repeated
clashes with Dinosaurs
Dear Jesus,
You confronted three kinds of Dinosaurs:
1- The Sadducees,
most of whom were priests, all of whom were ultra-conservative. They held the
reins of power very tightly and saw enemies everywhere. You, on the contrary,
were the man of openness to everyone. You were the man of the people, the man
of the excluded.
2- The scribes and the Pharisees, learned men who rigorously controlled public opinion.
They could have been your friends, but many of them were fundamentalists. They
put the law above the good of individuals, while you put it at the service of
people. They were the men of the word-by-word codes of morality; you were the
man of the heart, the man of the Spirit, the man of common sense.
3- The Police,
the Army, the big landowners, the usurers, the big merchants and many others...who
had no interest in seeing things change. You were the man of change, of a
profound change, of a permanent change, just like life!
The Dinosaurs were the INERTIA, you were the MOVEMENT.
You, Jesus, the more you fascinated the crowds with
your broad and liberating interpretation of what is still considered the
"Word of God", the more the Dinosaurs gnashed their teeth. The more
you were applauded, the more the Dinosaurs laid traps for you and labelled you
with such honourable titles as charlatan, heretic, lunatic, madman, drunkard,
swine, subversive and demon. As soon as you opened your mouth, the Dinosaurs
buried you alive.
Parenthesis:
not all of them bit
Note that not all Dinosaurs were rabid. Most of them
had few teeth and were halfway between the tough guys in their group and the
new paths you were opening up before their eyes. When it came time to choose,
however, they looked the other way and remained mute. They looked strangely
like most of us, the Christians of almost all time.
A warning of primary
importance
The language of the gospels and
of all ancient Christian writings has nothing to do with scholarly objectivity
as we understand it today. The authors of these writings were not trying to
give a detailed account of the life of Jesus. They only wanted to convey
something of the enormous impact that Jesus had on their personal lives and on
the lives of many people around them. So much so, that despite the horrific end
he met on the cross, he continued to live on in them more than ever and to work
wonders through them. (To go further on
this subject: see Note 1 at the end of Part 1 of this blog).
Facing
the crisis
Your people, dear Jesus, were going through an
unprecedented crisis. The chances of saving their millennial identity and their
possibilities of survival were at their lowest ebb. Two great forces were
holding them in their grip: the very powerful and seductive Greek culture that
was sweeping everything in its path, and the implacable Roman army that for
years had taken over the country and kept it under its boot.
To counteract the disaster, you undertook to clean up.
For you, it was no longer enough to save the furniture or to patch up the
broken pots, you had to change everything. You had to give up going backwards.
Instead, you had to go forward, towards the different, towards the new, with
all the risks that this entailed. "Follow me" was your motto.
Follow me to the prophets.
You wanted us to connect with
these heroes who were demanding radical changes in society. John the Baptist
was one of them, he who cried out in the desert: "Straighten out what is
crooked! Turn this unjust world upside down (metanoia) and make it right again!" (Luke 3, 3 and following)
You wanted us to follow you with
John and the prophets into the real world where there were lepers, blind, deaf,
dumb and lame people; beggars, crippled and destitute; into that world of bent
backs, of the hungry, of the scattered and of the refugees... You wanted us to
run the risk of meeting thousands of peasants uprooted from their land (there
are still hundreds of millions of them today), uprooted by the money and
weapons of those who give themselves the right to cut down forests, steal
herds, bleed the soil dry, disrupt the climate, create famine, droughts and
floods, sow terror and chaos, and corrupt governments as puppets at the service
of their empire all over the planet. You wanted us to go with you and breathe a
breath of justice, liberation, love and resurrection into all the victims, all
the crushed, all the undead who only wanted to live.
It was in the midst of this world
that you lived (and still live). It was in the midst of this broken world that
you carried out your actions with immense passion, often passing through the
synagogues, but without being attached to any particular religious
organization, to any school, to any authority, to any special dicastery (not
even to a small parish!), (Matthew 7:29;
21:23-27). You never used any other
weapon than your own person, your word, your conscience and the love of your
"Abba" (the kind word you used
to speak about God).
Your actions were mini-revolutions
within the great revolution that you ardently wished to see spread like a
conflagration throughout the Earth: "I have come to cast a fire upon the
Earth", you said, "and how I wish it were already all on fire! (Luke 12, 49) You wished us Peace, the
only true peace, the one that springs from health, justice, goodness and from the
search for truth (John 14, 27). You
rejected our peace that is made of white thread, of half-truths, of lies, of
diplomatic calculations, of cunning, of cowardice, of fear, of hypocrisy and of
de-mission: "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword! (Matthew 10:34).
It is true that the word
"revolution" is not very canonical, but who can say that you have
been canonical once in your life?
The word "dinosaurs" is
not canonical either. But if you prefer a term that is closer to the gospel
writings, you can replace it with "ravens", "vultures",
"and “vipers”, “pigs”, “camels” or “goats". The choice is vast.
Meeting
with the sea workers
(Mark
1, 16-20)
In Galilee you came across some
rough fishermen. These brave boys, identified with the 99% of their people,
dreamed of LIBERATION.- I say "LIBERATION", in every sense
of the word, to the great displeasure of the John Paul II of our time, the
Benedict XVI, the Opus Dei, the Marc Ouellet, Burke, Pinochet, Bush, Trump, and
all the Ayatollahs, the Putin, the Xi Jinping, and the woofs of every color and
every era; and notwithstanding the Eucharistic prayers, missals and breviaries;
and whatever the theological functionaries of the seminaries of yesterday and
today, and all the yes-men of the whole world think. - Exhausted by taxes, these fishermen from
Galilee were fed up with the local authorities, the temple police and the
occupying troops of the country. If they hadn't dreamed of LIBERATION, they
would have been the most beautiful idiots on earth... They ate liberation, they
dreamed of it as their ancestors ate and dreamed of it when, fifteen hundred
years earlier, they were caught in the chains of slavery in Egypt. They ate and
dreamed of it a good two thousand years before the birth of Marx and Lenin.
Imagine what a wonderful dream, and what an abominable sin! .... Not
surprisingly, this perspective of liberation, and the word
"liberation" itself (more outrageous, it seems, than the "n"
word) have been completely removed from the horizon and consciousness of the
vast majority of Christians who claim to walk with you and your Galilean
friends. I don't know if there is a better way to desalinate salt and castrate
the Gospel... (Matthew 5, 13).
These fishermen from Galilee were
hoping with all their soul to find a leader, a savior, a messiah, a king, a
powerful ruler who would stand in front of them and get them out of their
deadly mess. As soon as they saw you on their way, as soon as they met you, as
soon as they heard you speak, as soon as they saw what you were doing, they
believed that you, the carpenter from Nazareth, were that man. They left
everything and followed you. The news spread like wildfire. The Dinosaurs
immediately put you on their list of left-wing conspirators. You were followed,
spied on. They scrutinized your every word and action. However, far from
stopping you, this tracking only spurred you on. Your declarations became
swords, and your gestures, electric shocks. Sooner or later, you would pay
dearly.
Encounters
with the lepers
(Luke
5:12-13; 17:12)
The lepers were despised, cursed
even, because it had always been an absolute belief that it was God who
punished them with leprosy because of their repugnant sins, real or supposed.
This belief, according to you, was the height of ignorance and absurdity. It
was above all the face of an ignorant and cruel religion which, powerless to
cure, made the disease a hundred times more painful to bear. Contrary to this
kind of dogma preached for centuries by men of religion, you wanted us to get
it into our heads and hearts that "God", far from being a machine of
punishment, was, on the contrary, only life, grace and healing. So, with this
incredibly new and daring faith, you dared to approach the lepers and touch
them. You took away the immense burden of shame and guilt that stigmatized and
crushed them ("You who labor and are burdened, come to me and I will
relieve you" (Matthew 11:28). You
freed them from the weight that weighed them down, you relieved them and healed
them in their dignity, and their flesh, of its own accord, began to blossom
again. The sick who came to you, you approached them all with the same
liberating strength, the same assurance, the same audacity and the same
kindness. You often resorted to popular medicine, but you never bewitched
anyone with esoteric speeches or feigned magic that would have tricked their
minds into enslaving them to you. To follow you, to walk with you, did not mean
to become your slaves, but quite the opposite!
Was this of any use? Surely.
Nevertheless, after two thousand years of Christianity, there are still good,
practicing Christians who cannot get it out of their heads that it is God who
rains sickness and misfortune on the innocent as well as on the guilty: on the
guilty, to punish them, on the innocent, so that they do not want to imitate
the guilty... Now, it is mainly because of this strange, ambivalent god,
supposedly merciful but often indifferent or even cruel towards humans, that,
nowadays, millions of baptized and confirmed people complain against religion
and that churches are emptying.
Obviously, my dear Jesus, your
different way of seeing God did not go down well. In high places, your healings
were perceived as subversive. For, in addition to contradicting traditional
doctrine on sin and its consequences, they undermined the sacred authority of
the "divinely instituted" priests to deal with these matters... They
were never going to forgive you for that, (especially since it jeopardized
their job security and their wallets).
Parenthesis:
the question of evil
On the other hand, the old
question that has always plagued the human mind, namely: "If God is so
good, why does evil exist?", this very serious question remains absolutely
intact. (For an attempt at an answer, please read Note 2 at the end of the
first Part of this blog).
Meetings
with the blind
(John
9, 1-41)
The blind, including those born
blind, are not the hardest to heal. The hardest to heal are those who think
they can see when in fact they cannot. They are the ultraconservatives and
their kind, the Dinosaurs. They see nothing outside of themselves and nothing
outside of the narrow circle of those who think exactly like them. They are
always on your back and on your heels. Whatever you do or say, you offend them.
They claim to be defending the rights of God, the rights of truth, the rights
of Tradition, the rights of the "true" religion. Absolutely incapable
of recognizing a brother or sister in the poor, in the small, in the oppressed,
in the wounded, in those who do not think, speak and live like them, they see
you as a godless, scatterbrained, exalted person. You took many risks in trying
to open their eyes, but it never worked. They only became more enraged. In the
end, they got you. To this day.
As if it wasn't enough, they
proliferated and had countless descendants. In the 21st century, their
offspring can still be found in all strata of the Church, from the most obscure
sacristies to the most gilded thrones. Everywhere they grumble, lock, put wood
in the wheels and sand in the gears. With hearts overflowing with heavenly
gratitude, they take in tempting donations from their "fans" who, for
the most part, are flush with cash...
Your disciples, one day, tired of
fighting the Dinosaurs, put in your mouth a series of imprecations that had the
advantage of setting the record straight. It also allowed them to let off steam
and to relieve all those who, nowadays, don't have the audacity to face them.
"You, blind guides, race of vipers, hypocrites, whitewashed sepulchres,
you murder the prophets and then you build mausoleums for them (you canonize
them!)" (Matthew 23, 1-36)...
Encounters
with the publicans
(Matthew
9, 10-13)
Most of the tax collectors were ordinary
people who were hungry. To earn their crust, they did menial work for the Roman
occupiers. The good people hated them, boycotted them, repudiated them, and
condemned them to the devil. By approaching these people who were condemned by
public opinion, you risked being considered one of their accomplices, a
collaborator or a traitor... In your
defense, you compared yourself to the doctor: you said that you were not there
to take care of the healthy but of the sick. You went so far as to say that,
like the prostitutes, the wicked publicans were closer to God than most of the
models put forward and praised by religion (Matthew
21, 31). Unlike the "pure" caste, the publicans did not think
they were angels. They had the honesty to admit that they were scum. They did
not lecture anyone.
Refusing to put more blame on
those publicans who were already ostracized by popular vindictiveness, was
another of your abominable "crimes" that brought you many bumps.
Meeting
with the Syro-Phoenician woman also called "Canaanite woman
(Matthew
15, 21-28)
Let's talk about this woman. She
was a foreigner, a pagan! She did not dress like the good girls of your people.
She did not even wear a veil... Do you know what I mean? If war broke out
between neighboring countries, this woman would obviously be on the enemy's
side, and she'd hit hard. We had to stay away from that kind of people. Their
religion was scary. Truth be told, they were no better than dogs. But she, for the sake of her little girl who
was very sick, didn't mind looking like a dog. With a faith that would make the
most zealous Jews jealous, she begged you to cure her child. She screamed, she
cried, she dragged herself at your feet; she howled and moaned like a wounded
little dog. She would not let go of you. So much so that your famous disciples
lost patience. And so did you. “I am from Israel. In Israel, we don't throw our
bread to the dogs!” That's what you said
to her, showing your fangs. But she replied: "In our country, the little
dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table".... And wham! The
woman's reply caused you such surprise and pleasure that you exclaimed:
"Woman, your faith is really incredible! At that very moment, it is said,
the little daughter of that pagan woman recovered her health.
You, Jesus, were a good Jew, and
like all good Jews you believed that the world began and ended with the Jews.
For you, the other peoples were vermin. Well, that day you were
"converted" (that's the word) by none other than a woman, a foreigner,
a Syro-Phoenician, a Canaanite, and therefore a pagan. It was from this unusual
encounter that you and your famous disciples had to come to terms with the fact
that pagan foreigners can sometimes be models, even for orthodox Jews... This
was another of your many "heresies" which the Jews of your time, the
Dinosaurs in particular, never forgave you for. One of your holy heresies that
some believers of the 21st century still swallow like a fishbone... who still
doubt that there can be any salvation outside the Roman Catholic Church.
Meeting with the Samaritan woman
(John 4, 1-42)
She has all the faults. First,
she is a woman. That says it all. A
decent man, let alone a man of God, would never show himself in public with a
woman. Women are cut, veiled, hidden, and made to walk behind their husbands.
Women are seen as a necessary evil, as a useful sin. Women are not spoken to in public... All the more so if it is a woman belonging to
a people as bastard and threatening as the Samaritans.
This people, in fact, came from
six enemy ethnic groups (six, the number of the lack!). This was enough for the
native Jews to suspect them of being in league with these dishonorable nations
from which they came, and for this reason, they considered them as potential
spies and traitors who should always be distrusted. Despite this paranoia on
the part of the Jews of Judea and Galilee, the Samaritans, it seems, lived
their lives without too many complexes.
They were proud of their temple, which stood on Mount Gerizim and
competed with the temple in Jerusalem. They were also proud of their religion,
which, in fact, was nothing more than a cobbled-together mixture of Jewish
worship and pagan rites, a kind of religious "multiculturalism" (they
worshipped Yahweh in the form of an Egyptian calf. Abomination among all!). The
good Jews, who had never had pigs in the odor of sanctity ("systemic
racism" obliges...), considered most seriously that a pig's grunt was
better than the most beautiful prayer of a Samaritan (that's to say...).
