NOAH AND JESUS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about possible how to discuss Aronofsky's movie Noah in Sunday School.

In the movie, Noah hears his wife admit that she would kill to protect her sons from violence.  He had already confessed that he would do the same.  Because of this, he decides that the descendants of Seth are no different than Cain's. 

Noah concludes that all men and women should perish.  He explains to his family how that will go down.  

Shem and Ila will bury him and Naameh.  Ham will bury them.  Japheth will bury Ham.  Japheth will die alone.  The animals only shall live...presumably without evolving.

Only the innocent and the good should survive in Noah's theology, and that does not include people. 

I have thought a lot about this since I viewed the movie. What is it that makes Christians truly different from the rest of the world?

My pious, fundamentalist grandfather, spawn of the fundamentalist homunculus who dwells within me, would say that Christians don't drink, don't do drugs, don't smoke, don't cuss, don't fuck, don't don't don't, and they believe every word in the Bible is true without error.

How is that different from any other pious person in the world?  How numereous are the pious ones in all religions?

When we study the life of Jesus as the Christ, we see him making two statements that are impossible:  turn the other cheek and forgive seventy times seventy.  

I do not believe Jesus intended this to be the way men and women would live once the kingdom has arrived.  This is the way we are all supposed to be towards one another now and always.

Followers of Jesus are the ones who do not fight back.  We turn the other cheek.  We are the ones who forgive until the cows come home, that is, until every cow that has ever lived lows peaceably in its own place.  Disciples of Jesus are the ones who reveal the face of God's love to this godforsaken nuclear waste dump of a world.

The creation carries so much of its orginal goodness proclaimed in the priestly account in Genesis, but it is not good enough. Our species stains it daily with bloodshed and hate.

Thank God there are more good people in the world than bad.  However, that is not good enough either.  Even good people are violent when their complacency is threatened.

Jesus people must create more good in the world or our species may well perish ignorantly, shamefully, and violently.  
Someone has to refuse violence.  They have to do it with enough love to persuade others that it can be done and must be done.  Asking any human to turn the other cheek and forgive seventy times seven seems naive.

I know.  I am like Captain Kirk when he was disguised as an Organian named Berona.  A part of his disguise was to show kindness to an invading force of Klingons, but the Klingon leader recognized immediately that Berona did not like to be pushed around.

I do not like to be pushed around.  I hate it.  Every fiber in my being wants to strike back, and I do strike back more than I should with sarcasm and ridicule.  I sin when I do that, for my intention is to hurt people who are hurting me.  

I would like to see Jesus work in the school where I work.  I would love to see what seventy times seventy gazillion occasions for forgiveness would look like among thirty juvenile delinquents.  

Forgiving anyone more than three times might as well be seven, seventy, four hundred and ninety, or seventy gazillion because it never gets easier.  Often, I do not know if I am able to show patience and love because I love or because I hate.

I certainly do hate.  I hate it that the world is so mean.  I hate myself when I want to be mean back.  I hate having a choice.  I hate choosing to show the same weakness as the world shows by losing my temper and knocking the crap out of someone who surely deserves it.  I hate that almost as much as I hate it the world's doctrine that fighting back is strength.  

It is not strength.  It is violence.  Violence is the worst kind of weakness.  It is the kind of weakness that causes buildings to fall, boats to sink, and millions to perish.  Violence is stupid and disgusting.  

We humans crave violence.  I know a venue where it is harmless and can be experienced in all of its glory.

Violence expressed in art can be very appealing whether on a canvas, a stage, or a screen.  In the imagination--that is where violence should be.  Alas, we see it in all the world, the countries, the cities, towns, and homes ever embedding the human stain on Being itself.  

Jesus put this "turn the other cheek" nonsense into my head.  It is truly the foolishness that runs counter to the world's love of power.

I'm not very happy about it sometimes, but I know that the world should not be the way it is.  As Danny Glover says in Grand Canyon, a person should be able to do their job without a bunch of assholes menacing him with guns and knives.  Children should be able to go to school without being shot or stabbed.  Syrians should be able to live in nice homes with plenty to eat. People who disagree with one another should be able to live together peaceably.  

I should be able to teach English without being threatened, deliberately antagonized, ignored, willfully disobeyed, and constantly cussed out with withering hostility just for doing my job.  A job, by the way, that seeks to better all students.

I should be able to teach English without having to endure the worst educational practices that the nabobs of the company I work for make into policy upon pain of termination.

I yearn to tell them what fools and amateurs they are to me. I know that the true aim of the Company is economic, not educational.  Therefore, I imagine scenarios, rehearse scathing exchanges where I deliver various retaliatory strikes to let them know the depth of my revulsion for the way they run a school.

That lasts about as long as it takes me to drive to work. When I arrive, I am nice.  Always nice.  I forgive just out of sheer will.  I love, but like Berona, I am not pleased to be so gentle.

And like anyone who would follow the Christ, I seek justice and love.  How else will this world be transformed into God's kingdom?

Blessings...