| The absolute religious genius of Jesus is that he utterly refuses all debt codes, purity codes, religious quarantines, and the searching for sinners. He refuses the very starting point of historic religions. He refuses to divide the world into the pure and the impure, much to the chagrin of almost everybody—then and now. Jesus is shockingly not upset with sinners. This is a shock so total that most Christians, to this day, refuse to see it. He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners: these denying, fearful, and illusory individuals are the actual blockage. They are much more likely to hate and feel no compunction. Formerly, religion thought its mission was to expel sin and evil. Through Jesus, we learn that sin lies in the very act of expelling. There is no place to expel it to. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us. We either carry and transform the evil of human history as our own problem, or we increase its efficiency and power by hating and punishing it “over there.” The Jesus pattern was put precisely and concisely by Paul: “for our sake he made the sinless one a victim for sin, so that in him we might become the uprightness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). I admit, that is counterintuitive for most people. Only mystics and sinners seem to get it. |
02513 – Do We “Get It”?
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