Now, you, Jesus, at the village
well, in the middle of the day, you asked a woman of that race for a drink, a
pure Samaritan woman, a woman with "six" husbands (the six enemy
ethnic groups...) who, in addition to all her faults, had no tongue in her pocket.
She looked at you, scrutinized you, asked you questions and even talked to you
about theology. It was to her that you made one of your most striking
statements about religion. You told her quite simply that the relationship with
God was not in any way a matter of temples, churches, synagogues, pagodas or mosques....
Nor was it about traditions, doctrines, rituals and devotions. Even though you
were sure that the religion of the Jews was the only religion worthy of the
name, in reality, you dared to affirm that what was worthwhile was not really
religion, but what today we would call "spirituality".
To the woman you said: "The
hour will come, and now is, when God will be worshipped, not in this or that
temple, but in spirit and in truth" (John
4:23). "In spirit" means that we will no longer be in doctrine,
in worship, in organization or in structure, but in "spirituality",
that is, in the "breath" or the impulse of the heart. "In
truth" means "in conscience", in other words, in honesty,
frankness, sincerity and freedom of being (Matthew
6:5-8; 7:21). This means that we will no longer be in temples and
sacrifices, in mediations, in hierarchies, in indoctrinations, and in
"office secrets" and, for today's Catholics, we will no longer be in
the celibacy of priests, the priesthood of women, the contraceptive pill,
condoms, the refusal of communion to the divorced; we will no longer be in
pastoral strategies, in the hours of mass, in the stories of parishes
administration, of the fusion or non-merger of parishes; we will no longer be
in holy water, medals or rosaries. We will be elsewhere.
We will be first and foremost in
this creative word that you address to the Samaritan woman, which, in fact, is
a true declaration of love to her thirsty heart: "If you knew 'the Gift'
of God", if you were willing to accept in the depths of your consciousness
the love that God has for you, his free love, his grace, his unconditional
love, his most pure Spirit, his freedom, his power, his light, "a river of
living water would gush forth from the depths of your being". You would
truly be born to yourself, you would be born into God, you would be born into
the world as a free, unique and beloved person. You would be overflowing with
love and eternal life...
Upon hearing these words, the Samaritan
woman discovered that she could be loved for herself for the first time in her
life, a possibility she had never thought of. She left her pitcher and ran to
shout her joy to her fellow villagers. What joy, what happiness for people who,
in the eyes of the Jews, were considered pigs! What a relief, what liberation.
Jesus, you had simply given birth to something as immense as conscience and as
sublime as the human person. And you had broken through the wall that separated
Jews and Samaritans.
For a long time the river of life
created by this hyper-liberating word marked the mentality and the whole life
of the women and men called "Christians". But barely three hundred
years after you, at the time of Constantine, religion reappeared with a bang.
Faith was "organized", structured, regulated, fixed in the Roman
way..., and spirituality was brought to heel. Over time, it was framed in an
infinitely complex discipline called "mysticism", which was reserved
above all for monks, priests, religious men and women and lay people attracted
to contemplation. For ordinary people,
there remained only relics, indulgences, pilgrimages, and the hunt for
miracles, mushy devotions, and submission to a system that was beyond
them.
Two thousand years ago, you said:
"The time has already come" to get out of these suffocating frames of
religion in order to give breath to all those who are thirsty for freedom,
authenticity, life and meaning... Poor result all the same. Nowadays, while
many Christians have already rejected religion and some are discovering
spirituality, a number of them are turning to Tibet, Nepal, India or
California, others, very few, are beginning to explore the immense spiritual
treasure of the Gospel.
As soon as one stops confusing
your Good News with religious practice, one discovers with surprise that the
Gospel is a gold mine for self-realization. But the fact remains that most
Christians who go by mule, bicycle or on foot are unaware of this and have no
idea of what spirituality is. And if they have the slightest intuition of it,
they are far from thinking that this thing can really be distinguished from the
hold of priests, parishes, sacraments, masses, morals, sins and commandments,
and also from the domination of gurus, and thousands of other things. ... They
do not know that spirituality is not religion, that it is not dogma, liturgy or
morals; they do not dare to believe that outside, not necessarily against, but
beyond religious practice, there is something that is really like you, that is,
free as the wind... (John 3, 8).
Parenthesis:
Religion
Religion is not bad, far from it!
Since the cave era until today, religion has been constructed as the matrix and
the backbone of all cultures of all nations and of all civilizations. In the
West, as everywhere else, we have passed from barbarism to civilization in
great part, thanks to religion... But all is not rosy with it...
(To
go further, see Note 3 at the end of Part 1 of this blog)
Meeting
with all the Samaritans of this world
This is your best one! This is
subversion at its finest. It's the perfect leap out of the stifling enclosures
of religion, and a spectacular landing right in the middle of millions of
ordinary people like you and me who don't have a PhD in the science of virtue
and don't care whether we're recognized as good or bad by the courts of
holiness. It is incredible! We are full of flaws, we have our quirks, our
quibbles, our beliefs, our opinions, our fears, our cowardice, our sins, our
dreams, and, of course, we have some good qualities and we know how to do good
things, but nothing to jump to heaven. If we didn't exist, the world wouldn't
be any worse off. But we do exist! If someone were to tell us that we are no
better than the Samaritans, we would fully agree.
But that is precisely what you,
Jesus, are saying to us when you fall among our flock. You tell us: the Temple
is beautiful, but there are better things than the Temple. Religion is
beautiful, but there are better things than religion. The Law is beautiful, but
love is better than the Law. Morality is beautiful, but there is something
better than morality, better than obedience to sacred authorities, better than
sacrifices, better than rites, better than the mass and the sacraments. There
is something better than religiosity, better than the identities of races,
tribes, nations, social classes or status... All this can be beautiful and
good, but only if we do not stop the Wind, which is the most precious thing we
possess, because it is the Wind that makes us breathe and gives breath to
Nature and to the whole universe (John 3,
8). The Wind walks unceasingly; he goes where he wants and where he
pleases. He knows no barriers or boundaries (Acts
2:1-4). The Wind is what makes us BE. He is Freedom, Love, Life, Light,
Joy, Peace and everything that comes from it.
There are the Jews, which is
beautiful, but there are also the Samaritans, as well as billions of humans
like you and me who are different from you and me. They are part of us as we
are part of them. To welcome them is to welcome ourselves, and also to welcome
God who made them like us in his image and likeness. To love them is to love
ourselves and also to love God. God, us, them, we are inseparable; we are one
with the whole of humanity, with the Earth, with the whole cosmos...
 |
| Ferdinand Hodle |
(Luke 10, 25-37)
"One day, a man (a Jew) was attacked by
rascals who beat him up, stole everything he had and fled, leaving him
half-dead on the side of the road. While at any moment scavenging birds could
pounce on him and skin him alive, a priest followed by a Levite (a kind of
deacon) pass by on the same path. The two are heading for the Temple in
Jerusalem to carry out the tasks assigned to them for that day. They may be
late because they seem to be in a great hurry. As they pass by the poor devil,
they see him bathing in his blood; they frown, stifle a sigh, move away quickly
and continue on their way at a run. Meanwhile, a bearded stranger appears who
doesn't look very “catholic”. He comes on a donkey. When he sees the wounded
man around whom big flies have started to fly, the stranger jumps off his mount
and hurries to revive him. He cleans his wounds as best he can with some wine
that he carries in his luggage. Then he hoisted him onto his donkey and led him
to the first inn he came across. Once there, he entrusted the unfortunate man
to the owner of the place and gave him some money, asking him to take care of
him until he was back on his feet. He assures him that on his way back from his
trip he will come back and reimburse him for any extra expenses he may incur
for the injured man. End of the story”. Everyone listens to you with their
mouths open.
Naturally, the prophets, those
who prevented us from going in circles, were not listened to. Nor were they going to listen to a little
country bumpkin like you who told indecent stories. For in your parable you had
dared to give the role of villain to the poor priest and the Levite, and the
role of saint to the cursed Samaritan. You could have been killed for that. You
made no effort, not even a little, to excuse the priest and his deacon. Those two
good Jews had only done their duty. They had scrupulously respected the rules
of the liturgy strictly forbidding contact with blood before entering the
temple. But you, instead of excusing them, you praised a mangy Samaritan. You
let the blame fall on two people who had not deviated from the norms of holy
religious purity, and you put a repulsive pig-like character on a pedestal. You
have trampled on religious purity! You made it clear that the one who was on
the way to eternal life was that unspeakable Samaritan and not them. For the
sake of the neighbor, you sent the devil to heaven and God to hell!
-
THEM : "The famous "neighbor"! You
have only that word in your mouth! Listening to you, it seems that the neighbor
comes before God!"
-
YOU: God does not come before or after the neighbor,
because He and the neighbor go together. They are inseparable!
-
THEM: Inseparable?!!! The Samaritans are not our
neighbors! They are always too close. They are the ones who should never have
existed!
-
YOU: Our neighbors are our relatives, of course, but
they are all the others too. If there are some who are far away from us, we
only have to make them close to us by going to them ourselves. Just like the
Samaritan in my story who came close to the Jew to help him and save his life...
God wants nothing else. Eternal life is that!
The Dinosaurs who heard this
story would have wanted to cut out your tongue, gouge out your eyes and tear
your head off. You had nothing to lose by waiting.
And we who still have a little or
a lot of difficulty dealing with the poor, the marginalized, the immigrants,
the people of color, the LGBTQ+, the atheists, the natives, the anti-clerics,
the liberated Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, etc. etc. etc., and who are
sometimes ashamed of being Quebecers with French and Catholic roots, this is
perhaps the proof that in our DNA we also have a few atoms of Dinosaurs.
Meeting
with the centurion
(Matthew
8:5-13)
The Roman occupier, centurion,
decurion or other, is the impure par excellence, the enemy to be put down. Now,
one of these centurions had a servant whom he loved very much (some Bible
scholars suspect that this "servant" was, in fact, his lover). This
beloved slave was therefore seriously ill. The said centurion, being one of
those Romans who usually treated the Jews with great contempt, took courage to
approach you, a Jew, and asked you a favor. His pain must have been enormous to
stoop so low. From a prudent distance,
however, to avoid exposing you to impurity, he addressed his request to you.
One knows the continuation. How he did not allow you to disturb yourself to
enter his house: "I am an officer of inferior rank, but when I give an order,
my men obey me without my having to lift a finger. You, who are more important
than I am, must not risk making yourself unclean by entering my house. Say one
word and I am sure that my servant will get well". With these words, this
heathen you had before you had just overturned another barrier and had reached
you in the heart. Filled with admiration and enthusiasm, you declared.
"Never in Israel have I seen such great faith!"
The centurion loved his slave, he
longed for him to live, and he expected you to heal him. This is what you
called "faith". That's all it was. This heathen, this enemy of your
nation, this unbaptized, unevangelized, uncatechized man, this presumably
active homosexual, obtained from you the healing of his boyfriend. And you
healed his boyfriend without question, without conditions, and without
preaching.
This was another nice surprise for
that category of people that religion stigmatized as impious and perverse.
Also, among the Dinosaurs, your rating took another beating... Another landing that you should not recover
from...
Meeting
with the zealots
The Zealots wanted to make you
king, a real king, that is to say, a leader who takes over the country, a
leader who decides, a leader who commands, a leader who rides horses, who wages
war, who cleanses the country of all that is foreign, a leader who restores the
national institutions, re-establishes in their original purity the beliefs, the
rites, the customs that make up the identity of the nation; a leader who
mobilizes the popular forces to put an end to the Romans and all the traitors
who would have collaborated with them or would have been simply complacent
towards them. The Zealots were guerrillas, violent people. They were called
"bandits" or "robbers" (Barabbas was one of them), or
"thieves" (like the two thieves, the good and the bad, crucified like
you, on either side of your cross). In the caves of the surrounding desert
where they hid, they had to eat. So they did not hesitate to steal chickens,
goats and sheep from the nearby farms. From time to time, they would scour one
village or another for anything they could get their hands on. And if they came
across a publican collecting taxes for the Romans, the poor guy would soon wake
up with a dagger in his back.
You did not agree with the
methods of these Zealots, but you had sympathy for them. The proof is that,
among your disciples, you chose some fellows who certainly had some common
ground with them and who had perhaps already been involved in one of their
raids. For example, one of your disciples was a certain Simon the “Zealot”.
Another was Judas “Iscariot” (the man
with the dagger). There were also the two brothers, John and James, called
the “sons of thunder”. These two dreamed of defeating the enemies of the nation
as soon as possible and of occupying the most important positions in the
government of your future kingdom. Of course, there was also the ebullient
Simon Peter (the “Stone”), who had a quick hand for the sword... It was not
easy for you to channel the warlike energy of these brave boys and to give this
energy a much broader, but equally powerful and less bloodthirsty
direction...
The revolutionary ideals of the Zealots
were far from being indifferent to you. You understood their grumbling only too
well. But you unequivocally rejected the means they were using to achieve this
ideal. Your revolution was not to be fuelled by violence, hatred and revenge;
it was not to fight injustice with injustice, evil with evil, or violence with
violence. Your revolution was to be driven by courage, but also by feelings of
humanity and heroic love, even forgiveness and love for enemies. Your war, your
sword, your violence consisted, not in killing, but in bravely and freely
giving your own life to give back to mankind its dignity, its freedom and its
beauty. Power, yes, but to serve the human being and not to enslave him. In my
opinion, the one who best embodied this approach in our contemporary world was
Gandhi, a non-Christian... He was followed by Martin Luther King, a Baptist
minister (and a little womanizer), and Mandela, a fighter (and a divorced man)
who was freed after 27 years in prison. The first two were assassinated, the
other lived to be very old and died peacefully in the arms of his other wife.
Because you did not allow
yourself to be drawn into the violent path of the Zealots, you disappointed
them. They turned against you out of spite. When Pilate proposed the release of
a prisoner on the occasion of the Passover, they exchanged your head for that
of Barabbas, a notorious Zealot (!). For
the same reasons, it is thought, you also disappointed your friend Judas. Fifty
years later, however, in Jerusalem, when the Zealots, in the year 70, rise up with
their armament against the Roman troops, history will prove you right: the city
will be razed to the ground; the population, massacred; the State, abolished;
the survivors, expelled; the territory, annexed to Rome. The Hebrew state will
be wiped out for 2000 years! This is what the violence of the Zealots was to
lead to.
