What would Jesus shoot?

The Tuesday After Advent 1

It's a reasonable question. In the old days when I was a parish priest, the sermon I wanted to preach [but never had the courage to] was called "What do shepherds eat?" Like, think about it. You're a shepherd. You're tired. You're hungry. You've been stepping in sheep dip all day. So you really believe Mom packed peanut butter sandwiches and a twinkie in your lunchbox? Like my sainted grandma used to say: "Everyone who believes that, stand on your head."

There's no PETA Study Bible--at least yet. Like, do you know any vegetarian cowboys? So for the spiritually challenged, here's the answer: Got sheep?

Yeah, yeah. Guess what, folks, when shepherds got hungry, shepherds ate sheep. Kind of reminds me of some bishops I know. There's an old cartoon I injudiciously posted in the sacristy some years ago. It showed a bishop dining on rack of lamb with the caption: "I said feed them, not eat them!' The only better cartoon I had was one that I even more injudiciously mailed to my bishop. I think it was a Kliban. It showed two dogs, one dressed as a businessman--or should I say "businessdog"--standing at the sign-in desk after hours at a downtown building. The other dog, dressed as a security guard, was pointing to the sign-in book. The caption read: "I know you are who you say you are, but regulations still require me to sniff your butt." My bishop never acknowledged receiving it. Go figure. Though I'm pretty sure some ecclesiatical mucky-muck come to lay sweaty hands on my confirmands probably spied the cartoon of the sheep eating episkopoi in the sacristy.

What can I say? The Word is real. For some of us-- way too real. But the real problem is not that it's real but that it's realer than we are. So we idealize it. We really want vegetarian shepherds, teetotaling Jesuses and Christs that don't poop. [And yes, Virginia, Our Lord had bowel movements.] We have a tendency to sentimentalize Our Lord to such an extent that some of his humanity invariably slips away. Instead of a 100% God and 100% man, we get a 60/40 Jesus...60% God and 40% man.

It's a very subtle drift towards either Docetism or Sabellianism, not the full blown acknowledgement of a God "Who for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man..." 100% both ways. Fully God, fully human.

I realize I have probably offended some, but anything less than a Savior who is fully human and fully divine is not a savior. He's a prayer card. Light a cigar with him, and throw him away. Because that's about all he's good for.

I have recently been reading the 2nd century Church Father, Irenaeus. One of my favorite quotes from Irenaeus is that "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." St. Irenaeus did not write this to glorify human beings. He wrote it to counter Gnostics who believed that Christ had not been real. And by extension, that human beings were not real. In fact, for the Gnostics, pretty much nothing was real.

St. Irenaeus understood only too well that unless Christ was the Word made flesh, unless he was "in the flesh", we were in some really deep do do. Because for man to be fully human, Christ had to be fully human. The only way for us to be fully alive was for Christ to have been fully alive, to suffer, die, be buried, and on the third day rise from the grave.

It's not easy looking at Christ without sentimentality. To float down Pious River blowing smoke rings up the devil's arse. But it's always the answers we don't want to the questions we won't ask that always come back to bite us on a butt that only God loves enough to sniff. Because, make no mistake, one day we're all going to stand at the sign-in desk.

H. Richard Niebuhr [yeah, I know he's Protestant] once described the gooey sticky God we just "love to love". He's "A God without wrath [bringing] men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Two days into the liturgical New Year and it appears nothing much has changed.

What the hell. It's 12:20 AM and I'm going to read Compline then watch the tail end [since the theme today is "tail ends"] of Sukiyaki Western Django . It's on Showtime. And it's a true story.

Trust me.

Retired Sheep

 

Really retired sheep