An Off-Key Carol

illustration by Jason Stout

Half our century ago, in an Egyptian cave, an ancient manuscript was found. Scholars now believe it to be the earliest gospel, The Gospel of Thomas. In it, Jesus says: "Let him who seeks, continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will become astonished."

Surely there is no more troubling, astonishing figure in history. Ignoring the tracts of believers, sticking to the few facts we know, we can say that Buddha taught personal enlightenment, Moses sought to save his tribe, and Mohammed wanted a world lit by his revelation. A common person can understand those desires. Jesus is far more enigmatic, for he seems to have sought what no one in their right mind wants: redemption through the Cross. We pretend to admire that, yet if you seek it for yourself you're considered unstable, to say the least. (It's worth remembering that many in Jesus' time, including his family, thought him unstable, too.) Still, twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, the world seems to gravitate toward this strange figure.

I dislike the Christmas season not for the vulgarity of its commerce, nor for the inescapable Muzak that's replaced caroling, but because my mother did her work well and made me incapable of seeing this holiday as anything other than a contemplation of this haunting, troubling, astonishing man. Here he is again, following me around, asking me to explain myself to him and to decipher him for myself. I never manage to do either. But the struggle to do both, an inner conflict I seem helpless to prevent, ends with an almost physical sense of Jesus, as I perceive him, sinking deeper into my soul with ever greater weight. I used to know a priest who would have called this process "faith."

It's been my privilege to know three genuine Christians. One was my mother. Ever poor, she would often give what she had to whoever crossed her path in a state needier than her own. I rarely saw her hesitate, nor show any regret for being the poorer for her gift. Thus I was raised to believe that the test of a Christian is simple, as stated plainly by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, Verses 35-40. They are exacting, difficult words:

"I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Naked, and ye clothed me. I was sick, and ye visited me. I was in prison, and ye came unto me." The people he was speaking to were mystified, didn't remember any such thing, and asked how could it be? "Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

There it is, and nothing will change it. All the Sunday services and all the greedy prayers can't make you a Christian without it. That is why after you become troubled you will become astonished.

That is the voice of the Jesus I love. (Whether I live up to it -- thus far, I can't -- is another matter.) But he had many voices, among them a voice I fear. I don't mean the voice that rants about damnation. We don't need Jesus for that, we do damnation brilliantly for ourselves. Ask the survivors of Auschwitz, or just count to twenty -- 15 children will have died of hunger while you're counting.

No, the Jesus I fear said, in Matthew 5:27-29: "Ye have heard that it was said... Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out... And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off...."

That is the Jesus of most Sunday Christians, and what is he really saying? He's making the human psyche itself a sin. He's saying that there is no line between thought and act, fantasy and behavior, imagination and morals. Which is an attempt to deny the very existence of the psyche. For our psyches, our imaginations, constantly thrust forth images -- some shocking, some not. We can choose among our imaginings, but we can't choose not to have an imagination. We can make choices about our behavior, but we have no control about what images rise from our souls. To make our imaginations a sin is to create a conflict within us that, as history amply proves, is irreconcilable and unbearable.

How many millions have been tortured, murdered, excluded, censored, enslaved, and humiliated, in the name of official Christianity's war upon the imagination -- Christianity's inability to tolerate the existence (much less the freedom) of the imagination, nor tolerate anything other than its own image of itself? Following Jesus' own standards, we must lay Christendom's horrors at his pierced feet. For it was Jesus himself who gave us the right to judge him, and taught us how, when he said, "Ye shall know the tree by its fruit."

And yet, and yet... when they gathered to stone the adulteress, she who had sinned not only in imagination but in the flesh, it was this same Jesus saying: "He who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

That is a forgotten Jesus: the Jesus willing to break any law, of the church or of the state, if it interfered with his overwhelming tenderness. He even broke his own laws: The woman had sinned, in thought and in act, but he would not see her stoned. This is very, very different from Moses and Mohammed. The law, as they perceived it from God, was more important to them than the heart. But as we read the gospels, again and again the heart is more important to Jesus than the law.

(I mean no dishonor to Moses and Mohammed. Each was capable of great mercy but, to my knowledge, they never transgressed their own laws. Each was trying to found a society, and when you're doing that, your focus must be on the law. Jesus was trying to challenge a society, and when you're doing that your focus must be on the heart.)

It is easy to cling to Jesus, the challenger, who railed against the scribes and Pharisees. But then he goes and challenges himself as well, as he was always unafraid of doing, and he becomes the Jesus we fear most, the voice that said without equivocation: "Love one another."

Buddha told us to be compassionate and unattached. Jesus wasn't interested in unattachment. His counsel was the most passionate attachment possible: "Love one another."

Well, we all know how dicey love is. It's enough to drive you mad, and it has. But we can't forget that voice: "Love one another." It makes liars and sinners of us all. We live mostly by, "Fear one another." And, as the Christmas season makes plain, "Profit from one another." Many spend the Sunday Sabbath watching games that say, "Be victorious over one another." But we're haunted by "Love one another." To claim that we all, concretely, should live like that, much less that public policy should be based on that -- well, as you know, to claim such things is to be thought a fool. Certainly no business is run that way, and business is what we're all about these days. Yet those three words, spoken to a small gathering two millennia ago, were so powerful that even now we're haunted.

What eyes that man must have had, to give his words such indelible authority.

So this season there are all those infants in all those cradles under all those trees and in all those parks. I don't like babies, truth be told. They are concentrated globules of unadulterated need. That, as far as I can see, is all an infant does: It needs. Thus every Christmas we celebrate God as hunger in its purest form. We try to appease that hunger with trivialities presented to each other as sentimental gifts. Fully a third of the nation's GNP depends on this appeasement. Is it that, collectively, we can't approach God without too much awe or hypocrisy to bear, unless we imagine God as a helpless, hungry child? But then, we've just cut off funds for a million helpless hungry children, so even our least threatening collective image of God has become nightmarish.

But the cradled Jesus implies nightmare, for something in us knows that we are only praising the infant because one day he'll be tortured. I don't think of the nails so much, nor the incredible strain on the muscles when your full weight is supported by nails in your hands. I think of something you never see in the paintings: the flies that must have buzzed around his face, his eyes. Fat, inescapable, nibbling flies. The feeling of flies crawling over your face, as in footage of starving children in Africa -- that is part of how Jesus was tortured. I have never doubted that our knowledge of the infant's fate is part of the unconscious reason that so many get so anxious at Christmas.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says: "Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." He was right about that. He seems inescapable. His "Love one another" echoes down the ages. Every single promise he made is either unfulfilled or unverifiable, yet still that echo haunts us when we look at each other.

Of course we are dear to each other, for even a stranger's action can effect us deeply, make or break our day. We can't seem to live with that fact -- but isn't it a tacit admission of how much we actually do, whether we like it or not, love one another?

In the spirit of that question, let me say: Merry Christmas.