Your rejection of armed violence
did not make you an exclusively religious man strictly confined to matters of
the soul. On the contrary! If it is true that you refused to play the role of a
rebel leader or a political and military commander (John 6:12), you continued to assume a form of
"leadership" (in your time we spoke of "kingship"), based
on all that is essential for the life, peace and happiness of the people. But
your leadership was radically different. It was the opposite of what was
usually projected by "those in charge". According to you, true
leaders (or true kings) put themselves at the service of the people and, in no
way, let themselves be served by them (Mark
10, 42-45).
You yourself put yourself at the
service of everything that gives life and brings peace. And what is life-giving
and peace-giving? Is it religion with its many rites, prayers and sacrifices,
or rather justice, a justice exercised with humanity and goodness? Every
rational person knows the answer. So, for having dared to make religion a
matter of justice and justice a true religion, my dear Jesus, your days were
numbered...
You will be sentenced to death by
the pontiffs of the theocratic state of the Jews and you will be executed by
the Romans. You will be nailed to a cross, a death that Rome reserved for
slaves and those who rebelled against the Empire. You will be crucified as a political
dissident, as a rebel, as a "brigand" with two other brigands (or
thieves) at your side. Pilate will not be mistaken. With typical dinosaurian
cynicism he will put up a sign on top of the cross proclaiming loudly that you
were executed as "THE KING OF THE JEWS" (INRI).
The most distressing thing about
this whole affair, the most disgusting thing, is that they will learn to mourn
you as a "poor innocent victim immolated for the sins of the world"
(as religion has insisted on proclaiming to the four corners of the universe),
when in reality you were killed, or more precisely murdered, for the crime of
having defied a fundamentally violent and unjust society, which was sanctioned
and blessed by a religion blinded by power and subject to interests other than
those of God. ..
Why did the religion lend itself
to such a game? Easy. Religion, which wants to be the guardian of peace,
protects its back. In order not to compromise itself, it usually takes refuge
in the things of heaven, but most often it supports the power in place in order
to better preserve its own power (for the greater glory of God, of course).
With few exceptions, it accommodates all dictatorships, as long as they are
right-wing. It does so, it goes without saying, for the sake of peace. But it
is well known that no dictatorship tolerates rebels. It crucifies them. The
beautiful peace it offers crucifies even those who, like Jesus, oppose
violence, unless they show their true colors and rally to it like slaves.
It is not enough for the established
power not to take up arms against it, it is also necessary to kneel at its
feet. Jesus never did this, because he only knelt before the poor and the
powerless (John 13:4-5).
For three centuries before
Constantine's famous "peace", Christian men and women allowed
themselves to be tortured and crushed by tigers rather than kneel before the
emperor's statue or burn incense... They did not worship authority as one
worships God, they did not kneel before any man; they did not kiss anyone's
ring. But after the peace of Constantine, when the supreme authority of the
Empire became Catholic, the old hierarchies of the pre-Gospel era returned at
full gallop. Without warning, we found ourselves on our hands and knees under
the rule of the almighty God of Religion and under the increasingly gilded
crook of his representatives. The Church ceased to be a community and became an
organization directed from above and guarded on sight by officials of Law and
Order. The gospel of Jesus had received
a fatal blow to its heart.
Meeting
with Judas
Judas loved you, but, according
to many scholars, he despaired of you because you refused the offer of the
Zealots to lead their movement. At the
risk of being called a "thief", or a robber (John 12:6), he collected funds for the Zealots' cause. Only the
Zealots, he thought, would save the country, but you didn't agree. So, in order
to pressure you, he had this idea to "sell" to the Dinosaurs of the
temple an important piece of information about you, in exchange, of course, for
a sum of money that the Zealots' friends would greatly appreciate... He was not
trying to kill you, because he sincerely loved you, as you loved him. He only
indicated where the temple police could find you, so that the great religious
leaders would give you a good scare. It seems that they had committed
themselves to keep to this. Judas was
counting on this scare so that you would change your attitude toward the
Zealots and join them. He longed for you to become king. But the Dinosaurs
cheated him. As soon as they had the information they wanted, they jumped on
you and started the circus we know about to finish you off. When Judas became
aware of the turn of events, he wanted to die. With a broken heart, he hanged
himself.
Eloy
Roy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The language of the gospels and
of all the ancient Christian writings has nothing to do with scholarly
objectivity as we understand it today. The authors of these writings were not
trying to give a detailed account of the life of Jesus. They only wanted to
convey something of the enormous impact that Jesus had on their personal lives
and on the lives of many people around them. So much so that, despite the
horrific end Jesus met on the cross, he continued to live on in them more than
ever and to work wonders through them. What the gospel writers wanted to share
above all else was the faith that had taken root in them through Jesus. They
told us of the gratitude, the admiration, the enthusiasm, the convictions and
the joy that Jesus had brought into their own lives. When they made him walk on
water, for example, they didn't mean that Jesus was surfing without a board
under his feet. They meant that knowing Jesus and relying on him had enabled
them to overcome fear, doubt, misfortune and threats of death in their own
lives. In other words, in situations where they thought the abyss was going to
swallow them, their trust in Jesus gave them wings and inspiration to face those
challenges with clarity and courage. For, in biblical language, the
"waters of the sea" refer precisely to failure, misfortune and death.
If Jesus walks on "the waters" and does not sink, this means that
with him, evil and even death have never the last word, neither for him, nor
for those who follow him.
To
go further on the subject: see the article “Walking on Water” in the Appendix.
Note
2 - The Problem of Evil
Unless we get lost in endless
speculations that convince no one, we must admit that you too, dear Jesus, have
not solved this question. Your resurrection could be a very valid answer, but
it is only half an answer, because it comes a little late, only after death,
once the end of the tunnel is reached and everything is over... That's nice,
but what about the pain one suffers before reaching the end of the tunnel?
(The
following is a hypothesis of my own, to be taken with a grain of salt).
For thousands of years, billions
of people have not had a life, stuck in the bottleneck of their existence. If
they have one, it amounts to being crushed by the strongest, to endure this
fate, to rebel unnecessarily, to kill each other and to die... How can a good
God want or allow such a horror?
I try to understand. In the end,
perhaps this matter does not depend on you, Jesus, nor directly on God, but on the
low degree of evolution to which, up to now, we have arrived as humanity.
In the immense overall picture of the development of the universe, the human
species, besides being microscopic, is still extremely young and fragile. It is
impossible to imagine what it will be like in a few hundred thousand years.
Perhaps the suffering comes from the fact that we are still too close to our
birth and barely at the beginning of our growth. Birth and growth, as we know,
are long, violent and heartbreaking processes.
They are powerful traumas that never end in forging, carving, refining
and maturing us... Everything is suffering, it seems, but is this suffering
really evil? This is the real question. Is it absolutely unjust and intolerable
to stumble, hit your head or get hurt while learning to walk? If so, would all
learning be evil? Would the evil be not to be born ready-made? Would it be
wrong not to be able, from birth, to bypass the egg and chicken stage and come
into the world instantly as dashing roosters or perfect hens? The evil would be
not to have everything cooked in the beak? The evil would be not to be able to
abandon oneself to the "beatitude of inertia"? The evil would be to
let oneself be dragged by force into the frantic dance of the universe where
everything is untiring movement, change, upheaval, transformation, evolution,
as well as aging, regression, death and... starting again?... We know that it
is not. So, the evil is in our head. It could come from the simple fact that
the idea that life (and therefore happiness) is something static, fixed and
unchanging is planted very deep in our unconsciousness, whereas it seems that
it is, on the contrary, a kind of "galaxy" in perpetual
transformation that never stops turning and moving while flying towards
infinity.
It is good, consoling,
wonderfully inspiring and encouraging to know that one day (in 100 or 500
thousand years?), thanks to our descendants, that is to say, thanks to human
beings of our own flesh, we will overcome our inertia and reach the plenitude
to which our being, in all its cells and in the depths of itself, does not
cease to aspire. In this sense, Jesus,
your own life has been and continues to be a constant source of inspiration.
You, Jesus, have said that he or she who manages to love to the point of giving
his or her life so that others may live, is like a seed thrown into the ground.
If the seed does not break up, if it does not die in the earth, it remains
sterile, but if it breaks up, "if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24)...
In this image of disconcerting
simplicity, you reveal to us the fundamental law of life. You show us how our
way of seeing "evil" deceives us. This is your secret, the secret of
your life, of your freedom and of your fruitfulness. Your truth is there. By looking at you, by discovering what
animates you from within and through what you do outside, we learn, in fact,
that life consists in deconstructing ourselves, that is to say, in constantly
opening up so that the energy that is concentrated inside us can unfold and be
transmitted. By following you with our heart and eyes, we perceive that what we
often consider as evil would be, in reality, a force of nature that crushes our
inertia, breaks our shells, opens our cages, tears off our blinkers, breaks our
chains, and expels us from our tombs. What we call evil would therefore be,
most often, a simple law of nature that hurts: being born, growing, maturing
and dying always hurts, but it is necessary and not bad at all. It is even
good. "And God saw that it was all good" (Genesis 1:25).
I repeat. This was just a modest
hypothesis to try to explain the unexplainable.
Note
3 - Religion
Religion is not bad, far from it!
Since the cave era until today, it has been constructed as the matrix and the
backbone of all cultures, of all nations and of all civilizations. In the West,
as everywhere else, we have passed from barbarism to civilization in great part
thanks to religion
It is because of religion, among
other things, that at some point in their history, men and women dreamed of a
new world, left their homeland and braved the fury of the sea in walnut shells
to transplant themselves to unknown lands in order to found New France, the
cradle of Canada, or the United States, the so-called "paradise" of
which more than half of the planet dreams... But if, among the English, the
French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and many other nations,
religion has often been the spark plug that made them leave their country to
build in new territories a world close to the Kingdom of Heaven, it will have
served them most often as a pretext and justification to conquer a great number
of peoples, to plunder them, to indoctrinate them, to subject them to a more or
less disguised slavery, and to massacre without pity those who dared to resist
them.
Over the centuries, legions of
monks, nuns, priests, nuns, lay people and missionaries have flooded into the
world and filled it with dedication, self-transcendence, and heroic sacrifices
in favor of the poor, the foreigners, the captives, the slaves; in favor of the
little ones, the oppressed, the sick, the plague-stricken, the abandoned and
the rejected of the Earth. No one will take this glory away from them. In
truth, it is immeasurable.
Having reaffirmed, admired and
celebrated this, we must also recognize that this religion, which has produced
such beautiful fruits, has also been deeply tainted over the centuries by
abuses of authority, wars of power, fanaticism, excessive intolerance and cruel
inhumanity.
The Crusades, with the Pope at
the head, are a good example of this, which, beyond the good intentions (which
were not lacking), turned into real butcheries and dug a chasm between the
Catholic West, the Muslims and the Orthodox Christians that is still
impassable.
Of all the abuses of power, the
most pernicious, the most terrifying and the most effective was the infamous
Inquisition, which, from 1230 onwards, stretched over a period of almost 600
years in different regions. It was the
most sophisticated instrument developed by the Catholic hierarchy to eliminate
all criticism and dissent. It ensured the control of minds, imposed itself as
an absolute authority in all areas of political and social life, and
established a true religious totalitarianism everywhere. Its methods, its
techniques, its tortures, its pyres, had nothing to envy to what we will learn
later on about the jails of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, or about the dungeons
of the dictatorships of Latin America and elsewhere, and about the American
prisons spread all over the world, like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and many others...
I can already hear the Dinosaurs
screaming, "We must not judge the past with today's eyes!" This ritornello, which is surely right in
many ways, is a two-edged sword that has already been used too sadly to cover
up manipulations of history. It has been used (and is still being used) ad
nauseam to show us as world champions of virtue, while in the catacombs of our
memories the still living shadows of a whole past of horrors swarm.
Whatever we think, it is certain
that the Dinosaurs that are supposed to have become extinct 66 million years
ago, seem to have survived the said extinction, because, barely 2 thousand
years ago, we find them in full health at the foot of the cross, taunting the
crucified of Nazareth. It also seems that they are still among us, more
powerful than ever. Their look has changed and their techniques have become
more sophisticated. We now see them
without cassocks, with electronic microscopes and space telescopes instead of
glasses... Their heads are bigger and their tails shorter, they now kill with
drones. In their spare time, with horns on their heads, they take over the
Capitol in Washington, or, driving trucks bigger than mammoths; they shake the
columns of the soporific Ottawa. Behind these hordes, we find, of course, a
plethora of religious fundamentalists, most of them under the American banner.
The Dinosaurs triumph. The future is theirs!
Given the prominent role played
by Dinosaurs in the development of Christianity in the West, the least that can
be said is that Christianity, the so-called Christian religion, and the Church
itself are not exactly the same thing as the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. That
is obvious. The Gospel is one thing; religion and the Church are another. They
should be only a support and a framework for the Gospel, and that framework
should be as simple and flexible as possible. It should be open, transparent
and spacious enough so that, at every moment and without ambiguity, one can
breathe in the spirit of Jesus, his energy, his way of living, his way of seeing
things, his way of being, his breath, his dynamism, his originality, his
boldness, his freedom, his daring, his mentality, in a word, his active and
liberating presence which is never confused with the status quo and the
established order. The law, or laws, regulations and directives, pre-prepared
speeches from above, ready-made thinking should be reduced to a minimum. Just
as the Sabbath is for the human being and not the human being for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27), so religion, and even the
Church, should exist only for the sake of the gospel of Jesus and thus for the
service of the human being, and never the other way around.
Do we need to remind you of this?
Jesus, who was a religious man, did not get entangled in the nets of religion.
His gospel went beyond the religious discourse of his time, especially since,
on very important points, he opposed it.
This is why religion killed him. So, the fact that Jesus was killed by
religious people of his own religion, and precisely for clearly religious reasons,
should convince us that the Gospel and Religion are not Siamese twins. They are as different as the Law is from
love, as dissimilar as the letter is from the spirit. Love and spirit give life;
Law and letter kill (2 Corinthians 3:6). It is the Gospel that gives life, not
religion. For us, they are entangled as in a skein of wool; we would do well to
separate them as one does with the nut. When the nut is ripe, you don't swallow
it whole, otherwise you choke and die. Only the almond is eaten. But to eat the
almond, you must first separate it from the shell. And to separate the almond
from the shell, what do we do? We crush
the shell... Religion is the shell, the almond is the Gospel, and the harvest
is long overdue... (Luke 10, 2).
