Jesus Was A Capricorn

Today is Easter. While most of my family, and most people in the US are singing praises to Jesus as God, I reflect on Kris Kristofferson's Jesus Was A Capricorn, thinking of Jesus as a social activist and political reformer in a culture dominated by religion. Here are a few lines, from here:

Jesus was a capricorn
He ate organic food
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoes

Long hair, beard and sandles
And a funky bunch of friends
Reckon we’d just nail him up
If he came down again

Chorus:
’cause everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me...

Related:

The First Coming: How The Kingdom of God Became Christianity, Thomas Sheehan
The Gnostic Gospels. Elaine Pagels
The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell
A History of God. Karen Armstrong

To expand on my post a bit, I should explain that I am not, fundamentally, a believer in any organized religion. That does not mean that I am not a spiritual person. Each time I wander deep into nature, far apart from our human abodes, I feel that I am at one with both nature and the divine. I am "nature watching nature" as someone once said.

As I see it, a successful life is measured in how well we do in three practices: humility, charity, and veracity—where veracity is both truth telling and truth seeking. If we were all good at these practices, while working at building community, working within nation states, etc. all would be good. In short, we can be good both individually and collectively 'good' without reference to what most people call God. And, I believe that Jesus, like other great teachers, e.g. Confucius, Buddha, Mohammad, believed and practiced this as well.

Karen Armstrong's A History of God supports this thesis. In Jesus' time, reference to God was likely in vogue, just as it is here in America today. So his practice likely invoked direct reference to God. Who knows, so little was written down back then. Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels is about some things that actually were written down, back then, but were lost as various texts were compiled into various versions of the Old and New Testaments in the so-called Judeo/Christian traditions. Various "lost" gospels showed sides of early Christian thought that failed to make it into organized, bureaucratic religions that followed: e.g. no gender bias, recognition of traditions from Eastern mysticism and more. In The First Coming, Thomas Sheehan's thesis is that Jesus' Kingdom of God was pretty much, This is it! This is heaven on earth if we choose, but people don't see it, won't live according to God's will. In Sheehan's words, to live God's will pretty much means:

'[T]urning oneself around' and wholly changing one's life into an act of justice and mercy toward others. In Jesus' message, the invitation and the response were interdependent. The promised presence of God was the meaning of the demand for justice and charity, and yet only in such acts of mercy did the eschatological future become present. This mutuality—eschatology as the ground of ethics, and ethics as the realization of eschatology—is what made Jesus' moral demands so radical. Those who accepted God's kingdom by doing God's will in the world already had as a gift what pious believers tried to earn through observance of the Law. Charity fulfills the Law—not because it makes God become present, but because it is his presence. And when God arrives on the scene, Jesus seemed to say, all go-betweens, including religion itself, are shattered. Who needs them? (p. 63)

If you, like me, struggle with the word "eschatology", here is a helpful link:  In Joseph Campell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, we see a similarity. Campbell argues that as we need heroes, in this case to call us to better living, they arise. No divine intervention is either present or necessary.

Comments

[Mike Iverson]

I'm with you on this. I believe that Jesus brought a message of love to ALL mankind rather than one of ritual, worship, and salvation for a select few. I once asked you the "meaning of life" and you replied "service". I think Jesus, too, would have agreed that service (and activism) is far more important than worship; a concept that seems hard to grasp by many today who consider themselves Christians...

You quoted one great songwriter from the 70's, here's a take on the same subject by another:

The Rebel Jesus
(By Jackson Brown)

All the streets are filled with laughter and light

And the music of the season

And the merchants windows are all bright

With the faces of the children

And the families hurrying to their homes

As the sky darkens and freezes

They'll be gathering around the hearths and tales

Giving thanks for all God's graces

And the birth of the rebel Jesus



Well they call him by the Prince of Peace

And they call him by the Savior

And they pray to him upon the seas

And in every bold endeavor

As they fill his churches with their pride and gold

And their faith in him increases

But they've turned the nature that I worshipped in

From a temple to a robbers den

In the words of the rebel Jesus



We guard our world with locks and guns

And we guard our fine possessions

And once a year when Christmas comes

We give to our relations

And perhaps we give a little to the poor

If the generosity should seize us

But if any one of us should interfere

In the business of why they are poor

They get the same as the rebel Jesus



But please forgive me if I seem

To take the tone of judgement

For I've no wish to come between

This day and your enjoyment

In this life of hardship and of earthly toil

There's a need for anything that frees us

So I bid you pleasure

And I bid you cheer

From a heathen and a pagan

On the side of the rebel Jesus.