Readin

g J

esu

s A

gain

st J

esu

s

Vo

l. 1

No

. 6

© Jan. 2014, collaborators: Clodie von Knappenberg; Hobbes; El Piadoso Vulgar; Thom Stuart Mill; The-

odosius// centerfold poem “Son of man” by Nancy Heisey // published and directed by “dogspeed you”

E.M. Knapp // Art Credits: / “Jesus is My Homeboy” Series, by David LaChapelle// “Loaves and Fish-

es” /“Annunciation” / “Last Supper” / “Evidence” / “Intervention“ / “Sermon” // http://

www.davidlachapelle.com/series/jesus-is-my-homeboy/ // facing: “jesus armwrestling” from gimages //

back cover: “Jesus and Vader” by Cedric Chambers // front cover: “Jesus Guevara” from gimages //

thanks to BIRE EMU, especially Ted “White Rider” Grimsrud; Nancy “check those sources” Heisey //

no price /// free ///

Reading Jesus Against Jesus

© Jan. 2014, collaborators: Clodie von Knappenberg; Hobbes; El Piadoso Vulgar; Thom Stuart Mill; The-

odosius// centerfold poem “Son of man” by Nancy Heisey // published and directed by “dogspeed you”

E.M. Knapp // Art Credits: / “Jesus is My Homeboy” Series, by David LaChapelle// “Loaves and Fish-

es” /“Annunciation” / “Last Supper” / “Evidence” / “Intervention“ / “Sermon” // http://

www.davidlachapelle.com/series/jesus-is-my-homeboy/ // facing: “jesus armwrestling” from gimages //

back cover: “Jesus and Vader” by Cedric Chambers // front cover: “Jesus Guevara” from gimages //

thanks to BIRE EMU, especially Ted “White Rider” Grimsrud; Nancy “check those sources” Heisey //

no price /// free ///

theSineZine.blogspot.com Vol. 1 No. 6 Reading Jesus Against Jesus

Jesus vs. love

L et’s put things into perspective here. Satan loves you. Think about it.

Why else would Lucifer go to such great lengths to torment you,

except that he wants your love in return, and feels deeply unworthy of

it? Like a bad ex-girlfriend who stalks you out of a sense of betrayal —

in her mind, from a sense of love that only really fully existed in the ab-

sence of any relationship — Satan just keeps showing up around town.

After being stalked for a while, we start to see Satan (or our crazy ex) in

every shadowy doorway; we feel fear every time our phone vibrates in

our pocket, and at every odd encounter. This is one reason why we

must resist the idea that “Jesus Loves Us” — because love doesn’t neces-

sarily mean what we think it means. In fact, if Christ wants to teach us

anything, it is precisely this. “LOVE? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE LOVE!”

We might instead say that real love — love not of the satanic-stalking,

you-complete-me kind — love that is borne from a sense of God’s and

our own wholeness — pre-exists us, and that Jesus offers an alternative

to Satan’s accusatory kind of love. So how can we positively formulate

the love of Jesus? Let’s start by actually believing that God loves us no

matter what we do — and for chrissakes, people! stop stating the obvi-

ous and start acting like someone Jesus would love! —CMK

Jesus vs. philosophy — by Thom Stuart Mill

P hilosophy died with Jesus on the cross. However, just as Jesus remains

among us as the love that joins the collective of believers, the story of

philosophy does not truly end upon the cross. The cross of Christ shatters

the notion of philosophy for its own sake yet resurrects philosophy as a

gateway for something deeper. What philosophy has to offer us is one

method of seeking the experience of faith and of the event. Worldly philoso-

phy (from scriptural times until now) has cheapened the meaning of “faith;”

it formulates faith into something that points to a certain metanarrative, a

particular story we tell ourselves or are told by others about the meaning of

reality. This standard account of faith — the equation of faith to a mere be-

lief — was subverted by the insight of the apostle Paul.

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I

will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the

debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For

since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God

decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who be-

lieve.”