For my part, the more I distance
myself from Religion and its “God”, the more I discover Jesus of Nazareth as a
being of flesh similar to me. I feel that he is really close to me and to every
human being. I am getting a taste for his Abba, and his gospel seems to me more
actual and tasty than ever. I no longer feel the need to be someone else to
feel close to him. I no longer need to be schizophrenic. I walk beside him as I
am, and I learn....
APPENDIX
Walking
on water
The language of the Gospel is not
our language.
When we read the gospel with the
idea that the people of two thousand years ago thought, expressed themselves or
wrote like us, we poke ourselves in the eye. Their way was not at all like
ours. It was probably that of the popular storytellers or the singers of the suburbs.
In those days, few people could
read. What is reported in the gospels was first told, acted and perhaps mimed
in small groups and in front of various crowds, arousing fervor and admiration,
and surely also controversy and debate. It was a bit like the television of the
time, the speech or the improvised show at the end of the alley, in the shade
of a tree or on the gallery of an inn.
Jesus was for many the unbeatable
hero of the hour. His many admirers never tired of telling his story. Each one
of them put a little bit of color in it, and surely added a little bit more to
the audience's delight.
The important thing was to make
known this man who had changed their lives. A man who had simply put an end to
superstitions, to fears, to the bottomless pit that kept ordinary people far
from anything called God, far from his mercy, far from his heart.
A man who had taken pleasure in
abolishing a lot of taboos, prejudices rooted in the sacred, in throwing down
the thick walls that separated genders, races, classes, nations, peoples,
religions.
A man who took pleasure in
exposing the idolatry of oppressors of all kinds, and the hypocrisy of those
who passed for saints when their religious demands were only pretexts for
abusing the weak; a man who knew that it would cost him his life, and who did
not shy away from death; a man out of measure, an amazing being, a wonderful
being; a man who inspired courage, audacity, dignity. He gave us confidence in
humanity, hope and the desire to live. A man who let us see that destiny was
not to be suffered any longer and could be changed. That nothing was immutable, nothing was
definitive, nothing was fixed in advance and forever.
To describe this man, there was
never any expression or image too strong. Nothing was too beautiful or too
surprising.
So we don't have to worry about
how Jesus could have been born of a virgin or raised from the dead, or whether
he really walked on water, multiplied the loaves, turned water into wine, gave
sight to a blind man, or whether he was really alive in the bread and wine of
the Eucharist, or whether he was exalted to the right hand of God. Basically,
these expressions mean the same thing: "All that Jesus was goes beyond the
cross, the tomb and death. Death could not overcome Jesus. He is alive, present
and powerful."
"The proof that he is not
gone and that he is still acting is that we are here. With him we have said “no”
to death. Death is no longer the master of our lives. Our only Master is him,
the Living One. Because we have taken up his project in order to continue it,
we may be killed as he was killed. But we will not return to our graves, to our
fears, to our injustices, to our slavery. If we die with him, with him we shall
live!" (2 Timothy 2:11-12).
Following in the footsteps of these
first witnesses of Jesus, Christians of all ages, whose faith has deep roots in
the same waters, have been able to proclaim, and can still proclaim today, that
it is in their support of one another, in their solidarity, in their brotherly
love and in their commitment to the group, that they draw a freedom, a strength
and a happiness that they would not otherwise have known.
They in turn can tell: "It
is here, in what we live among ourselves, that we feel that Jesus has
overthrown the wall of death, that he is alive, that we hear him speak to us,
and that we feel his own breath, his breath."
"It is he who still, through
us, continues to enlighten, to forgive, to reassure, to heal, to liberate, to
resurrect what is dead".
"Through him we have truly
seen God, for no one can be more like God than this man. Through him, we have
also known all the greatness and depth of the human being, for no one has been
more human than he. And then we finally understood that with God nothing is
impossible."
"That is why we believe and
affirm that another world is possible. Yes, we believe that out of our own
powerlessness, out of our nothingness, we can do wonders. We believe that our
hearts of stone are capable of melting into hearts of flesh and that we can
recreate this world without spreading death."
"We believe in the power of
love. We know that love has unlimited capacities for daring, creativity,
intelligence, science, freedom, overcoming and humanity."
"From our inner depths,
indeed, spring unknown forces and from our rocks rivers of life. Our lands
burned, poisoned, torn, made dead by our weapons, our hatreds, our insatiable
greed, our unconsciousness, our carelessness, we will change them into green
orchards and pastures. We will purify the air of our sky and wash the water of
the seas and restore life to the whole surface of our globe".
"No, nothing is
irreversible! Everything can change. Everything can be transformed. Everything
can be illuminated and recreated. We will have to row against the current for a
long time to come, but life will have the last word and all of humanity will eventually
'walk on the waters!'"
Eloy Roy
This is the end of Part 1,
now starts Part 2
JESUS,
A MAN OF RISKS
Part
2
Repeated
clashes with Dinosaurs
Jesus, you are not reasonable! You dared to set foot in the home of that scoundrel Zaccheus. The religion of the Dinosaurs (which was also the religion of many good people), formally forbade to approach an individual of this species.
Meeting
with Zacchaeus
A short man who became great
Luke
19:1-10
Zaccheus was a creature corrupted
to the bones. He was an income tax collector. He sucked his fellow citizens in
favor of the Roman enemy who had been colonizing the country. He took advantage
of his function to fill up his pockets to the full while drawing an interesting
commission coming from the Romans and enjoying their protection. Zacchaeus did
not find anything better so as to become somebody.
It was from his childhood that
Zacchaeus had a deep complex because of his short size. This infuriated him.
Everybody made fun of him. His only dream was to grow taller. More than a
dream, it had become an obsession. But what could be done? Nobody cared about
him.
And so crossed his mind the idea
of selling himself, of prostituting himself, of sticking himself like glue to
those who dictated what went on in the country. It did not matter for him that
they were enemies as long as they paid well. And so this is how Zacchaeus, the
short man, had become a traitor to his people and a very rich individual who,
for want of being loved, was feared and hated by everyone.
Zaccheus was a bastard, a living
dead like there are everywhere, even at the head of nations. His house was an
impenetrable fortress. No one could enter.
Suddenly, some noise was heard in
the street. Jesus was passing by. A joyful group accompanied him. “The miracle worker?” asked Zacchaeus. “Here is my chance to add a
cubit to my height. We never know. I have money…”
Zacchaeus could not stay in
place. Spurred on by his long-time dream of being taller, he rushed out of his
fortress and climbed up a tree, just like when he was a child….From there, at
last, he could see things other than the feet of the people; he saw Jesus. And
Jesus saw that short man, that big wicked person, who was clinging to a branch
and waving his hand to him.
“Zacchaeus, come down from that
tree!” shouted Jesus to him. “I want to go to your place!”
The short man almost fell over
backwards as if the end of the world had come. With one jump, he was back at
the foot of the tree and hastened to open the door to Jesus and to his joyous
group. Some did not enter. The Law of the priests did not allow it. But Jesus
and his friends had no qualms. They entered with their joy, their humanity,
their simplicity and their liberty in that house that was only a tomb. They
filled it with fresh air, and the sickened heart of the short man was flooded
with light.
Zacchaeus had just escaped the
merciless tribunal of the righteous, the pure and the envious. For the first
time in his life, he felt neither a dwarf nor a bastard, but normal. He was so
happy about it that he lost his mind.
“I give one half of my
possessions to the poor”, he shouted while holding Jesus and his companions in
his arms. “And all that I have stolen I will repay it four times!”
That day, Zacchaeus' bank account
went below zero, but Zacchaeus himself had become a very great man, a true son
of Abraham. He became known throughout the world, almost as much as Alexander
the Great, Ali Baba, Robin Hood and many other famous rascals. For two thousand
years, thousands of things have been written about him. The present lines are
part of the lot...
What saved Zacchaeus was his
childlike heart. That pure heart was slumbering under a mountain of suffering,
of shame and of stupidities. That was his hidden treasure, his precious pearl,
his deep being, his «true self»…It was the image of God, the kingdom, the new
man, the risen one who was slumbering within his being.
This heart was able to emerge
from the wicked Zacchaeus because one day someone looked at him with the eyes
of God.
God is not a Dinosaur, but a
power of intelligence and tenderness that pierces the hardest stone from
within. He never judges on the basis of appearances (1Samuel 16, 7).
Bravo, Jesus! After having
flouted once again the most elementary rules of religious decency, you changed
the heart of a rapacious and traitorous man into the heart of a just and good
man. This was undoubtedly your greatest miracle. Even greater than those
stories of water turned into wine, of walking on water, of miraculous fishing
or of the resurrection of Lazarus! Yet, by entering Zacchaeus' house, according
to the law of religion, you had committed a great sin.
Proof that there are, despite
everything, good, holy and reasonable sins... What do you say, ladies and
gentlemen of the Dinosaurs?
Meeting with Nicodemus
Jesus, do you remember Nicodemus?
He was a distinguished Pharisee who already believed in you. He would have
liked to join your disciples, but he didn't dare to take the step for fear of
losing his reputation, his social status, his job. However, one evening, at
dusk, between dog and wolf, he came to meet you.
To see such a member of the enemy
Dinosaur clique approach you was quite a surprise. From him, it was really a
daring gesture, because he risked a lot. For you and your group of
"fishers of men", it was a godsend. You should have embraced him and
integrated him into your band with great joy. But you didn't. You knocked him
out cold. You simply said to him: "Just a moment, Nicodemus, you must first
be reborn"... To be reborn? This meant that all that Nicodemus
represented, his wisdom, his knowledge, his many connections, his sympathy for
you, were no longer of any use. To be with you, you had to start from scratch
after having gone through an inner turmoil equivalent to a new birth. You did
not negotiate anything. You did not make any "reasonable
accommodation" to him.
Nicodemus did not seem surprised.
He knew you well enough to understand that, even though you set the bar
unreasonably high for those who wanted to follow you, you were also a man of
great patience and deep compassion; he knew that you firmly believed that the
wick that still smokes can always ignite again.
Moreover, the fact that he himself came into contact with you showed
that the rebirth had already begun in his being.
He didn't want to become a
militant, a radical, a hero, a martyr, let alone a perfect man like you. It was
enough for him to be with you as a simple "shadow disciple". Not a
"fan" who would blow the trumpet on the street corners to proclaim:
"I am a Christian! Jesus is the Truth! Convert, repent! Look at my sign of
the cross, my Bible, my medals, my rosary, my breviary, my Roman collar, my
miter, my masses, my doctorates! Come and join the greatest religion in the
world!" It's that, despite your
radicalism (because with you, it's all or nothing), you didn't close the door
to anyone. You respected everyone's path. You knew deep down that a dinosaur
doesn't change by spinning like a top on a dime...
In short, since that night, in
the hiding place of his heart, Nicodemus became one of you, but in his own
way. His thing was to philosophize while
stroking his beard, asking questions and sub-questions, putting the spoon here
and there so that his colleagues would be less unfair and more open towards
you. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. (John 7:50-52).
When the Dinosaurs laid hands on
you and killed you, pious women embalmed your body and laid it in the
tomb. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea,
his colleague, were in for a lot of trouble, but they were there, too, lending
a hand (John 19:39-40). And then the mourners on the way to Calvary, whose
cries of pain "buried" the howl of the hyenas unleashed against you;
and the gentle veronicas who wiped your face and consoled you; then the very
humble, the poor, the courageous, the magnificent Simon of Cyrene, probably a
black man, an immigrant, an undocumented person, who shared the weight of your
cross. And even this "good
thief" all muddy, all bloody, crucified at your side who had a good word
for you in front of his soul-scarred colleague who could find nothing better
than to howl with the wolves.... The wolves... The centurion at the foot of the
cross was a wolf. Nevertheless, when he saw you die forgivingly, his conscience
overcame his obedience as a soldier and it pushed him to proclaim loud and
clear, he, the Roman, he, the oppressor, he, the accomplice of your
executioners: "This man (this Jew, condemned by Rome) is really the son of
God! (Mark: 15, 39).
If you think about it, my dear
Jesus, even today you have more disciples than you think. They are not easily
identified, because most of them are also mere "shadow disciples".
When it comes to lending a hand, however, they are always there, discreet, barely
visible... Just like Nicodemus... Or
like that rich young man you loved the moment you saw him. To give up
everything to go and be killed was too much for him. (Mark 10, 21; Matthew 19, 16-24). Did this make him evil? I bet
not. He continued to be a good boy, a disciple from afar, a disciple from the
shadows, like Nicodemus. A disciple like Martha, although that good girl spent
more time scrubbing her pots and pans than meditating on the good word (Luke 10:38-42).
For Mary meditating to
concentrate on the essential is beautiful, but fortunately there are disciples
like Martha, otherwise our world would be really dull, and the Source of Life,
who is in the smallest things as much as in the big ones, would find us pretty
boring.
And then, do "shadow disciples"
really exist? ... Not sure. All your
disciples are light, but with different intensities. There are the
"ultras" who are "stars", but there are also the
"cool" ones, not lukewarm but simply cool: fireflies or simple fire
bugs... In your circle, there are even
Dinosaurs... It's spicy. Without them, everything would be really
"flat", as we say in Quebec.
Risking
equality
To fight for freedom, that goes
without saying; for fraternity too, because it is a magnificent ideal, but for
equality? ... It seems impossible. In a family, there are big and small. In
life, there are strong and weak, whites, pinks, yellows, browns, blacks and
dark blues, men and women, of course, green and blackberries too with a lot of
nuances between them. No one is the same. No one is equal to the other... And you, Jesus, come to us with an
abracadabra story, a parable, that of the "workers of the last hour".
Workers who have done nothing all day and who will "punch" just five
minutes before the bell rings. These slackers are going to get the same pay as
the comrades who have worked all day. And you tell us that the great Boss (God)
wants this (Matthew 21, 1-16). Honestly, it can't work like that!
Of course it doesn't. But, when
the parents leave this world, they will make a will and in this will, will they
favor one child more than another? In order to avoid disputes, they will divide
their assets equally among each of the children. The youngest child, who has
been pampered and spoiled, spoiled by everyone, who is as temperamental as
anything else and doesn't yet know what to do with her ten fingers, will
receive as much from her parents as the older sister or brother who has worked
hard for years to contribute to her support and that of the entire family. Is
it not unfair? Not at all! The "little one" who only plays and dreams
and sulks is as important as those who only work. The little ones, the unemployed, the
dreamers, the poor, the last ones, are as important as the first ones (Mark 10,
31). Even some Dinosaurs understand this, all the more reason why it should be
so among your disciples.
