The love of Jesus is expansive out of a love that embraces both Roman and Jew; it is a love that embraces “born” enemies. His spirit encompassed the emptiness inherent in spanning the seemingly impassible spiritual no man’s land between Jew and Roman. His spirit encompassed a depth of fulfillment in the attempt to be the transcendence of this spiritual impasse. And to the extent that he achieved this, he felt he had ascended to the mind of God. It was precisely the clash between the Jewish spirit-mind and the Roman spirit- mind that enlarged the breadth of Jesus’s soul. Christianity is only the apex or mountaintop of the reconciliation in death that this spiritual war produced.
The bizarre circumstances of Jesus’s birth are directly responsible for the belief that Jesus was supernatural or beyond nature. If he could be what a natural Roman or a natural Jew was not, perhaps he could do what a natural Roman or a natural Jew could not. Perhaps he could end the entire world by being the overcoming of the spiritual clash between Jew and Roman that exemplifies “the world”. This is why Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God was in his soul: a soul beyond Roman and Jew — a soul beyond nature. “God’s Kingdom” encompasses both Jew and gentile literally within the breadth of Jesus’s soul, and in this way, the believers in Jesus find God’s Kingdom within themselves within Jesus.
The laws of the Romans and the laws of Moses no longer applied to Jesus’s spiritual transcendence of all hitherto normative sociobiological laws. When Jesus’s contemporaries saw him walking down the street, did they react with the common, casual register, “He’s a Jew”, or, “He’s a Roman”? Perhaps their reaction was more like, “What is he?” Interracial marriages in the ancient world were neither generally accepted nor common. And this kind of intermixture of Roman soldier and Jewish peasant, in the middle of a war, just did not happen in normal life except through war.
How could Jesus escape from being perceived as a mutant perversion of nature or a monstrous angel-freak? But if people stared obsessively at Jesus, was this because he was a freak or because they could see in their souls that he was special? Popular fascination with the man almost certainly contributed to the belief that he was unique, sui generis and, ultimately, the one true messiah.
Jesus, in the classic Jewish manner, turned his condition as a social outcast into the basis of his spiritual election. Shunned as a social leper, an untouchable, or a source of social disease, Jesus turned this on its head in classic prophetic form. By touching Jesus (Mark 5:28), one is healed of disease. In other words, the moral disease of many of the people of Israel was to make him an outcast in the first place. They could cure themselves by touching Jesus, the social leper, in faith: “your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease” (Mark 5:34). Yet Jesus could never have preached as he did if numerous Jews were not sympathetic to his message, defenders of him, or followers of him.
Yet if Jesus was the very symbol of Rome’s rape of Israel, the putrid symbolic spawn of the evil venereal disease of Roman oppression, were his persecutors not right to fight evil? How could Jesus blame those who despised him for his birth without somehow sanctioning the sin of rape that begot him? If Jesus were to accept himself in the biological sense, he would be accepting the rightness of evil and the rightness of the world as it is.
fuck fuck FUCK
