The Sacrificial Ideal

What if God somehow burst into history in a singular way; what if he became like us, came to earth, proved himself with eloquence and miracles, proclaimed his unconditional love and forgiveness, -- and we killed him?

Shall we mention that he rose from the dead?

OF COURSE, he rose from the dead. He was God.

But we killed him.

Wrath, sloth, greed, shallowness, indifference, impatience, etc. -- the collective sins of his contemporaries determined that Christ's gospel be rejected and that he suffer death without mercy on the cross.

It has been a slow acknowledgment, these twenty centuries, that whoever spoke this message of love was speaking truth. In many places today, truth still cannot be heard, and it is thought blasphemous to speak more than half-truth. The people are blinded by the fire of Christ's life and words, and can receive only partial reflections and distortions thereof. We want to prosecute crimes, swear oaths, wed, breed, own property, and kill -- all things which he expressly forbade as being unhealthy to the spiritual life of man.

And though the Master even makes endless allowances for our weakness, and though, no matter how often we turn back, and turn our backs on him, he still invites us to follow, -- nonetheless, we continue to distort his teaching, or else reject it altogether.

What we ought to do is humble ourselves to the awesome gravity of the Christian life; equally acknowledging the strictness of the law and the leniency of the lawgiver.

Whatsoever we do, we are assured of God's forgiveness and his love, but there is only one way which he blesses and calls us to; absolute abandonment to the Holy Spirit; desiring nothing before God, and nothing but God. Christ decrees that all men should be beggars, until all doors are thrown open, and bachelors, until everyone is embraced. He understands that ideals are meant to be lofty, and that Christian ideals should be the loftiest of all.

At the same time, he plumbs the depths of our depravity, and because he knows what we struggle with, he makes concessions to our frail humanity, such that we need never fear his judgement, though we have fallen so far short of what is good.

The ways of God are so perfect that we might say they are not intended to be fulfilled by any man; but, being infinite in scope, are meant, rather, to pose an equal and insurmountable challenge to all men. How else can we learn to depend entirely on the grace of God? It is essential that even the saints fall short of perfection.

We should know this. But two thousand years have passed and we are still crucifying the Word of God; corrupting the gospel for which Christ lived and died.

Placing limits on love, we place shackles on Jesus. Calling ourselves good, we forget the meaning of the Word. Our standards are low, but our punishments are severe, while the standards of the Lord are high, but he knows nothing of judgement; only mercy.

Let us embrace Christ on his own terms, not ours, or let us shun him altogether, as our ancestors have done. Either way, we would not inflict the further insult of a Judas Kiss; pretending to embrace his statutes, while secretly perverting them.

Is it so terrible to have an ideal, or to recognize an ideal?

Just because we come up short, ought we to lower all things to our height? Must we compromise our vision, when we compromise ourselves? Is it so difficult to bear any discrepancy between the two, that we must turn the moral world on its head, and put to death the one who came to give us life? For the law of Christ permits a man to fall, and to be exhonerated by grace, but it does not permit him to drag the law itself down with him, in order to exhonerate his crime as well as himself.

We killed God. We murdered our ideal. We covered it up. And now the ghost of Jesus, the Holy Ghost, haunts our churches, like a tell-tale heart. The ghost of the ideal... the buried heart of the world... will... not... rest.