Spiritual Disciplines

I wanted to keep this clean.  Alas, it was not to be.

If you live in a crowded city (and let's be honest, all big cities are crowded as a matter of definition.  Even the small town I grew up in has gotten bigger, enough to have serious traffic problems in one small part of town where, now, everybody seems to want to be at every hour of the day.), you face the problem of other people.  I freely admit my sins:  crowds have always been a problem for me, and as I get older I (relatedly) get more misanthropic.  I take responsibility for my misanthropy (it stems from my childhood, at least in my self-analysis of me), but it is who I am now.  Crowds bother me, other people annoy me.  And then, this morning, I had an epiphany.

Jesus told us that whoever we see, we see him.  He put it particularly in "the least of these," to underscore the point.  I don't think it undermines his point to say that applies to everyone; everyone else, that is.  I don't see Jesus in me; I see him in you.  It crossed my mind when I saw the woman in the store this morning who was clearly crippled in some way.  "That's Jesus," I thought to myself, not for the first time.  But then I realized that applied equally to everyone in the store:  the woman in the wheelchair a bit further on, the store workers, the customers, the drivers of cars in the parking lot, even the driver of the Google car with a camera tripod mounted to the roof and California plates.  (I assume it was Google; I also toyed with standing in my yard (the store is in my neighborhood) waiting for that car to come down the street, so I could raise my middle finger as it went by.  Told ya I was a misanthrope.  Jesus also said thinking is as bad as doing, right?).  I went on thinking about it as I drove away, and decided I could make this a spiritual discipline, and maybe it would remake me.  When I can apply it to other drivers, I'll have made a real breakthrough (you don't want to drive with me.  I go from Bruce Banner to The Hulk behind the wheel.  Ask any of my friends.  Or better yet, don't.  Trust me.).

And that applies to everyone:  trolls on the Internet, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, even Franklin Graham.  Yes, you will say those people do evil deeds and don't deserve to be seen as Jesus, who did only good.  Well, what makes you so Christ-like, I would ask?  And then I'd bring up this Daily Beast article:  "Did Jesus poop?"

I'll leave the reasons for that discussion to the article, which is actually quite good.  I'm interested in the import of asking the question, because it goes to the nature of Jesus, not in the theological sense alone, but in the sense of how we understand his words, his teachings.

When we decide Jesus didn't poop because poop is unclean and Jesus must be clean, first we're making a Hellenistic, not a Hebraic, distinction.  Yes, Hebrews had standards of clean and unclean (and how do you have this discussion without mentioning Matthew 15:10-11?), but they understood merely they had to be kept apart, not that one could not come from the other (anyone remember the story of Samson and the lion, the honey that came out of the corpse?).  It's a Hellenistic idea, from their ideas of gods, that gods were perfect and pure and could not be sullied by even dirty feet, which would mar their perfection (so Shakespeare, almost two millennia later, still remarks about his mistress whose eyes are nothing like the sun:  "I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground."  Greek goddesses floated above the ground, to keep their pedicures perfect.).  Jesus, under Hellenistic influenced thinking, can't poop, because nothing unclean can come out of one who is perfect.

But was Jesus perfect?  By what standard?  The plainly materialist standard of Hellenism?  Or by the more spiritual wisdom of Hebraism?  I stake that out as my marker, and then invite you to return to the argument I started with.

If Jesus can't poop, then can Jesus be crippled?  Can Jesus be poor, or illiterate, or autistic?  Can Jesus be a bad driver, an annoying person who blocks the aisle in the grocery store ( you know who you are!)?  Can Jesus be foul-tempered, intemperate, rude, even a murderer?  I have vague memories of being taught Matthew 25, the passage about Jesus separating the sheep from the goats.  He asks there, "When did you come to prison to visit me?"  My very proper middle-class church taught me that Rome imprisoned people for unjust reasons, like Paul's imprisonments in the Acts of the Apostles.  So visiting people in prison in Jesus' day was not visiting real criminals; real criminals deserved to be in jail, and didn't deserve to be visited as if they were Jesus.  No one ever asked if murderers and rapists and child-molesters could be Jesus.  But clearly, for us, they can be.  Clearly, if no one is beyond the love and care of God ("the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike"), then we shouldn't put them there (pretty much the lesson of Acts 10:9-16).

So, did Jesus poop?  If not, Jesus is already elevated so far above us, so beyond our comprehension, that Jesus cannot be human, and humans cannot be Jesus.  It's hard enough to see the people fumbling with change in the express lane as they pay for 25 items (the LIMIT IS 15!!!!!!!) as Jesus; it's even harder if I can't recognize Jesus as human as me.  That's the Jesus of John's gospel, who gives up his life; not Matthew's Jesus, who cries out the first lines of Psalm 22, and writhes in agony as his life is taken from him; just as mine would be, on that cross (though Psalm 22 would not be the last thing to cross my mind in extremis).

It's a small distinction, in the end.  As even the article points out, nobody argues about this anymore.  But whenever we put any barrier to compassion between us and others, whenever we decide Jesus didn't really mean for us to think kindly of murderers or bad drivers (we're all more likely to encounter the former than the latter), we weaken ourselves and our understanding of what being human could be.

I'm going to work on the spiritual practice, and keep my mind on Matthew's gospel:  what is unclean is not what comes out of you, but what comes out of your mouth (your speech).  And nothing is unclean unless you mix matters, cross boundaries.  What comes out of the body belongs in the toilet; it's only unclean if you don't put it there, or try to take it out of there.  Boundaries.

But what boundaries should there be between me and thee?  Surely none that allow me to think less of thee.