A neighbor gave me a lend of his Passion of the Christ DVD tonight. My normal pre-movie routine involves turning off nearly all of the lights, drawing the curtains, making popcorn, and setting up the TV to play through my stereo. I forwent popcorn. Popcorn seemed sacrilegious. Which makes me wonder about the sales of popcorn and Pepsi and candy treats when the movie was playing at theaters. But not so much. I wonder more, say, about the curious spelling of sacrilegious.

In the movie, I liked the bits that weren’t expected. The floating androgynous Satan. She was cool. This feeling of a not quite but nearly absent God. I think that worked out well. Pontius Pilate, caught, trying not to do the thing he had to do. That was clever. And I liked his wife. And the resurrection was good. Just long enough. Just short enough. And not nearly as goofy as I had worried.

But, the truth is, I was bugged the whole time. I love the cleverness, the beauty, the tragedy of the story. But I don’t believe in Jesus.

My maternal grandmother was a gentle Christian and believed in all the good bits of Christianity. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies too. Be good and do good things. And all of that. My aunt, my mother’s sister, came out more of the tyrannical type of Christian. She hammered into me John 3:16. I can still quote it verbatim. She stole me away for a week to Bible camp where she impressed upon me that the only way to get into the Kingdom was through Jesus, and where, in the end, she stood me up in front of a crowd and had me speak, “I accept Jesus as my own personal Savior”. And when I grew up and she got wind of some of my deeds, she sent me a card, the kind you buy in bulk, with flowers on the front or something, and inside, this: “I hope you come back to Jesus.”

There’s no going back to Jesus — if I had ever been there in the first place. And for my aunt, all of this here, blasphemy. I admire conviction and faith. It is not my intention here to be blasphemous. But this is what I don’t get:

If God exists, He – or She or It or Whatever – if He exists, He must be some kind of architect. That is, religion requires purpose and an organizing principle. Otherwise, God is only an inventor and we are abandoned. This God requires no faith and demands no religion. The Christian God was an inventor and an architect. And this is my problem with Jesus: God, an architect, does not get to change the rules and he wouldn’t want to (I got tired of capitalizing). For hundreds of thousands of years, you did good things, you believed in God and you got the keys of the kingdom. Presumably. But after hundreds of thousands of years of living, of people, of criminals and saints and malefactors and benefactors, after hundreds of thousands of years of human history, God changes the rules. Now, after the birth of a boy, there is no way to the Kingdom but through Jesus. I just can’t abide that. If you are God and you are an architect of reason and purpose, you don’t get to change the rules. You wouldn’t need to and, what’s more, you wouldn’t want to. The creation of Jesus, the addition of Jesus, is, as far as I can tell, one of those dangly bits they add on to laws. What is that word? A codicil. No. That’s not quite right. But if I can inherit the kingdom of God, then the word, codicil will do.

It’s not just that God changed the rules. That’s hard enough to swallow. The rules suddenly make a lot less sense. It’s not enough anymore that I believe in God, that I believe in doing good things, that I take responsibility for my actions, that I do all of the things that, before Jesus, would have got me into the kingdom, I must also believe in Jesus. Not just the man. I must believe he was born of God and a virgin. I must believe that he was holy. I must believe that he died for my sins.

Not just God and the principles of good living, but God and Jesus. And not just God and Jesus but God and Jesus and Jesus was born of a virgin and Jesus said a lot of lovely things and Jesus was brutalized and crucified and died for my sins. And not just all of that but I was born guilty. If Jesus died for my sins, I killed him. I murdered Jesus when I was born.

Well a fiddle-faddle, a poppy-cock, and a humbug. It is patently unacceptable that I was born guilty. But the androgynous Satan character was still cool. Meanwhile, bicycles.

SS