Meeting
with the women
They are full members of the
community that accompanies you. There are no barriers between them and the men
in the group! In the world of the Dinosaurs, the Dinosaur women stay in their
corner, otherwise it's the stick. Even
in today's ultra-Orthodox Judaism, women are still locked up at home, and
religious men never show up with women in public. Religion and life in general,
is a man's business (as is the case with Islam, which appeared six centuries
after Jesus). This rule prevailed in
your time, my dear Jesus, and you did not hesitate to break it. So, those women
who moved freely around you, in public and in private, were a big scandal. But
you couldn't help it. Women, for you, were real people.
Luke talks about a group of women
who followed you everywhere. One of them was from Herod's disreputable court,
while from another you had cast out no less than seven demons! (Luke 8, 1-3). You provoked. You were doing
it on purpose to attract the wrath of decent people. In reality, what would you
not have done so that women, who, after so many centuries of opprobrium,
support their fat half of the sky at the side of man, regain their royal place
under the sun? What would the world be without women? However, the religion of
the Dinosaurs has succeeded until now in keeping them away as if they were
sinful beasts just good for procreating (males as much as possible...) or to
serve as secretaries, sacristans, cooks or laundresses...
Meeting
with a woman suffering from bleeding
(Mark
5, 25-34)
Let's talk about this woman who
for years had been bled dry by her illness, by the doctors, and by religious
norms. According to the health guidelines of the time (which were also very
strict religious guidelines), blood loss was considered the ultimate impurity.
The person who suffered from it could transmit the impurity to others. Like a
plague victim, this woman had to stay away from other people at all times and
refrain from touching them at all times. She was a public danger. But one day
the woman saw you, Jesus, in the middle of a large crowd. Her heart leapt. She
said to herself, "This is the chance of my life! I will sneak up on him. I
will not touch anyone. I won't touch him. I only want to touch the edge of his
clothes. Then, trembling like a leaf,
and without being able to avoid pushing everyone in her path, she painfully
made her way towards you and managed to reach the end of your tunic. Bitch!
Crime against humanity!
Yes, a hell of a crime that
earned this brave and wonderful woman the much desired cure. Magic? No. This
woman dared to cross the line that made her an outcast. To get out of her
prison and find her place under the sky, she simply imitated you. She dared to
go further. That's what healed her.
And this is what you are for,
magnificent Jesus, you man who crosses the red lines of the irrational sacred,
leaps over the walls of fear, taboos and even the holiest laws, you who pushes
back the boundaries of all the tombs, and who calls everyone to follow you.
"You didn't catch a single minnow during the whole night? Too bad! Push
the boat further out and cast the nets. If there is nothing on the right, try
the left!" (Luke 5:4-7; John 21:5-6)
The present scene of this
daughter of Abraham suffering from blood loss is a small vignette that sums up
the fierce struggle of the bold women of our time to climb the billions of
steps that separate them from the sun. To the delight of all mankind, they
succeed quite well.
Meeting
with Jairus' little girl
(Mark
5, 21-24.35-42)
A matter of blood again, and
therefore of religious impurity! The little girl, like her father, was
traumatized by her first period. She was really blocked. She was
"paralyzed". By whom? By none
other than Jairus himself. This good father, like many men, did not understand
anything about this thing and, on top of that, he was scared to death of blood.
For him, for sure, his daughter was going to die! While looking for help, he
came across you, Jesus, who happened to be on his way. You quietly unravelled
the fears that were suffocating this father and his little daughter. You showed
yourself, once again, as the one who soothes, unblocks, dares and makes people
grow. "Talitha koum!"
You are the opposite of all those
who, blinded by their fears, prevent new life from germinating. The unknown may suddenly burst into your
life, but you do not clench your fists. You accept the challenges and upheavals
with courage, as any father should when he sees the body of his twelve-year-old
child suddenly transformed from a doll into a woman capable of welcoming and
giving life.
Encounters
with the mother
She may have been your mother,
but she was stuck. The family, the relatives, the cousins, pressured her to bring
you into line. They only wanted to make you understand that your activities,
which were causing so much hives to the religious power, were not only going to
turn against you, but were likely to attract the wrath of the whole family
clan. Now, in the fabulous staging of the wedding at Cana, your mother suddenly
appeared as a giant symbol. She herself took the initiative to make you appear
publicly as the one who had always been expected. She herself pushed you to
attack the purifying water of the 613 prescriptions commanded by the Bible, and
to replace it with tons of top quality wine. For her, as well as for you, the
Gospel had to be something other than a heap of laws and a patching up of old
wineskins (Mark 2:22). In no way was
the Gospel to be a simple updating of the Law (however holy or sacred it was).
On the contrary, the path you were about to open was to have an air of newness
and a wedding fragrance. Your Gospel was to be life in abundance, justice and
love without limits, and freedom without end. It was to be joy in abundance,
the great breath, the mighty wind. It was to be, no more and no less, the very
fire of the Spirit of THE ONE WHO IS. (John
4, 46-54 and Acts 1, 13-14 and 2, 1-14. 22-24).
Meeting
with the Magdalene
This prostitute, more probably a
high-class courtesan (like a geisha in Japan), had been a professional for a
long time, but was now retired. She showed you more love than anyone else (Luke 7:36-50). Last in the eyes of the
"pure" Dinosaurs, she was first in your heart. With your mother at
the foot of the cross, she knew an abyss of suffering. But she was the first to
"see" your resurrection (because this experience can only be made by
those who know how to love intensely). And she was the first to tell the world (John 20:11-18). Rather than Peter, the
Head, rather than John, your favorite disciple, rather than your most holy
mother, you made Magdalene the spokesperson for the Resurrection, the very
heart and essence of your Good News. This says a lot about the place of women
in the community of your fellow travelers.
The Dinosaurs, however, who soon
showed up in the said community, hastened to put things in their place,
starting, as we know, by muzzling women, making them wear the veil, the hat or
the mantilla, and sending them back into the shadows under the feathers of
their husbands. And this, until today (with some softening anyway)...
Meeting
with the adulterous woman
This woman had sinned, yes. But
she alone bore the brunt of the sin, even though it was committed by two people.
Her partner, oh surprise, had been lost in the wilderness. She was to be
punished to death with a tsunami of stones. Thus ordered the sacred law of the
great Moses, (the "sharia" of the Jews)... The Dinosaurs, the oldest
and most vicious, were the most enraged. They were already grabbing the biggest
rocks to throw them at her, when one of them stopped them. He had just seen you
around. He accosted you and, with drool in his mouth, he put glue on you to get
you into trouble. "According to your preaching, we should forgive this
slut, but the Law of Moses commands us to kill her. So who do we obey: you or
Moses?"... You stayed quiet and had fun drawing pictures in the sand. You
did not even raise your eyes. When you opened your mouth, it was to say:
"Let him who has not sinned throw the first stone!" There followed a dead silence. Then little by
little the Dinosaurs withdrew with their tails between their butts, starting
with the oldest...
Fortunately, dear Jesus, you
appeared in the picture, otherwise, by virtue of the Law of Moses, because of
religion, piety, morality and the tendency of judges, of priests and males to
blame women and protect the "stronger sex", this woman would have
been blown to pieces under an avalanche of rocks (John 8, 1-11).
Your murderous sentence:
"Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone at her" should be
inscribed in gold letters on the pediment of all the confessionals and courts
of the world. And so much the worse for the Dinosaurs!
The woman could not stand up
straight. For eighteen years, for
eighteen centuries, for millennia, she had been living bent over, imprisoned,
tied up.
It was the work of the devil,
they said. Because women were said to be in league with the devil. It was a
known fact. They used the devil to do
strange things: healings, for example, getting pregnant, seeing things...
First they dressed women from
head to toe, locked them up, cloistered them and stoned many of them because
they thought they were all more or less whores. They were held responsible for
the vices and sins of men. If a man raped, strangled, slaughtered, killed, they
said: "look for the woman".
Then they were burned alive. If a
misfortune fell on the village, it was the fault of the witch. A witch hunt was
then launched. In the end, one was always found. Was there a woman who was too
fond of cats, picked strange mushrooms in the woods, went to church a lot or
not at all? Did she have red eyes? (By concocting her remedies over the hearth
flame, it was difficult to tell otherwise, but one didn't think that far
ahead)... Did she have a wart or some strange spot on her body? Nothing was
clearer, she was a witch! She was burned
alive in the market place. No more hail, no more flu, no more fires, no more
toothaches in the village. At least, for a while, everyone was happy.
For eighteen centuries, for
thousands of years, women had been subjected to disgusting tasks and hard
work. And even to mutilation, as it
still happens in some cultures; or to rape, sexual slavery and honor killings,
as it happens every day. Hundreds of
millions of women have been prevented from being born, or have been killed at
birth, for the sole "mistake" of not being male. For many people,
being a woman is still a defect, an accident of nature, or at best a necessary
evil.
They had the right to be
servants, toys, dolls or trophies of the man. They had the duty to make the
male enjoy and to give him descendants, but they themselves did not have to
enjoy. The males loved them, no doubt,
but under these conditions.
They could embroider and play the
piano, but they were not allowed to study; they could not write checks, sign
contracts, or vote. To enter a church they had to be wrapped in thousands of
petticoats.
It is not surprising that the
good Orthodox Jew still prays this prayer every morning when he gets out of
bed: "I thank you, Lord, for not making me a woman”.
In our less traditional
societies, things have changed. Through epic battles, fought on their own,
without weapons and without shedding a drop of blood, women have succeeded in
gaining recognition of their dignity and their essential rights. But they have
not finished. There is still a long way to go before all women everywhere on
the planet are happy to be women.
In Latin America, where there is
the largest concentration of Catholics in the world, the churches are full of
women. Without them, the Church would be dead.
But there, as in other countries, the high Catholic hierarchy has
decreed that God, in creating women, has rendered them irreparably incapable of
celebrating a poor little Mass. This would be inscribed for eternity in the
female genome... and in the mind of God...
This high hierarchy is currently
busy mobilising all the forces of the Church in order to launch a "New
Evangelisation" on a worldwide scale. With all due respect to these
venerable beards, I am pleased to present here on the subject a Good News of
Jesus that should be inscribed for eternity in the very genome of the Church:
A woman was there. She asked for
nothing. For eighteen years she had been living folded in half, locked in on
herself, tied up. She was "so bent
over that she could not stand up at all".
Jesus saw her and was touched to the core. He stretched out his
brotherly hand to her and said, "Woman, you are set free! At these words, the woman stood up straight
as a tree (Luke 13:10-17).
The high hierarchy immediately
attacked Jesus for daring to do such a thing on the sacred Sabbath. This was
forbidden by immemorial law.
Dinosaurs are all the same: to
them a woman is worth less than a donkey or a cow (see text, verse 16), and
anything beyond their control is of the devil.
Ironically, it is because of its
clinging to 'unchangeable' laws, beliefs and practices that our poor Church (which,
by the way, has done great things in its history, let us not forget) has turned
itself into a bent old woman... Let us hope that by updating the Good News of a
Jesus who straightens the bent woman, she will find the desire to rise again,
straight as a tree. And that in the name of Jesus, she will make sure that in
all churches and everywhere on earth, women walk with their heads held high.
And may they even celebrate Mass (in the centre of the church and not behind
the curtains in a dark corner of the sacristy) without fear of offending the
Divinity and turning the whole planet upside down. ...
How can they offend this
brilliant God who had the good idea of creating "in his image and
likeness" (Genesis, 1, 26-27)
both women and men, they who gave birth to a man like Jesus? ...
Meetings
at the table of the notables
In the meantime you were often
seen at the table of notables who invited you to their banquets. Every time you
accepted this invitation, you ran the risk of being considered a glutton and a
drunkard, a friend of the rich. In fact, this label has been applied to you
more than once (Matthew 11:19).
These notables were surely trying
to win your sympathy, or to set traps for you. You, however, took advantage of
the opportunity to hit the same nail on the head: to speak of the society that
God wants humans to live and grow as humans. You called this society the
"Kingdom", which should be like a huge banquet offered to all humans
without any distinction, where, every day, everyone could eat their fill and be
happy to share the same table with the whole world. This great feast of
equality, justice and friendship was the very image of the new world for which
you were ready to give your life.
Sharing in justice and friendship
is the great miracle; in fact, it is the only true miracle that puts the world
back on its feet, the only one that takes it out of its wild state, the only
one that takes it out of death. It is the only true miracle that liberates it,
reconciles it, civilises it, humanises it, heals it, makes it grow and saves
it. Let's not look for other recipes.
When they say that you turned
water into wine, or you walked on the waters, or you fed a crowd of 5,000 men
("not counting women (!!!) and children" (Matthew 14, 21) with five small loaves of bread and two fish, and
that from this profusion there were still baskets full, this was the miracle
that they meant.
Only the miracle of sharing in
justice and brotherhood makes possible the impossible. This alone overturns the
mountains of iniquity that separate and crush us. That alone prevents us from
being swallowed by the waters of death. That alone makes us cross them. That
alone sets us free from bondage and brings us joy and freedom.
But this is systematically
blocked by the Dinosaurs, by those who have taken the land, the resources, the
wealth of the entire world to make it their own private property, leaving the
others naked, one hand in front and the other behind.
No, you are not against private
property. What you want is for every human being to have his or her own private
property, his or her own share of the common property, his or her own share of
the earth's wealth, so that everyone can live in dignity, freedom, justice and
peace. (Acts 2:44-47. 4:32-35)
The first Christians tried this
adventure of sharing goods according to each person's needs, but it did not
last, because persecutions came, the community dispersed and the beautiful
dream more or less fell apart. A few centuries later, however, this very
laudable attempt bounced back. It was the inspiration for the communities of
monks that grew like forests, especially in Europe, and were largely
responsible for the development of the West. It inspired thousands of religious
orders of men and women who, in the course of history, devoted themselves body
and soul to the service of others, to education, to health, to the liberation
of captives, to the development of the arts, science, and the advancement of
culture, and above all, (with methods that were not always the most
sophisticated), to the integration of peoples, tribes and ethnic groups who
were constantly at war with each other. Utopia will never come true, but it is
there to inspire, to guide, to show the way...
Sharing the same table creates
bonds and allows us to deepen this orientation, this ideal, this call ... Hence
the meal shared in community became the
emblem, the rallying sign, the sign of Christian identity. So with the mass,
which is not a sacrifice for the dead, but a simple sharing for the journey, a
fraternal meal to rally and move forward all those who follow you.