T he philosophy common amongst the scribes, the debaters, and the wise

is here revealed as an insufficiently-radical endeavor. The event that is

harbored within the name of God is a rupture-within-Being far more signifi-

cant than questions of whether God “really” exists or whether reality is

“truly” meaningful. The faith of the cross of Jesus is an injunction to fall in

love with reality in such a way as to be undeterred by the results of philo-

sophical debates based upon reason or wisdom. The Christ Event compels

us to embrace our neighbor and joyously proclaim the beauty of life even if

the ultimate worth of existence and outcome of the cosmos have been accu-

rately predicted by the nihilists. Though the Jews demanded signs and the

Greeks desired wisdom, Paul proclaimed the beautiful irrational faith of a

crucified God. Philosophy is valuable…. but it must push radically beyond

its own limits, past the intellectual quest to determine objective meaning,

and push towards the haunting call of the event and the radical yes-saying

which the event demands. In short, we must philosophize — and we must

philosophize from the vantage point of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. For

the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being

saved it is the power of God. — TSM

Jesus vs. eternal life

I n Volume 1, Issue #4 of SINE ZINE, we explored a Christian decon-

struction of the idea of eternal life. The question we insisted on put-

ting to Christians then, and put to them again now is this: what makes

eternal life different from hell? Enjoyment, happiness, satisfaction, lack

of pain, good food… all these are relative pleasures. The problem with

the idea of eternal life is that anything would become torturous on the

level of eternity! The pleasures of sex, music, heroin, intellectual en-

deavor — the pleasure associated with such things is all predicated up-

on the imminent death that awaits us. I don’t care how much fun you

might have the first couple-billion years out there in your fantasy post-

life… eventually you’ll get tired of it. So tired you’ll want to kill your-

self. And thus the problem with eternal life as finite beings. Simply

put, wtf Jesus? If you really loved me, why would you do something like

make me live forever? Perhaps this is why Francis Assisi named “sister

death” a “gift from God” — because the prospect of eternal life is some-

thing that should scare the crap out of us.

L et’s go a step farther and invert the question of eternal life, and the

contingency of what we know as pleasurable. Let’s take the hell-

fire-brimstone preacher seriously for a moment, and grant the idea of a

hell full of torment. Torment, like pleasure, is also contingent on a

multitude of social and personal constructs; Milton isn’t wrong when

he has Lucifer say basically “the mind can make a hell of heaven and a

heaven of hell.” Dante missed the point altogether: after two or three

thousand years stuck in a lake of fire, a sheet of ice, or pushing a boul-

der like Sisyphus, you get used to that crap. I mean, torture loses its

efficacy once life and time lose their meaning. Therefore I put it to you

that such concepts as heaven and hell — as we know them at least —

are patently false, and impossible in any degree. Jesus says as much

when he talks about the “Garbage Pit of Gehenna” and the “Kingdom of

God.” Let the reader of the gospels beware: these things are not meant

to be taken at face value. They were specifically formulated to help you

deconstruct your idolatrous notions of what awaits you in death. —

CMK

Jesus vs. debt — by Theodosius

I n the stories of Jesus’s birth, we learn that indeed something new is at hand, a “new thing” in full harmony with the Old Testament portrayal of

salvation. There is no hint that something has to happen to God to make restoration possible. God initiates the reconciliation. God unilaterally de-clares that salvation has come and is especially available to vulnerable and marginalized people.

T he birth of Jesus is not linked with the logic of retribution. The birth stories’ announcement of salvation’s presence contains no sense of a

new approach to satisfy God’s aggrieved holiness or violated honor or to balance the scales of justice with ultimate innocent sacrifice. The stories point only to God’s initiating mercy and forgiveness.

A s Jesus begins his public ministry, he expresses his own sense of conti-nuity with the Old Testament salvation story. In his resistance to Sa-

tan’s temptations in the wilderness, Jesus quotes Israel’s scriptures. In his opening message to his home synagogue in Nazareth, he links himself with Israel’s hopes and Yahweh’s promises from the book of Isaiah. Throughout his teaching as pre-

(continued p. 10)

Son of man

Born of a woman pushed out to the howls of Rachel weeping, he touched the hand of a fevered fisher mother-in-law felt the terrified grab of a forever-menstruating woman lifted up Talitha and let Joanna and Suzanna pay his way.

