Bogosity

This has been rattling around in my head since Christmas. It seemed to me that the readings of the Christmas season had a lot to do with hope.

Back in the old days, the Israelites used to hope that God would make them into a great nation and lead them to the promised land where they could settle down and get some serious milk and honey production going. A little further along and they spent a lot of time hoping that God would defend them from their enemies. The psalmist(s) writing on a more personal level hoped for a lot of different things – the usual smiting of enemies and cries for justice but also for intimacy with God and understanding or wisdom when it came to God and to life. Moving along, and the nation of Israel was divided, invaded and Nebuchudnezzar carted them off to be his slaves. Then we get the prophets hoping for a restored Israel – taking the line that if everyone were to just repent, get rid of their idols and stop sinning then God would restore Israel. The later prophets were also mad keen on a Messiah figure who would be God’s chosen and would lead the Jews back to God and restore Israel.

So along came Jesus (one of many claiming to be the Messiah) and he seemed to fit the bill pretty well while at the same time he totally blasted all of the Jewish theologian’s understandings of the Messiah out of the water. My kingdom is not of this world he said, Unless you become like a child you won’t enter the Kingdom he said. And he did other strange things like forgive sins without requiring sacrifices and punishments. And most unexpected of all, he waltzed into Jerusalem when he knew there was a price on his head and happily let the Jewish leaders make an example of him in an extreme way.

But of course we then have the apostles of Jesus who believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, gone to heaven and was going to make a come back. These new hybrid Jews called Christians believed that Jesus had somehow made it possible for us to know God directly through praying to him and celebrating what we today call communion or the Eucharist. So these Christians hoped for the forgiveness of sins and they hoped for resurrection.

But what do we hope for today? People don’t become Christians unless they are hoping for something – people don’t become Christians if they don’t feel a need to.

The traditional Christian message as extracted from Paul’s letters assumes that we feel a deep need to be forgiven or that we believe that God is raging with anger against us because of our sins. The Jesus message is a wonderful salvation from the damnation of God and we are supposed to be filled with gratitude to Jesus for sacrificing himself in our place.

But here in the west – those of us who have money and aren’t oppressed find it a bit hard to relate to this message. That kind of Gospel does really well with people who’s life is shit and who may find it easy to believe that they need forgiveness.

The rest of us don’t feel that we are particularly bad or that we need God for anything much at all. Many people turn to God when things get difficult – they are dying, a close friend or family member dies, they lose their job – whatever.

But here I am, relatively rich, relatively not in need of forgiveness and I’m really into Christianity – why?

For me it is still about hope but not about my personal hope to go to heaven, it’s more of a kind of hope of humanity. What interests me is all of the different phases of hope that are described in the Bible and that are also found in just about all forms of media and even occasionally in the cheesiest pop-culture. The hope for a better world, a hope to be perfected. That’s what I get from Christianity at this stage of my life – being able to reflect on and tap into deeper feelings than just wanting to get a promotion at work, great investment return or whatever it is that we rich people obsess over.

So Jesus for me is the embodiment of Hope. I think that God really did send Jesus to us and that Jesus represents all of our hopes – the hopes that topple dictatorships, that heal the sick, give sight to the blind, set prisoners free and lift up the poor. Even though those hopes may at times seem to have been utterly destroyed, the story of Jesus tells us that hope cannot die.