The problem is that over time,
the mass meal has become so ritualised that it no longer resembles a meal. The
bread no longer looks like bread and the wine is so rationed that we end up
forgetting it. And everything is prepared in advance according to such strict
rules that you have to be a seer to detect any real sharing. There is no
festive atmosphere either, despite the lights, the ornaments, the songs and the
flowers. People are not drawn to each other, they don't talk to each other,
they express themselves very little, they don't laugh, they are on guard.
Spontaneous joy, emotions, contacts, are left at the entrance and taken back at
the exit, as in the cemetery...
Yet you, Jesus, have come to
change the water of precepts into the wine of freedom. And the sharing of a
fraternal meal on the first day of the week (Sunday) was the celebration of the
passage from death to life with you, the Risen One. It was a celebration in
love and joy of the salvation that has already arrived and is about to spread
throughout the world (Luke 24,
1.13.30-32; 1John 3, 14).
Meeting
with the merchants of the temple
(John 2, 13-22)
Against the hoarders, especially
those who grease their palms and get fat from religion, you whip them and kick
them out. In the middle of the Temple,
you attack the religion of sacrifice and business with all your might. Is that clear enough? You don't want a religion that claims to
honour God by slitting animals' throats, or worse, by exploiting humans like
animals, or by trading God's favours for money. God is not for sale or
purchase. Neither is any human! You strike "the System" in the heart;
you thrust your spear mercilessly into the "Eye of the Dragon". And, of course, in doing so, you sign your
death warrant.
Instead of blessing weapons, as
she has been in the habit of doing for a long time, why hasn't the Church made
this whip a sacrament?
I understand that bread,
especially if it doesn't look like real bread, and wine (hardly half a drop of
wine) have the advantage of never disturbing anyone. But a whip, a good little
whip on a corner of the Table of the Meeting of those who follow you, would not
be too much to remind them that are not welcome in your community the
scoundrels who, with one hand, water
religion with their pennies, while, with the other, they starve three-quarters
of humanity...
The wedding banquet is open to
everyone, but it should not be used as a refuge for thieves and murderers. The
great sign of universal brotherhood is not that of stupidity.
"It is immolating the son in
the presence of his father to offer to God a sacrifice with the goods of the
poor. To deprive the poor of their meagre pittance is to commit murder. To
deprive the wage earner of his due is to kill him." (Ben Sira 34:20-26; James 5:1-6).
May we have as soon as possible
blessed whips to make the starving of three quarters of humanity go away! ...
(to
read more on this topic, see “When Jesus blows his top”, at the bottom of this blog.)
Meeting
with the possessed man of Gerasa
(Luke
8, 26-39)
This is not Christian! To free a
poor wretch who was full of devils, you allowed 2000 pigs to be sacrificed! You
put the economy at the service of the human being, and not the other way
around, which was great. But let's put
ourselves in the shoes of those pig owners. They may have been Dinosaurs, but
it's understandable that they didn't find it funny. We almost want to take
their side. But who, today, really takes to heart the defense of these humans
who, by legions, wake up every morning poorer than the day before, while for
the richest, it is the opposite? Is it normal to keep on fattening up the
fattest ones while the leanest ones are already skin and bones?
It is obvious that the pig
farmers of Gerasa were not going to take a picture with you... So you had to
leave the place without any fanfare, otherwise you were done for.
(See
Annex: "Jesus, the economy and the pigs").
Meeting
with the paralytic delivered by forgiveness
(Mark
2, 1-12)
This is another wonderful scene,
infinitely liberating. In a society where forgiveness was administered in dribs
and drabs, practically only once a year, by the High Priest himself (as the
Pope would say) and only by him, and at the cost of thousands of sacrifices of
sheep and bulls, you, an ordinary guy, not even a priest, not even a little
priest, not even a sacristan, you, an unconsecrated, unanointed man, you, a
simple layman, dared to declare to a paralyzed man that his sins were forgiven.
Everyone was dumbfounded. The Dinosaurs were on the verge of a heart attack. It
just couldn't be! This individual's
paralysis came from somewhere! It must have been God who sent it to him as a
punishment for the enormous sins he must have committed. You claimed to forgive
this man's sins? Who do you think you are?
But when the poor man heard from
you that his sins were forgiven, when he heard that the weight of the sins he
was suspected of having committed was no longer on his shoulders, his head
turned. He saw birds. He felt like living. We know what happened next. He began
to walk.
You wanted to show how
forgiveness unties, forgiveness unlocks, forgiveness liberates, and forgiveness
heals. You wanted to tell us that the Son of Man, that is to say, the human
being, all of us, humans, have within ourselves this same power (and duty) to
set in motion that which is paralyzed. For this we don't need high priests or
low priests, we don't need penances or sacrifices of sheep or bulls.
Forgiveness is within everyone's reach and, if it is sincere, if it is true, if
it comes from the heart, it does amazing things.
The Dinosaurs saw with their eyes
the paralytic get up, pick up his mat and walk straight to his house. They
turned green. They said to each other, "This Jesus is really possessed by
the devil. If not, where did he get this power? (Matthew 10:25). Surely not from God, for one thing is certain: God
does not accomplish his works through laymen and ordinary people!
Meeting
with the man with the withered hand
(Mark
3, 1-6)
You can do healings any day of
the week, except Saturday. On Saturday, the sacred Sabbath, it is strictly
forbidden. Breaking this law, the most sacred in the Jewish religion, can be
punished by death. You, you make on purpose to heal this day this man who
cannot work, cannot feed his family, because his hand had dried up, we do not
know how. Why this provocation? Simple. You wanted to show clearly to those who
still doubted what true religion consists of, not so much by refraining from
working, but rather by giving the chance to work to those who, being in need,
are prevented from doing so... For there is a religion that kills, the one
which tolerates that a man or a woman is treated worse than a donkey or a cow,
and a religion that liberates from all forms of slavery, all the more so on the
Sabbath day.
Meeting
with the little children
(Mark
9, 33-37. 42; 10, 13-16)
You like them. They have fun,
they don't care about anything, they ask questions without stopping. They want
to know everything. They have no prejudices. They are open to everyone
regardless of skin color or social status. They love stories, inventing worlds
with nothing... We have to educate them,
yes undoubtedly, because they are not always angels, but to educate them
without killing their soul, transmitting to them our prejudices, our fears, our
obsessions, our neuroses. For you, they are the greatest. They are our masters.
They are the new, the novelty, they are the budding future. Be like them, you
tell us. Woe to who corrupts them by making of them toys, mummies, old men
before time... Those, it would be better to hang a huge stone on their neck and
to pull them to the sharks.
Meeting
with the flowers of the field
(Matthew
6, 28-29)
This is not an innocent detail.
Flowers are one of the great forces of nature. They are at the root of the
earth's fertility. They are, so to speak, the sex of vegetation. Without them,
without their infinite variety, without their billions of seductions, animals
and humans would not exist.
They are not beautiful little
useless things. They are like atoms, like every drop of blood, every drop of
water, every tear or every smile. They are like grains of sand, chromosomes,
ova, stars, bacteria, quanta. They are the basis of the Big Bang of life...
Even the mites have greatness and
the Dinosaurs too. As well as love and peace, silence, sleep, rest. As well as
the beauty of all things, all people and all races... They are the joyful side
of Reason that explores new worlds and keeps us from falling into madness.
Meeting
in the secret of your heart with your Abba
(Luke
15, 11-32)
Your Abba, you feel him close,
you see him in you. You live him as your beloved Father. You cherish him. Who can claim such familiarity with God
without having been consecrated to him as the priests and prophets recognized
by the Temple?
The Father in the parable of the
prodigal son teaches us a lot about this.
This parable strikes a blow at another absolute of the society of your
time, the patriarchal family. Fathers, in your time, practically had the right
of life and death over their children. Obedience to the father was an
absolutely sacred duty. It was a matter of honor, a matter of face, of rank, of
reputation, of race, of clan, of tradition; it was a matter that bore the
solemn seal of religion upon it. To obey the father was to obey God. The whole
society was built around this principle.
So you, to show that God was not a tyrannical father, as was the case in
your society and in all societies of the time (and as is still the case today),
invented this story of a hard-hearted son who had the nerve to ask his father
to give him his share of the inheritance.
The father gave it to him. The son pocketed the money, slammed the door
and ran away from home to waste it all on a life of debauchery. Disgraced, the
father had lost face and was left alone with his other son, who, fortunately,
was a model son. But the poor father was still a laughing stock. This wound
would never heal.
Years passed. And one day, this
rascal of a son, who had gotten lost in a faraway land, fell into a rut. He was
left with nothing but skin and bones. Now, driven only by hunger - and not by
remorse - he had the audacity to bring himself home again. He was
unrecognizable, emaciated, dirty, dishevelled.
His father should have thrown his dogs at him, and even killed him. But instead, seeing him coming from afar, he ran to meet him, wept with joy, showered him with kisses, and welcomed him as if he had been the best son. He gave him a big party.
The other son didn't take it, who
could blame him? If his father had gone crazy, he was going to keep a cool
head. No way was he going to join the party. For him, this scoundrel, this
human wreck, was no longer a brother. It was impossible to do otherwise. The
father's heart was heavy, but he understood the reaction of this son whom he
also loved well. Without turning away from him - Dinosaurs are also God's
creatures - he went back to feast with the ragged man who had returned home.
In this story, or rather this
parable, my dear Jesus, you have really blown the lid off. You went beyond
anything reasonable we could think, believe or say about God; you revealed to
us the very nature of his heart. For you, there was not and never would be any
other God than this God who, with all his heart, loves unconditionally even the
most hardened and the most ungrateful as well as all those who abuse his
goodness.
But he also loves the
cold-headed, who are, after all, Dinosaurs...
This God was your Abba. You loved
him above all else. He dazzled you. He was the love of your life. You liked to
withdraw from the agitated world to meet him in the most intimate part of your
being. He was the source of your
freedom, the great secret of everything you said and did. This God had no
beard...
Such a theology, which
definitively discarded the God of justice of the good old tradition,
destabilized to an unimaginable degree the "guardians of the truth",
who never stopped tearing their clothes.
The patience of the Dinosaurs was
no longer far from the end of its tether.
Meeting
with the people of your village where you shone your light on the Mission
(Luke
4, 16-30)
You were in the village
synagogue. You were invited to read a text from the prophet Isaiah (a genius!)
The text said this (here I interpret it in our own words): "The breath of
God is upon me. He breathes in me. It moves me to announce the good news to the
poor: all those whom our oppressors have thrown into prison will be freed! All
those who are locked up in the darkness of the dungeons will finally see the
light of day and freedom! All those who, because of their poverty, have fallen
into the clutches of usurers and who, unable to repay their debts, have had all
their possessions seized and, very often, have even had to sell their strength
of arms and their freedom so that their creditors could keep them alive, well,
all that is over! Their pardon, their freedom, their liberation, in other
words, their "grace" has arrived! They will be able to recover their
freedom, their rights and all the goods that were confiscated from them!
Because it is the YEAR OF GRACE of the Lord our God!" You closed the book.
Not a fly was heard to fly. Everyone looked at you with eyes as big as
dollars... Then you opened your mouth and said: "TODAY IS FULFILLED WHAT
YOUR EARS HAVE HEARD"... At these words, the poor people jumped to the
ceiling and began to dance for joy. But immediately, the others, the usurers,
the big landlords, those who confiscate land and houses from the insolvent,
they laughed at you, insulted you, and heckled you. They shouted at you:
"Who do you think you are? You are only a miserable carpenter of this
village, a loser!" They asked you
to perform a miracle in their village to prove to everyone that your words did
not come from the devil. You told them that it was not in his village, but in
Zarephath, in a foreign land, that Elijah had performed a great miracle for a
Gentile widow who was dying of hunger; and on another occasion it was not a
local Jew whom he had healed of leprosy, but Naaman, an official of Syrian
origin. These words only added fuel to the fire. They jumped on you, dragged
you out, intending to throw you down a high cliff... How did you manage to
escape? Nobody knows. What we do know is that you managed to sneak like a snake
between the legs of the Dinosaurs. None of them realized it. Not so strong,
after all, the Dinosaurs...
My dear Jesus, it was in this
sulphurous atmosphere that your "missionary sending for the evangelization
of the peoples" took place. But things have changed since then.
Today, in a cloud of incense, the
holy religion has come to round off the corners, to put down some flats, to
nuance things, to erase outright what was not profitable for it and for those
who, with it, give themselves the "mission" of maintaining order in
the world and balance in the universe. In our missionary sending, we do not
speak of liberation, of forgiveness of debts, God forbid! Not so long ago, we
still kissed the feet of missionaries, just as we kissed the feet of rich
people who from time to time made small donations to the missions (we even
honoured them as godparents, spiritual parents).
We went to the missions because
we wanted everyone to convert to our holy religion (a religion, moreover,
carefully expurgated of any reference to the "Year of Grace", which
we ignored or which we had totally deformed by dressing it up as a golden
opportunity to collect indulgences and lots of money. ...); a religion that had
also been exorcised of any desire for liberation, that thing considered dangerous
that was readily identified with the disobedience of fallen angels. (v.g. a
certain Syllabus and a certain anti-modernism oath). Perfect dinosaurism!
This has changed, of course, but
these changes are still very recent. The substance and the mentality remain the
same: "liberation" is like the ‘n’ word... or thereabouts.
Meeting
with the sex
No fanfare, no farting, no
sickness about that. It was probably because you saw sex simply as a normal
thing. It's true that the subject was highly taboo in your world (as it was for
us for a long time), but you who never let taboos embarrass you, why would you
be embarrassed about sexual practices in the society of your time? There must
have been something for everyone, at least in the circles influenced by other
cultures and other "cults"... There were all kinds of extremely salty
material there, against which you could have shot some of your sharpest
arrows... But, no. We will never know why. The least we can say is that you
weren't obsessed with it. Sex was not the center of your concerns. However,
that was all it took for you to be considered a pagan, an impure person, and
even a friend of the debauched. In fact, you were accused of that too... You
were even called Beelzebub, as we know (Matthew
10:25).
Meeting
with the Galileans
They dreamed of a king who would
lead the troops to hunt down their enemies, restore order and increase the
power of their nation. But you dreamed of a state in which authority, politics,
economics, justice, freedom, and religion itself would be at the service of
human beings, and not the other way around; a state where everything would be
centered on the good of the human person. You called this project the
"Kingdom of God". You established it on the sacred principle that
"the Sabbath is for the human being and not the human being for the
Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). The leader
(or king), the supreme law, the administration, the religion of this Kingdom,
the gospel itself and the whole community of disciples (the Church) would be at
the service of the human being and never the other way around.
