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It was a number of years ago when I found myself praying in church, when I looked up at the crucifix, and thought to myself, “How crazy is this? Why am I asking for help from someone who is nailed to cross?” If there was ever anyone who was in a helpless state, it is a person who is crucified. Consider all the able-bodied people who help us survive our daily life, from the plumber to the doctor to the builder to the farmer to the energy producer, etc., none of them would be of much practical value without the ability of motion. What then makes Jesus helpful rather than helpless? We should be trying to Save Jesus, not vice-versa. He needs our help.
As a white male, entrepreneurial, self-employed, college-educated and American, I exist as among the most privileged people in the world. While not rich compared to some, my lifestyle is among the top 10% of the richest people in the world, if certain statistics can be believed. I am a master in this universe, buying and selling, reading and speaking, thinking and doing, coming and going. I have achieved the American Dream of house and family and freedom, yet there was still something more I wanted.
I was down on my knees praying for the answer that I have always sought, going back to at least the seventh grade: why is there war and poverty? This is a pretty common question, I suspect, but I am not sure how often it has been answered. In seventh grade I was the “hippie” at my catholic school in Watertown. It was 1970, and one of the nuns showed us pictures from the battlefield in Vietnam. She put them on the chalk edge and we filed around the room looking at them. Here in vivid and silent color was the real Vietnam. Men in uniform laying in the tall lush green grass, with blood oozing out of their skulls and other places. They were not so different than the crucified Jesus, reduced to a shell of flesh, like meat in the marketplace of time.
This same nun also played for us Jesus Christ Superstar, the rock opera. Looking back, it is clear that she was no ordinary nun, but I did not appreciate that at the time. I didn’t really like her or school. I was the chronic daydreamer, detached and uninterested in my immediate surroundings, schedules and the rat-race rhythm. My brother had the album, and I had head it a hundred times already. To me, her playing this album was just some goofing off time in school. That I liked. She was obviously unconcerned about MCAS scores and was trying to teach a deeper lesson. It is too bad that I was not paying more attention, as I may have discovered she already knew the answer that I was grasping for.
Please don’t get the impression that catholic school is normally a deeply probing moral and spiritual place, or that she or my peacenik attitude were the norm. In fact, I have witnessed more cruelty at this school than anywhere else in my privileged life, by both students and teachers. The world everywhere is a microcosm of a macrocosm. The conflict in Vietnam was no different than the conflicts in America: civil rights, poverty, political power, foreign policy, etc. A consensus is hard to come by everywhere. War and poverty have a thousand faces, but I was primarily focused on just one. I hated Nixon. I could not see the whole. It was only when I was down on my knees that I began to see how I fit within reality.
As absurd as it may sound, I am the one who crucified Christ. I am the person responsible for war and poverty. I am the gnawing specimen of history that keeps repeating itself generation after generation. You are too, of course. We all are. In fact, it is unavoidable. The problem is not what we disagree about, the problem is what we agree about. Our only consensus is the problem! We all believe that money is “real,” when in fact it is simply a figment of our imagination. The love of money is the root of all evil, but more specifically, how we create, understand and handle money is the root of all conflict.
We have been doing a terrible job in how we conceptualize and manage money. In modern times, the four horsemen of the apocalypse can be thought of as George Washington, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and Robert Morris. They set down the cornerstone for the society we live in, and each one in his own way rejected Jesus Christ, even if they acknowledged his existence. Each was a reformer, ambitious, hard-working and concerned with the future. They undoubtedly believed themselves to be righteous, but they forgot a key instruction: love your enemy. And secondarily, don’t be so concerned with wealth in this world.
Government, regardless of how it is configured politically, is the source of both war and money. It is the wellspring of all misery: a central government, a central bank and a standing army is the infrastructure of every empire. The individual is smothered by this arrangement since fidelity to organization replaces faith in God and kindness toward one another. The enduring problem with human laws is that the wise don’t need them and the unwise won’t follow them. Adding new laws to God’s laws creates a conundrum. The first law-makers of every country were first law-breakers. The cornerstone of every country is hypocrisy. Any success in a system of hypocrisy can only be accomplished through hypocrisy. As such, my sin, your sin, and our sins are all the same: hypocrisy and double-standards. All men are created equal, in the worst way possible, by our collective errors. Individual countries simply reflect the same conflicts and the same attitudes on a grander scale.
But moving beyond the structural failures of society, what am I doing wrong? I buy and sell goods for a living. Unfortunately, I am just like the money-changers in the temple. Exchanging goods for money is not any different than changing money for money. Both Profit and Interest presume an unequal exchange. This habit results in inflation and concentrations of wealth. Conflicts inevitably follow as wealth and power divide. Every war is actually a civil war, they only spread as other nations get involved. As war spreads, so too does the misery. No government can ever collect enough in taxes for what it spends. Government is the origin of money, not the people. As values are applied to goods, and more transactions occur, the bigger the problems become. Boom must follow bust, and the swings and the divides must grow larger. The geometric progression of compounded “value” is a limitless as numbers themselves. Government is not incompetent by chance, there is an underlying cause and effect. Since government exists to kill enemies and to regulate money, when Jesus says to love your enemy and to share your wealth He challenges the very foundation of every civilization. He says to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's because the faithful have no need for money. We are woefully lost, and the creation of paper money has compounded our problems.
So what should we do? For starter’s, we should take Leviticus more seriously. Jesus came to confirm the old laws. The prohibition on profit and interest was good policy by God. Everybody can afford zero, nobody can afford inflation. Jubilee was a system of making automatic adjustments so that the next generation did not find themselves at a disadvantage to the previous generation. Reformers have used violence and laws in every way possible. They fail repeatedly because they abandon the only strategy that works: Forgiveness. It is mercy that the world needs, not justice. Courage, not fear. Humility, not pride. Change, not tradition. Each and every man is an individual, for good or ill. Mountains are not moved whole, but by changing the nature of each grain of sand. “The good” has the same advantage as “the bad.” Both grow from a single mustard seed, and we get to choose which seed we will be. It is a small act, yet the harvest is huge. As Isaiah declared, if we are willing and obedient, we will eat the best from the land, but if we resist and rebel, we will be devoured by the sword. This would seem to be true for both this world and the next one. If you ask you will be answered, at the time of God’s choosing. Happy Easter.
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