Finally, crushed, broken, encrusted with dried blood, he huddled in the dark awaiting the holy myrrhbearers.

~ N.H. 2014

sented in the gospels, Jesus quotes and alludes to and paraphrases the Old Testament. He never hints that he might understand his teaching as any-thing but in full continuity with Israel’s scriptures.

J esus drew on Torah to transform how people viewed God’s participation

among the people. People in power used debt to enhance their power and

wealth at the expense of the less powerful. Jesus saw debt differently. Draw-

ing on Torah, Jesus’s believed debt provided an opportunity for forgiveness.

God does not demand repayment for every ounce of indebtedness. Rather,

God offers abundant mercy. The debts would be forgiven without any kind

of payment. Jesus’s God was not a God who maintained debt records for the

purpose of foreclosing on the poor, but a God who canceled debt and re-

stored life. — TDS

Jesus vs. Christ

T he issue of Jesus’ divinity has been way overplayed since he last

was around. Whether or not Jesus was “Son of God” is really im-

material to the theological points he tries to make (except perhaps that

we are all children of God.) “The Christ” was never something Jesus

directly claims as his and his alone, and, in contradiction to what the

preacher tells you, Jesus’ doctrinal claims about the messiah exist in a

fog of ambiguity. Take the long passages in the Gospel of John for ex-

ample: all this thou-in-me and me-in-them and them-in-thou makes

things awfully hard to follow.

I f there is a Christ, perhaps it is a “cosmic Christ” — a kind of Nie-

tzschean ubermensch maybe— that exists as unrealized capacity

within us all. The idea of Jesus as merely human — a communist car-

penter — is anathema to fundamentalism precisely because it exposes

the fact that we are all able to participate in being the cosmic Christ.

This existential truth — our radical equality as brothers in Christ — is

unacceptable to the authoritative function of dogmatic religion. Jesus’

ministry, once stripped of the political ambitions attached to it by

those seeking to justify their power-over-others, seeks only to connect

to the underlying spirit of divinity that is within us all, hiding beneath

our corrupted perceptions. The miracle of healing is quite simply the

miracle of the self-realization of the healer and the healed as Son(s) of

God.

U nderneath the veil of ego, let us say that we are all Christ, and this

is how Christian authority can function without needing a coer-

cive, mechanistic administrative system of justice — our right percep-

tion of our neighbors as ourselves and ourselves as God’s children is all

the authority we need. When we wake up to the fact of our inner col-

lective Christ nature, God’s Kingdom (of servants) will finally have

been realized — not effected, but realized because the “Kingdom of

God is Among You” — and no nuclear zombie apocalypse will be neces-

sary.

T he ultimate reality of “Reading Jesus Against Jesus” is that Jesus

himself was no more innately divine than any other human; only he

was able to realize the fact of his divinity, and we have yet to do so.

This fits with the Kierkegaardian sense of evil — “that which is not yet

good.” We must resist the fundamentalist temptation to make Christ

into a fix-all, rather than engaging the lessons of Jesus. This is the

problem of our ego-stained perception: that Christ is something so

anathema to both authority and ego that we cannot truly connect with

it as we are, and thus, we seek to divinize Jesus the Carpenter’s son.

Also it leads to authority problems…

...Jesus vs. authority

H uman authority, most notably that of the church itself, stands in

direct opposition to the true message of an egalitarian cosmic

Christ, where we are all one as Christ. Again, when Jesus speaks on

behalf of such a Christ — when he says things like “I have come to fulfill

the law” — this means that the law as it stands is necessarily incom-

plete, unfulfilled and more importantly, even unfulfill-able. In atone-

ment terminology, we as sinners are unable to fulfill the law within the

mis-perceptive framework of a corrupted self-identity. Those legalists

who spent their efforts and lives trying to maintain the law, trying to

prove the absolute authority of the law, were unable to recognize the

law’s limitations because of their transcendent intentions regarding the

law.

