What if Jesus could call a “do over”?
My nephew and I sat chatting with each other in the quiet of my “mountain house” last night. We talked about some of the things that seemed like mistakes to other people but turned out to be really right for us. We talked about things we wished we’d known when we were younger. We talked about things we did almost right and, in retrospect we wish we’d understood better earlier in our respective adulthood’s.
We talked about Christianity and how being expected to embrace it the way other people embrace it turned out to be a bad approach for each of us. He said “At some point I realized that following a God who gets mad at you for not doing things a certain way makes no sense. Maybe that means I’m going to end up with the other guy but I’ll risk it.”
I laughed and said “It’ll be a hell of a party. I’ll be there, as will most of my friends”
The Church is nearly 2,000 years old. For the first 300 years or so it was loosely strung together collection of people exploring the nature of God via letters, stories, conversations, and rumors. The Emperor Constantine most famously tried to put an end to this approach to faith by calling the first of the ecumenical councils, the Council of Nicaea, which, conveniently, he also presided over.
The Council was, at best, an attempt to get some clarity over the “rules of Christianity” by a guy who was used to being given consistent advice on how to approach things like ruling an empire. He had to have been frustrated. He’d been at this Christianity business for 12 years at this point and every time he turned around he was bumping into some new “sacred” writing. At worse, the First Council of Nicaea was an attempt to consolidate the power of this growing and highly resilient faith with lip-service to a few of the larger groups and over-riding authority to a guy who fundamentally worked for the Emperor himself. And it was successful – Christianity as rooted in the first 7 ecumenical councils constituted a force so powerful in the known world that it became the root of law almost everywhere it ended up. It didn’t face a true obstacle post First Council until nearly 300 years later when a young prophet in the middle east took scriptural dictation from the angel Gabriel and produced the Qur’an.
Yes, *that* Gabriel.
Martin Luther had no such divine messenger when he arrived at the church door on October 31st, 1517 with his hammer, nail, and list of 95 items best described as a Fault Letter to Christianity.
Interestingly, October 31st also marks the end of the spiritual year to Wiccans and many other pagans. It is a time when the veil is thin and the ability to access the wisdom of ancestors is highest. Most pagans then enter a time of reflection and preparation for the year to come. A new beginning.
Today the majority of religion in the world stems from a one dude who produced two sons via two different wives in what is best described as the worst case of sibling rivalry since Cain met Able.
The idea of God being omniscient, regardless of which name you call him by, is pretty rooted in our perception of who he (gender neutral use) is. Which makes me wonder if Jesus chatting up God in the Garden of Gethsemane – as described in Matthew chapter 26 – was less about the Crucifixion and more about his glimpse into the next 2,000 years of humanity’s misbehavior.
Was Jesus’s experience of humanity enough of a game changer in his perception of the possibility of us to make him doubt the effectiveness of God’s game plan?
His post crucifixion reappearance to his posse leads me to believe he wasn’t giving up on us.
But what if Jesus could call a “do over”? What would he do differently?
What If Jesus...? 