This is why the Church was
invented. It is this vision, this breath, this way of doing things that it had
to embody in the world. It is in this way that she was to be the light of the
world, a witness to Jesus, a witness to the gospel. In this she was to be and
must be the leaven in the dough. She was to be the living proof that everything
in the world must be built from the human and according to the human, and also,
we would add today, in very close connection with Nature. For Nature is also an
immense living being. The human being is only a part of it. It is not a thing,
it is not a simple object, but a set of beings which, like plants and animals,
breathe and are alive as much as humans themselves. Finally, all this is to give glory to God,
who loves the world so much that Jesus, his witness, cannot do otherwise than
give his life for it (John 3, 16-17).
Your revolution, Jesus, was that!
If today's Christians are not with you on the side of the oppressed, all true
revolutionaries who care about the triumph of humanity over stupidity will
rightly judge Christianity as "the opium of the people". They will
call Christians hypocrites, fascists and gorillas, and they will wage war
against them. But if, on the other hand, a good number of Christians were to
stand firmly on the side of the oppressed, it would, alas, be surprising if
their great religious leaders supported and defended them.
It would really be the surprise
of the millennium! For fear of losing something of their power, they would be
the first to suspect them of being naive, crank, useful idiots more or less in
collusion with the godless and the big bad communists. They would surely
ostracize them or denounce them without qualms.
Unless they simply have them eliminated by a subordinate looking to move
up the hierarchy with a red belt...
When we take your gospel
seriously, dear Jesus, we run the same risks you did.
Meeting
with Joy
In spite of the horror of the
cross, we must affirm loud and clear that the Gospel is pure joy from head to
toe. There are cloudy passages, there are moments of great darkness, but above
all there is joy that flows like the best wine at the wedding of Cana.
This joy is all about you, dear
Jesus. You have nothing of a dark spirit, nothing of a sorrowful spirit. You do
not brood. You are not grumpy. You have
your mood swings, sure, your less than happy moments, your moments of sorrow
and sadness, but you are not just that.
In Matthew, your good news begins
with a huge cry of joy that throws all the sadness of the world to the ground.
"HAPPY! HAPPY! HAPPY!" is repeated nine times in a row! (Matthew 5, 1-12). This word still rings in our ears. You want
the happiness of all the poor people on Earth; you want joy in the whole world.
You are joy. With you everything leads to this incredible certainty that the
reign of death, the reign of the Dinosaurs, is over and that the reign of a new
consciousness begins, the reign of a completely different reality.
Yes, with you, we walk towards
the joy of the Kingdom. Towards that joy which we feel when the godsend of the
century falls from the sky, when we discover, by chance, an enormous treasure
hidden in a field, or a splendid pearl mixed with the junk of a souk of the
Arabian Nights (Matthew 13, 44-45).
Or to the joy of a poor woman who, having lost one of her few remaining coins,
finds it after turning the house upside down and sweeping it from top to
bottom. Or to the joy of the shepherd who finds a lost sheep, as if this skinny,
slightly scatterbrained sheep were as valuable as the 99 fat sheep left
unattended during the search. Or towards the extreme joy of the father who
finds his lost child, even and especially if this hard-hearted child no longer
deserves to bear his father's name (Luke
15, 8-9. 4-6. 11-32). Or to the joy of the workers who have worked only one
hour and receive the same wages as those who have toiled all day (Matthew 20, 1-16)...
"Let my joy be in you and
let your joy be complete!" (John 15:11).
Wrenching
I hear voices of protest.
I could be reproached for making
the way of Jesus an open bar where anyone can enter without wiping their feet
and where everyone is served without paying. I am reminded that the Jesus of
the Gospel said: "Unless you renounce yourself and take up your cross to
follow me, you cannot walk with me" (Luke
14, 26-27). People are also surprised that I do not speak of the
"wedding garment" required to take part in the banquet to which
"many are called, but few qualify" to be accepted (Matthew 22, 11-14). People tell me that
my language is not that of Jesus...
To which I reply:
“Okay. In Matthew, who is a Jew, access to the
banquet of the Kingdom is apparently more restrictive than in Luke (for Matthew
is a Jew and still retains the legalistic reflexes of his traditional
community. In Luke, who is Greek and therefore does not have the same scruples
as Matthew, his vision of the Kingdom is unreserved: "Go by the ways and
by the fences and force people in, so that my house may be filled" (Luke 14:21-23). I, who am more Greek
and more Gentile than Jew, gratefully adopt Luke's vision.
As for the renunciation required
to follow Jesus, I don't think I have lowered the bar. I've talked a lot about
"tearing ourselves away." I have insisted that we tear ourselves away
from our old practices, our routines, our taboos, our prejudices, our fears;
that we tear ourselves away from our inertia, our comfort zones, our
preordained ways, our certainties, our dogmas; that we renounce the honeyed or
lordly images we have created of Jesus; that we renounce our crutches, our
disguises, the beliefs embedded in our genes, all those things that we have
often made sacred through religion; that we tear ourselves away from our sacred
enclosures and that, from there, we make the leap into the void, into the new.
For me, "renouncing
everything and taking up one's cross to follow Jesus" is just that. To strip oneself of everything in order to
'put on Christ', as the apostle Paul would say (Ephesians 4:22-24), to 'take the narrow way' of which Jesus
himself speaks (Matthew 7:13), is
just that. However, it is not always a narrow path, because it hardly lasts
long enough to break the moorings and take the plunge. As soon as the wall is
crossed, it opens onto a roadway that is extremely wide. There, in
"close" connection with him, one learns to walk joyfully in "the
glorious freedom of the children of God" (Romans 8:21).
What
about the Dinosaurs?
The Dinosaurs, you endured them
as long as you could. In the end, when they crucified you, you begged your Abba
to forgive them. You pleaded on their behalf, but you did not prove them
right (VERY IMPORTANT DETAIL).
You argued that they should not
be found guilty. Why? "Because they did not know what they were
doing" (Luke, 23, 33-34). In
other words, because they were unaware (which is not exactly a compliment...).
For this reason, you asked your Abba not to condemn them. You asked him to show
them mercy...
With you it is like this: first
of all justice and truth, but the last word belongs to mercy.
What will happen to the Dinosaurs
after their death is a secret that Jesus shares only with very close friends. I
discovered this secret somewhere, in 1959, in an old yellowed book with the
title: "Revelations of Our Lord Jesus Christ to St. Gertrude on the
Passion" (imagine that!). He would have whispered in her ear:
"My daughter, neither of
Solomon nor of Judas will I tell you what I have done, so that my mercy may not
be abused"...
You have guessed it well. This
saying has a great chance of being authentic and of being very well applicable
to our Dinosaurs... So much the
better! After all, our Dinosaurs deserve
it. Because, even if we have no reason
to love them, I wonder what we would have known about Jesus if they had not
always been in his legs... Remove the Dinosaurs from the Gospels, and the
Gospels fall apart. Take the predators off the planet and the world will end.
We have no choice...
This is probably why Francis of
Assisi made a pact with the wolf of Gubio, a wicked wolf...
Death
and Resurrection
The great Veil of the temple
which marked the absolute separation between God and human beings, between the
sacred and the profane, between the pure and the impure, between spirit and
matter, between religion and daily life, between the Law of God and the Law of
Nature, between the Human and the Divine, between Death and Life, this Veil was
torn from top to bottom (Matthew 27, 51).
This veil that divided and separated... was torn by the whips, the thorns, the
nails and the spear thrust into the heart of the Crucified One.
It seemed, Jesus, that your face,
your body, your personal history or even your real word were being removed to
"unveil" the ultimate reality that could explain the world, change it
and save it. Then, having loved your
own, you loved them "to the end" (John
13:1). You made yourself similar to humans in every way. You washed their
feet (John 13:2-16) and made yourself
their slave to the death of the cross (Philippians
2:6-8). You became a slave to them until you died on the cross (Philippians 2:6-8). You became a slave
to all that we are, including the most inhuman and despicable parts of us. You
became a curse, you became sin (Galatians
3:13; 2 Corinthians 5:21).
You have annihilated yourself in
all our horrors up to the absurdity of the present war between Russia and
Ukraine. Today you are in Mariupol, trembling with hunger and cold among the
old men, women and children buried alive in the damp cellars of the Azovstal
steel plants.
Your cross of yesterday, today
and forever are the torture chambers, the gas chambers and the gaols of all
tyrannies of all times. Your cross is the hunger from which a large part of
humanity suffers, while the other part of humanity is full of abundance and
murders the Earth that gives it life.
When the sun goes down at high noon under the thick cloud of our bombs,
our crimes and all our madness, you are there, nailed to us, still crying out
the same death cry that pierces the heart of God: "Eloi, Eloi, lama
sabachtani", "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15, 34).
This was also the cry of your
disciples, themselves dead with fear and buried alive in their refuge in
Jerusalem. They had lost everything.
They had nothing left but the
love with which you had loved them. This
love, kept deep in their hearts, suddenly rose up with force in their being and
gently brought them back to the light and to reason. It brought them out of the
shadows. It "resurrected" them.
Then their eyes were opened. They saw that the love with which you had
loved them, not only gave them back their life, but brought you back to them.
They saw and understood that all death was gone and that you were still alive.
Alive, no longer outside, but within and beyond themselves to go with you on
all the roads of the world.
They understood that the greatest
power in the universe is love. They understood that love brings everything
together, love brings all things back to their original unity, love resurrects
everything, love recreates everything.
They understood that everything
dies and only love remains.
And they understood that
everything that is love lives in God forever, for God is love (1 John 4:16).
Could this be the
"truth" that Pilate was looking for? (John 18, 38)
EPILOGUE
Dear reader,
This Jesus that I have just
"updated" in my own way is perhaps not quite the Jesus that the
witnesses of 2000 years ago are supposed to have seen with their own eyes. I believe, however, that I have
"in-spired" him, even though we have no portrait or definite history
about him. For my part, all I know about him is that he is alive.
If this Jesus reaches out to you
at all, don't let it slip. He doesn't ask you to imitate him, because he
doesn't command anyone. He only wants to take root in you enough to
"in-spire" you in turn, that is to say to "spiral" inside
you, to give you breath, tone, vision, wings. All he wants is for his spirit
(his "spire") to continue in you and through you the work begun by
him.
Too often, in our imaginary
iconography, the Spirit comes from above, it comes from outside and seems, in a
way, to come after Jesus and to be independent of him. Yet, even though Jesus
has a very broad idea of the Spirit, the one he gives us is properly the Spirit
that "dwells" in him. It is the spirit that intimately inhabits him;
it is his mentality, his way of being, his way of thinking, his way of acting,
and his way of loving. What he transmits to us is his own breath (John 20:19-22).
To use a term closer to us, the
spirit of Jesus is his own "energy". It is his soul, it is his
breath, and it is his life. Attached to Jesus and "breathed" into us,
the spirit makes Jesus alive within us; from what he was (or what through the
centuries) we have believed him to have really been.
By allowing ourselves to be impregnated
by the same spirit, Jesus will be in us something other than a subject of
theses and a theme of sermons. His presence will be real, affective and
effective. His emotions, his creativity, his freedom, his wisdom, his audacity,
his strength, his love will communicate themselves to us. In our inner soil his
roots will grow deep.
So, if ever these lines that I
have just shared with you make you vibrate a little, if they "fetch"
you as we say in our common language, read them and reread them at your own
pace, either in one go or drop by drop. Let them turn in your head, chew on
them, debate with them, let them "spiral". Let yourself be
"contaminated" by them. So much so that in the long run, the
"dinosaur" that sleeps in you, just like in me, will eventually melt;
it will slowly fade away like an iceberg in the waters of the warming Arctic...
And that's it! In less than three
years, Jesus, you have shaken up our lives and reversed our death so that we
could find our center and establish harmony within us, around us, with the
universe and with the One who is the Source and the Heart of everything. You
have broken all the moulds and shaken all the corpses. All your encounters have
been challenges to take up, risks to run, prohibitions and often impossibilities
to face. You never ceased to surprise.
All things that did not fit into
the views and frameworks of a religion that was sure of itself and more or less
convinced that it was the very incarnation of God and his will on Earth,
believing hard as an iron that its Scriptures, its dogmas, its moral codes, its
rituals, its structures were immutable forever, you dared to question them, you
attacked them and turned them upside down... We are still amazed, but you, with
patience, gentleness and goodness, warn us that we have not yet seen anything
and that we must continue to walk.
"Truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will do the works that
I do, and greater works than these he will do" (John, 14, 12).
And we are the most unfortunate of humans because we are overwhelmed and unable to follow you. Our boat is taking on water on all sides and you are sleeping. If you wake up, it is only to hear you say to us:
"Why are you afraid, you men and women of little
faith? (I have overcome the world (John
16, 33). I have survived death and "I make all things new" (Revelation 21, 3-5). "Go and make
disciples of all nations... I am with you always, until the end of the
world" (Matthew 28, 19-20).
A
last question
To you who still have doubts, to
you who find, perhaps, my Jesus really too rebellious, too delinquent, too
militant, too third world from the 70's, not cool enough, not liturgical
enough, too secular, not at all canonical and too kamikaze... to you who think
that what I say about him is really exaggerated, I ask you this question: if
the real Jesus was more composed, moderate and nuanced than the one to whom I
give life in these pages, why then, in less than three years of public action,
was he, who loved so much and was so loved, delivered up as an extremely dangerous
enemy, and why was he crushed on a cross with such rage, cynicism and cruelty,
not by devils out of hell, but by religious men who, however, only sought to do
their duty? ...
Eloy Roy
ANNEX
3
articles and a clip from old posts
LET
HIM BE RID OF HIS STRIPS!
As I meditated on the
resurrection of Lazarus in the gospel of John 11:1-44, it came to my mind that
even RELIGION can be a killing machine. As a system, indeed, Religion is a bit
like an iron box that too often strangles God and shrinks him rather than
revealing him. Gospel is quite the
opposite: it open boxes, it awakens, resurrects, "reveals" (i.e.
"removes the veil"); it frees from frames, it opens paths, brings to
light what is hidden; it takes you out of the grave.
Lazarus was a very good boy and a
great friend of Jesus, but he lived sunken since ever in things of religion. He
did not have a personal life. He was «dead to the world». For him, the world
smelled bad. For the world, however, he was the one who did not smell good...
Upon learning that Lazarus'
situation had reached a critical point, Jesus was perturbed by that. He
approached the place where his friend had locked himself up like in a tomb, and
shouted to him, "Lazarus, get out of there! ». He went near the tomb of
his friend and shouted: «Lazarus, come out!»