T his is another insight of Paul: “the letter of the law is dead…” Bot-

tom line here is that the “letter of the law” — legalism itself — fails

to deliver completeness. If there is going to be authority “in Christ” that

authority will not at all resemble any kind of authority we are used to!

— CMK

Jesus vs theology — by El Piadoso Vulgar

A Parable of Children in the Park

T o me, the Kingdom of God (God’s community or reign) is similar to two kids spending a sunny day at the park.

O ne of them sat fixed on a bench under a park roof as he held a golden, glossy helium-balloon he’d just purchased from a man walking around

selling them. A second boy ran towards a group of children who were gath-ered in a grassy, open space, and he was carrying a beat-up soccer-ball his father gave him time ago.

T he running kid passed right in front of the kid on the bench. The helium balloon was so impressive in its brilliance that the running child

stopped to stare at it and the child holding it; he increasingly desired to be that kid — possessing such a glowing object, dwelling in such tranquility of his roofed bench. But he quickly repressed his desire as he looked at his friends — who were waiting for him — and soon he quit staring at the

beautiful golden object and its owner, and took off to a pick-up game with his old soccer ball.

L ikewise, the balloon owner’s attention was drawn immediately to the joyful vibrancy of the playing children. He himself desired to be that

other child, the one who so wildly and playfully kicked the ball around with his comrades. The child with the balloon yearned for the warmth of the sun upon his body and the cool perspiration of sweat in the wind, but he quickly repressed his desire, reminding himself that he, after all, had a beautiful bal-loon. And so he sat, reassured in the gloss and color of his balloon and the tranquility and shade of his bench.

T he child with the helium-balloon signifies a typical academic theologian whose thoughtful understandings of God’s wisdom are admired by lay

folk; and likewise the running child alludes to a lay follower of Jesus whose practice of God’s wisdom in ordinary environments is admired by academic theologians.

J esus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. (Matt. 13:34). Parable is a folk-communication, and as such

a form or genre, it must be learned. The word of God for all; Jesus Christ.

Psalm 667

Michtam of Hobbes, the lost psalm of the Beloved,

To be sung to the tune of “Son of God” [Jesus vs God— and a demonstration of how to deal with enemies]

Cheek— on the floor. So tired. Blessed peace. Can’t move. Don’t want. Loopy. It’s like an internal fracture in glass, the shield from the thought of my daugh— Safe here, no pushing against. Don’t go there. Hmm... can’t feel my arm, though it quivers some. Nor there. Kidneys failing, maybe. Don’t care. Wait — am I dreaming? Is he back? I can get one eye open a slit, does he stoop to hear me? Can my cracked fat lips form words he can make out? Do I have the strength, or will? I can’t believe it! Where does this come from? The flame is there — I will speak! Don’t think I can raise my head, but... I will not be silent — until you slay me, o Lrd*. Listen to my faint whisper:

* Name changed to protect the guilty

I have nothing to offer you, Lrd. My regret is real — if I live I will fulfill this dream: That I had wine and cheese to offer you, dry wine and salty cheese, and bread which crunches under tooth and then becomes chewy and sweet, that we could rejoice together. You are welcome here in the home of my peo-ple, most respected Lrd.

Your dignity we promote and defend. Tell us your desire... we can work this out! You have the power to save us, Lrd. You can call off your dogs, the tear gas, the water cannon, the beatings... We ask for our dignity, Lrd. Be gracious to us, forgive us the burden we are, grant us space to breathe and we will be with you. Let us pledge our vows of respect! Accept our speech, consider us, and we will consid-er you, forever. We can both live.

Forgive us our trespass, as we forgive yours. Be with us Lrd. Open your doors and we can yet be saved. For your way is our way, our only way yours, there is but one.

It is finished.

Readin

g J

esu

s Aga

inst J

esu

s V

ol. 1

No

. 6