Maybe NOT Making Jesus the Reason for the Season Will Help
By: Brian Kean
Tags: Christmas, Kindness, Love, Jesus, Equality

Poor Jesus. Another year filled with so much hypocrisy, so much hate and anger, and much of it lived in his good name.

I’ll be honest: Thank God I am not Jesus. I would have lost it a long time ago and really abused my powers. Now they will start running around saying I am the reason for the season. Please, leave me alone. Maybe this is what Jesus is thinking, but who knows?

Catholicized throughout the first seventeen years of my life, I became one of those hardcore “‘God’ is everywhere” people. On hikes alone through the mountains, moving ever upward and feeling the press of thinning air, I stop to look around me. The precise meshing of colors offset by an endless array of shapes and sizes, all of it so randomly, but precisely, slapped onto the canvas before me, sends my retinas into fits.

Taking a deep breath, the smell of pine as it becomes more aromatic in the warming pockets of sun blazing through the icy forest shadows, fills my lungs. I always feel so lucky at this moment.

“Thank you, God,” I utter. Mountains are proof that a force bigger and better than us, more pure, does exist.

God for me can be a Jesus-figure when needed or a hike in the mountains. A church offers sanctuary from the world like those deep, emerald forests populated with scampering and bouncing wildlife. I don’t need man-made churches to be aligned with divinity but many people do — and that’s fine. I often go to them when city-bound and no mountains are available. If religion can make people kinder, then let’s all do religion. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way. Religion seems to cause a lot more problems than need be, especially today in our society.

God isn’t religion. God is divine; divinity is what it is — I challenge any holy-roller to tell me I am wrong.

I mean, if people were as loving and holy as they physically present in churches, then so many of the ills in our society today would be non-existent. Many of the so-called influencers, be they actors, politicians, or TV news personalities, live public lives that are in no way aligned with the goodness of a “God,” a walk in the mountains, or a life sacrificed on a cross — a gift to all of us offering eternal life. These would-be examples of how we could live better are failing us, and many of them are all up in Jesus’s grill, so to speak.

Jesus

Remember when Jesus kind of lost it because his Father’s temples were turned into cash-cows? (Matthew 21:12,13, New Revised Standard Version) What would Jesus say today if he could see the way organized religion has turned the worship of God into such a cold, and in many ways, heartless commercial venture? Discriminate and hate others, but as long as you give money and remember to drop in the appropriate shout-outs to Jesus — all is good.

Many of the most common transgressions the divine power warned us about — gluttony, coveting this and that, failure to treat your body as if it were truly a temple, et cetera — shape the lives of many of the most holy among us.

Humans are weak. 2020, more than many other years, has proven that professed love for thy neighbor for many of among us is just a lie; the way bleached teeth are supposed to suggest a person is healthier, wealthier and happier.

God’s temple is not those mega churches where so few wear masks. It is not the priceless cathedrals being governed by Rome. God’s temple is that walk in the mountains, along a beach— the nature we so willfully destroy. These same people who say they follow God’s words then mock a child, Greta Thunberg, when she draws our attention to this hypocrisy.

Praise Jesus, they rant, getting angry when our political views differ from their views. Anger rises, and emotions barely resembling love flow because we don’t wear Jesus is the reason for the season t-shirts or hang flags in front of our homes.

2020 was not a year in which Jesus could have been proud of us. It was a year lauding everything Jesus was against; and the laziness in understanding these teachings has led to so many unnecessary deaths in our nation. Look at the mask-stupidity, people. I heard some evangelical preacher talking about how “ . . . Jesus would have been against wearing masks — the government never would have told him what to do,” the lunatic shouted. Jesus would have worn a mask — take that to the bank.

But the hate and non-Jesus stuff cannot be relegated solely to masks. Another Black man was murdered by a racist policeman. Some of our country men and women made comments like sure, it was excessive force, but, I mean, you know he had a record and he was high and — yes, these words were actually expressed after watching that man cry out for his mother. A friend of mine told me there was more to Mr. Floyd then meets the eye. The cop who killed George, he said, knew him and held a grudge and so that’s why he strangled him. It surely was not an instance of systemic racism.

You know what met my eye about the murder of a man who looks like George Floyd? That he looked more like the real, historical Jesus than the wisp of a man whose piercing blue eyes and peach-like complexion reminds me of a 1940s Estée Lauder night cream advertisement. What many people don’t know, actually, is that a large portion of the Syrian refugees who flooded into the world back in 2015 spoke the very same language that Jesus spoke — Aramaic. So much of the racist hate we see today in the world was brought to the forefront because of those refugees. Imagine that one of them is kin to Jesus; or that God was testing us.

Jesus in our modern life has been so pulled apart and put back together again like a holy-rolling Mr. Potato head, and each time He is reconstituted, the image of the divine power looks more and more like us in all of our vileness and fallibility. Oh, the behavior being attributed to poor JC, these days.

If I were Jesus, I would be really pissed off. I mean I would be using my powers to punish everyone. Use my name to prove your righteousness and then bend my teachings to fit your flawed and harmful ways? ZAP! If I was Jesus, I would have messed up those people whose idea it was to put those little kids in those cages down at the boarder.

Let’s just say that, for humanity’s sake, thank God I am not him.

Let’s Forget About Jesus This Season

This essay has been one of not of anger but exasperation. Christmas is my favorite time of year, but because of the level of vileness that is committed in the name of that divine force, instead of rejoicing, singing, and feeling the magic of my favorite song, “Silent Night,” I am instead wishing for a 2020 do-over.

Let’s make this December 25th a day for all of us to reconsider how it is we treat each other. Let’s make this the season of our neighbor. Because we can’t see Jesus, and thanks to that wonderful little out he gives us by being all-forgiving, we transgress against those we can see and then conveniently let a few whoops of “Praise Jesus!” fly and all is whole again. Wrong.

We need to re-imagine the ideal of a Jesus. We need to stop hating those nearest to us, warring, impoverishing our fellow citizens, and end the greed and worshiping of wealth. We need to push ourselves to live better lives.

We have let divinity down with our selfishness and this failure gives us so much opportunity to ask ourselves some vital questions this Christmas. Let’s not slip back into habit and start whining about a war on Christmas. Let’s not pontificate about Jesus-Jesus-Jesus. Just ask questions:

Do I need a Jesus in my life? Do I want this divine power to have been born today? You might be surprised that your answer is No — and if so, then you are free. Free to regard the day as a winter solstice and go on being free of conscience.

If you say Yes, I need a Jesus — then think about your behavior over the past year, might any of it have been cringe-worthy to Jesus? Acts that might have been uncharacteristic of the teachings of a good person (Jesus was human, also)? If yes, then make this Christmas about the people you hurt, change your ways, and grow back to Jesus.

Too many of us act with meanness in our hearts and then conveniently use a “Praise Jesus!” to absolve ourselves of those transgressions. Living a life that is aligned with a more divine, higher power for many is a genuine inconvenience. If you find it uncomfortable being kind, then just let poor Jesus off the hook.

This Christmas, let’s give the Nazarene a break from being the scapegoat for our so-so human behavior and let’s make an effort to come back to some form of divinity, a better world in 2021.