Lazarus rose up, breathing in the
fresh air with his lungs full. But he couldn't walk. Strips were holding him
from head to toe. Every strip that bound him was a fear: the fear of
displeasing God, the fear of making a false move, the fear of not observing the
commandments to the letter, the fear of not carrying out the religious duties
in an exemplary way, the fear of not repeating exactly the same sacred
gestures, the same sacred words, the same sacred thoughts and the same sacred
mission programmed from time immemorial by religion; and, above all, the fear
of deviating from the standards set by the religious morality that the cult
sanctified: the fear of not always obeying religious authority in every detail;
the fear of getting out of the ranks established by the religious order; the
fear of what could exist outside the walls of religion. In short, the fear of
the «world», the fear of being a human being, the fear of the human adventure,
the fear of freedom, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the other. Lazarus
had become a religious mummy, a plaster statue, an embalmed living creature.
Because sometimes Lazarus could
have had in a flash a personal thought or a hint of doubt, or could have taken
a quick look over the fence and enjoyed it a little bit, he had about himself a
strong feeling of being a trash. Remorse was gnawing at him. He was full of
feelings of guilt. His face was ashen. The ulcers perforated his stomach. He
loathed being a human. He was dead. Let's just say he had fallen into a coma.
« Lazarus, come out! » shouted
Jesus at him... « Let him be rid of his
strips! »… Right now, fear is over and, in spite of everything, trust begins:
trust in yourself, trust in the human being, trust in life and trust in God!
For us today, who is this Lazarus
in the tomb, who stinks for the world and is entangled in his strips? This
Lazarus is simply the old Church; the Church of the Law, the Church of Fear,
the Church of Death. It is that old Church which, nowadays, by the grace of
God, is falling to dust.
But the Lazarus who listens to
the voice of Jesus over all the other voices, the Lazarus who comes out of the
tomb alive, Lazarus who gets rid of his strips, this Lazarus, as beautiful as a
spring, is the eternally new Church, the Church of the Risen One who gently
grows on the ruins of the other. The voice of Jesus is the secret.
The voice of Jesus, indeed, is
not any kind of voice. It is not the voice of the books, or the voice of
tradition, or the voice of the hierarchy, nor the voice of religion. However, it is not either the voice of
anarchy, chaos, panic, libertinism, consumerism, or of the «free for all». It
is not even the voice of the prudent and reasonable people; and, even less, the
sacrosanct voice of the sacrosanct consensus at all costs, or of the «right
balance» between yes or no.
The voice of Jesus is the voice
of the Good News that is, was and will always be a «scandal» for the devout,
and pure «madness» for the rationalists and the wise people, may they be
believers or atheists.
In other words, Jesus' voice is
the unshakeable trust in the intelligence and fruitfulness of FREEDOM in spite
of everything! It is the assurance that creativity, novelty, daring, love,
compassion, justice and peace are not only sweet ideals; they are rather real
forces that are buried in the depths of all and every human being. Once
awakened, these very concrete energies have the great power to build, ordain,
turn on, transport, transmit and transform life.
Jesus' voice is the voice that
awakens these energies and penetrates the heart of every human being with words
that overcome every coma: "Come out of your grave, lift your head, drop
your bandages, and walk! Open your eyes and see that life is pure opening to a
larger world. It goes from deaths to resurrections like a flower that blossoms
endlessly."
« You, Lazarus, come out of the grave! »…Not
only out of the grave of that anesthetising religion which keeps you prisoner
of your fears and of your sweet dreams, but also the grave of the new religion
of cynicism and arrogance which, on the pretext of being in step with one’s
time, makes of the pompousness of the super ego the absolute norm of the good,
of the truth and of the beauty.
Drop everything? No, Lazarus...
Once you're well free of your grave and of your strips, you can always, if that
fancies you, recuperate the words, the gestures and the clothing of the former
religion, but on one condition: that these signs no longer prevent you from
walking or spreading your wings and flying in the sky with breathtaking
acrobatics that could amaze the stars.
Eloy Roy
JESUS,
THE PIGS AND THE ECONOMY
Mark
5, 1-20
Who is piggier: the pig or the
one who feeds it?
Gerasa is an ultra-pagan town
perched on a cape above Lake Galilee. A subdivision of the Roman Legion has
turned it into a military base and 2000 soldiers armed to the teeth are camped
there. Their mission is to control with an iron fist the whole area that the
Roman Empire is colonizing and exploiting.
In the eyes of the well-born
Jews, who live on the other side of the lake, these Romans are evil creatures
sent by the devil himself to contaminate their blessed land and lead their
people to perdition. For this foreign soldiery does not only kills and indulges
in all kinds of vices, but also worships degenerate gods, forces people to
worship the statue of their emperor and, to top it all, eats pigs!
Who are the people who supply
these Roman devils with pigs, if not the big owners of Gerasa? For them, the
Romans are manna fallen from heaven. So they frantically invest in pig breeding
and then sell them at high prices to the rich occupants.
Funny, isn't it? These
"pigs" of Romans, who poison the life of the Gerasians, are fattened
by... other Gerasians, who in turn are fattened by the money of the Romans. And
what is this? Business as usual.
The land of Jesus is a land of
Jews allergic to pigs, which is located, as we said, on the other side of the
lake, just opposite Gerasa. No self-respecting Jew would ever let his boat
approach this Gerasa, which stinks of the devil and pigs for miles around.
But one day, Jesus, without a
passport or anything, decides to cross this forbidden border. He called his
fellow adventurers, all as Jewish as himself, put them on their boat and headed
straight for Gerasa.
No need to insist, the crossing
quickly turns into a nightmare. The guys are scared to death, perhaps more
because of their prejudices and superstitions than because of the terrible
storm that suddenly breaks out in the middle of the lake. Jesus is forced to
raise his voice to get his friends to pull themselves together and finally calm
down. Then, it is the arrival at Gerasa. All are safe and sound.
As soon as Jesus stepped out of
the boat, a dark thing appeared from behind the tombs of the local cemetery and
ran towards him. The locals explain that it is a madman who lives with the
dead; at any time of the day or night, he howls like a beast, slashing his
flesh with sharp stones (as pagan seers are wont to do in their mystical
delirium). Whenever anyone tries to tie him up with chains and irons, he shatters
everything. No one can control him. He is a monster.
A monster who, when he gets close
to Jesus, throws himself on him as if to kill him. But Jesus stands up. Using
the same voice that overcame the storm on the lake, he knocks the wretch to his
feet. A hoarse sound, both pleading and sarcastic, comes from the man's throat.
Whimpering, he implores Jesus not to torture him.
“ I beg you, If you want me to
come out of this man's body, send me into the bodies of the pigs that are there
on the hill”...
“What is your name?" asks a
Jesus who is determined to get to the bottom of things.
“My name is...
"Legion"...
The cat just got out of the bag!
So this man is no ordinary individual. He embodies in his person the people of
Gerasa, and many other peoples who, like Jesus' own people, are dominated, not
to say "possessed" by the Roman "Legion"...
In order to
"accommodate" themselves to the empire, these peoples lose their
identity, their freedom, their dignity and even their reason for living. They
become like waste... They self-destruct. They cover their bodies and souls with
deadly wounds, like that poor fellow with his sharp stones and his lair among
the tombs.
Then Jesus orders the
"Legion" spirit to come out of the poor devil's body and sends it out
to the herd of pigs grazing on the escarpment above the lake. The shock is
brutal. In spite of their very bad reputation, the pigs, less accommodating
than some Jews, prove unable to swallow the "Legion" spirit and
prefer to commit suicide by throwing themselves into the lake from the top of
their cliff. 2000 pigs drowned that day. As many drowned pigs as there were
soldiers forming the Roman subdivision of Gerasa. There were, in fact, 2000 of
them.
It is then that our unfortunate
man comes to his senses. He is washed, dressed properly and becomes a new man.
But the party immediately turns sour. The owners of the pigs are out of their
minds and drive Jesus out of their country.
Whoever wants to understand,
understand!
This story shows that Jesus does
not like the Roman legions, or those who collaborate with them. He is not a
friend of military boots, nor a friend of dictatorships. He is not a friend of
foreign powers who, under the mask of love for democracy, humanitarian aid or
development, or under that of the fight against terrorism or drugs, sneak into
other countries to control and dominate them. Nor is he a friend of those who
raise pigs to fatten other pigs...
But what a lack of kindness on
his part! That he has pulled a wretch out of a bottomless pit, everyone rejoices,
but at what price, great God! Let's put ourselves in the place of the breeders
of those 2000 pigs whose death Jesus caused, don't they have reason to be
furious with him? Is a human being worth 2000 pigs by any chance?
“Yes, certainly!" Jesus
answers.
Even if he is an outcast, a
madman, a depraved person, a monster who sows terror? Even if he is full of
devils, even if he is as evil as a Roman legion that steals, rapes, tramples,
humiliates and oppresses a whole people? Is it right to sacrifice the economy
of a whole village to rehabilitate such a monster?
“Not only is it right to
sacrifice the economy of a whole village, but also that of a whole country,
says Jesus. Even that of the whole world!”
The economy that has been making
rain and shine in the world until now is more destructive than 2 billion bombs
equal to those used on August 6 and 9, 1945, to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This economy was built on the
backs of 99% of humanity, at the cost of the dignity, freedom and rights of
entire people and nations, by mocking them, deceiving them, corrupting them,
exploiting them to the hilt, and slaughtering them.
This economy is responsible for
the wounds, frustrations, hatred, violence and decadence of its victims.
Monsters like this poor devil of Gerasa are created every day by this economy
that sends them by the thousands to live among the dead and the nightmares of
the immense human dumps that keep growing all over the planet.
It is cursed this economy that
literally murders our beautiful blue planet and that sacrifices people and
entire peoples to pigs and not pigs to people. That's why, one day, everything
will blow up. Not just 2,000 pigs will go down the drain, or two New York
towers will go up in smoke, but the entire world economy will collapse. It has
already started.
Obama himself, being a good boy,
feels sorry for the pigs of Wall Street and feeds them. But one day those same
pigs may turn on him and bite him. For you must not feed the pigs, nor cast
pearls at them (Mt 7:6). (See who
succeeded Obama)....
Let alone give them billions,
Jesus would add...
Eloy Roy
THE
STOLEN GOSPEL
For
the new evangelization
God speaks through the cries and
the silences of the impoverished of the Earth. The new evangelization will have
to pick up that voice; if not, it will only be a new miscarriage.
Lazarus (Luke 16, 21)
That is simply so because the
soul of the gospel is Jesus and Jesus was a poor.
Jesus lived and fought for and
with the poor. He stood by the poor. He was the companion, the friend, the
brother, the defender of the poor. He suffered for the poor and died as the
poorest among the poor.
In the same way that the sun
shines above the good as well as above the wicked, and above the rich as well
as above the poor, thus God loves everyone, said Jesus. But still, he did not
identify himself to the wicked nor to the rich. He identified himself to the
poor. Of course, he wanted to touch the heart of the wicked as well as of the
rich, but he did it from the poor and through them.
He identified himself to the poor
by becoming one of them. He made his own their groans and their hopes. If he
loved the whole of humanity, he loved it with the heart of the poor, with their
cry and with their most foolish dreams.
The poor are the ones who inspired him the Beatitudes and also the
marvel of the Kingdom. Without the poor, the gospel would simply not exist, and
neither Jesus.
Jesus loved the poor to the point
of giving himself totally to the task of giving back to them hope and life. He
would show interest in them as being persons with a name and a face. He would
give them the opportunity to speak, to cry out their truth. He would listen to
the poor. He would open his arms and extend his hand to raise them up. In the
footsteps of Jesus, life was flourishing.
And when he would meet on the
road rich people who exploited the people, he would not curse them. At times,
he would even enter their homes to share a meal. But he would accept to share
the table as a poor, the way he was. And he would not alter his discourse to
please them. He would even take the opportunity to tell them a few good truths,
without hatred, but also without any concession.
If with Jesus comes the creative
Word of God sowed in our soil, this word can only be the word of the
impoverished. If we want to hear the voice of God, we have to listen to the
poor. If we really want to know God, we have to really know the poor. If we
want to come near God, we have to come near the poor.
But the poor are not all saints.
Many among them are detestable, disgusting, beasts, wicked, deceitful, lazy, envious,
arrogant and violent. Nearly all of them dream of becoming like the rich. How
can God speak to us through that shapeless mass of brave folks among whom are
mixed together, like in a dump, so many «rejects» of humanity?
The same question could be asked
about Jesus who himself was discarded like a «reject» of humanity. He was
excommunicated from his community, subjected to torture as a criminal,
condemned as an apostate and a subversive, and crucified as an enemy of
Religion and of the Fatherland. Yet, we venerate that «reject» of humanity like
the «Savior» of the world.
What that means for us Christians
is that it is there, in human misery, that is buried the supreme Word of God
which recreates humanity.
We may object that Jesus was
«innocent» unlike the poor who are sinners just like the rest of us. True, but
that same judgment should apply as well to the poor, since they also are
innocent.
They are the creatures of a
delirious and perverse system that for centuries produces them by the hundreds
of millions with the only purpose of always enriching those who already own
everything.
That system is a monster. It keeps on growing free of worries, thanks
to a multitude of good people like us who still stupidly believe in the virtues
of the strongest and in the miracles of war and money. Ironically, we pretend
to be the pillars of democracy and of Christianity. And even so, it so happens
that we pray God to bless all of that.
Still, in a world which overflows
with riches, poverty is a heinous crime against humanity whose victims are not
extraterrestrial creatures but the very members of our own body.
If only their cry could pierce
our heart, and their flaws fill us with horror, their sufferings hurt enough
our feelings as to blow up the tedious bubble of our comfortable blindness!
The new evangelization will have
to be built on the flagrant expectations of the impoverished of the Earth. If
not, it will collapse like that house about which Jesus says that an idiot had
built on sand instead of on rock, and which at the first strike of the flood
was carried away like a wisp of straw.
(Matthew 7: 26-27).
Eloy Roy
You make a whip and you hunt the sellers, the merchants, the profiteers, and all those charlatans who destroy the great Temple of the Earth. You drive out those who disembowel the Earth, who empty it of its entrails, bleed it white, poison its waters, its air; those who tear it apart, rape it, tear it to pieces. All those who profane the huge Temple of Nature, the wonderful home of the human family, you kick them out ... You make a whip and you chase the whole bunch with their bulldozers, their insecticides, their drills, their cyanide, their oil, their bombs and their dirty dollars…
(Mark: 11, 15-19)
Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages and Deepl
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