The year is AD 30. You’re in Jerusalem. You live and die by the holy Torah. You’re anxiously waiting for a “messiah” to appear. The expectations you’ve mentally created are gigantic. He is a God; your imagination has led you to having the most profound beautiful picture of what it will be like. Your expectations? Possibly he will fly in from the sky. Maybe perform massive miracles to prove to the world he is the chosen one. Many Jews around you expect a potential military leader, at the very least. There must be something that makes it…dramatic. Something that makes it profoundly different.
You’re working one day in the streets, and you hear about this man who claims he is this exact messiah you’ve been waiting for. Shock and anxiety clash in your mind as you ask where he is. A friend tosses you information about his whereabouts and you decide to hang up your booth for a break. You take a stroll across town to see this “God.” As you start your inconvenient walk, subconsciously you find yourself doubting before you even arrive. You know time is money as you walk through the hot roads to the other side of the city.
You finally arrive to where he is. You look around. Nothing. You turn to a bystander, “where is this man who makes these claims?” A finger points to a certain section of the area and you finally lay eyes on him. What you see misses your expectations in a second’s notice. He is short, worn and dirt sticks to his skin. He looks like every other man who walks by your little fruit stand. Nothing about him is attractive to your consciousness. He’s far too normal. Your deep biases yell to reject him before you take another step forward. The hot sun blares down as you stand in discomfort thinking about your walk back to work. Before you leave, you ask a bystander about his whereabouts, and discover he was born in a manger of all places. Immediately you know he’s a fraud, another Wanna-Be Pagan God. Your God would never be born into poverty. That alone is all you needed to know. Your eyes lock his for a moment before turning around and walking away. You’re not angry necessarily, but more disappointed that your messiah still hasn’t arrived yet. You saw his followers listening to him, and you can’t help but giggle at their ignorance. “That is God”? You go back to your stand, disappointed that you spent your energy searching for this man. When you arrive back to your stand, you grab the Torah, take a breath and get back to work.
THE OBVIOUS CONTRADICTION: FAITH VS LOGIC
We have human rationale and logic. Our entire society was built off strictly these two realities. Intellect is everything to every professor and learned individual. Faith is not used in anything of the world regarding societal progression. Imagine if a doctor says he is going to have “faith” before operating on your heart because he isn’t sure about a certain part of the surgery? Imagine if the pilot of a plane said he will just have faith that the plane will make it to its destination because he is sleepy? Imagine if the architect of a building just said he used faith for the mathematical portions of its foundation? Society is entirely based off of everything but faith. Technology is all intellect and rationale. This had led to chemistry and mathematics. Everything branches off human rationale. Even thousands of years ago rationale was the basis to all societal growth. Faith just doesn’t cut it.
Jesus appears 2000 years ago and directly stabbed a sword into all of this. He came and contradicted all human thinking. He gave radically different ideas that no one had ever heard… to reject all of what you ever thought and obsess over the idea of “faith”. The idea of just thinking something is true without seeing it. He not only taught this but claimed to be divine. “I am” was his bold response to human rationale when asked his place in our world. Consider all of this is happening while many people still believed deeply in various pagan Gods. To make matters even more distorted, not only were there other different pagan Gods, but also other failed messiahs who came before him. Quite literally, there were other individuals who made similar claims of divinity but were complete frauds.
There was also stoicism, a secular philosophy that spread like wildfire to the masses. Stoicism was and is still an honest philosophy of logically finding peace in this life without a deity. Learned men with open minds attempted to discover true happiness entirely on their minds, using thoughts to find freedom. No attachment to the world was a part of it which sounds extremely similar to the ideas of Jesus except for one monumental fact: Jesus said that while you’re detached from the world, you are to fully attach to him. Detaching from the world can be radically lonely and can only bring so much peace. Jesus said to walk the other way and come directly to him, which in return will be a cheat code to your happiness and peace. Jesus taught that you’re actually NOT alone, but instead you’re standing behind the strongest force in all realities. At its core, the realities that Jesus taught stepped all over stoicism and replaced it with something so much better that after all is said and done, they’re not even comparable side by side.
But the big question to everyone at the time was if this man “Jesus” real, or just another narcissistic failed messiah? Was he a man with mental issues who couldn’t get medication because it simply didn’t exist back then? Maybe he was hoping for fame, social status? The worse would be if he actually thought he was a God, but wasn’t? Imagine just how skeptical so many were of this average looking “man”?
SPECIFICALLY CHOOSES THE WEAK OF THE WORLD
He specifically chose the weak of the world to push forward his ideas. Many were unlearned, probably socially rejected. Imagine a God walking on earth today, needing extremely vital work done, specifically going to a poor man working minimum wage for direct assistance over all scholars in the world? If this “Jesus” would have come now instead of then, we couldn’t expect anything less. If Jesus was God, one would think he would have gone for the higher up, those who are learned? Maybe even try to get up closer with the Roman leadership to influence more. While dangerous, he was a God, right? He instead specifically walked to and called out two men working in the shore, “Come, follow me, I will make thee fishers of men.” He grabs Matthew, a tax collector. Average job, potentially like a freelancer in today’s society. “Follow me” he said to Matthew. How odd is it that a God would only go for what is considered weak, corny and unlearned? Again, we see a contradiction of what any rational person would think.
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES?
Love thy enemies? If this isn’t direct attack on every subconscious mind, then I don’t know what is. Jesus was nothing less than the physical embodiment of charity in its purest form. If you could go to a dictionary, pull out the word “Charity” and make it into a person, you have nothing less than this poverty-stricken individual two thousand years ago. Imagine just how many people live with resent, anger and project in modern society, in this moment. People wake up every morning with deep biases towards others, always holding it deep into their minds, always in a constant state of discontent. A fullness of peace can’t occur without letting go of all resent and negativity. Charity in its purest form rejects all anger, resent and frustration. It’s obsessed with helping others, without question. Charity is completely numb to trends and social norms. Charity looks right past lust and cravings as it marches forward to help and build up others. Charity is completely desensitized to all opinions and validation, perfectly ok with losing its reputation. It forgives and only sees the potential in even the worst of people. It is the most beautiful part of being …human. Jesus stressed this, personified it…he was a walking “charity” in the flesh. It was and still is the single most difficult thing the world struggles with. Consider that if this was fully comprehended and felt, the impact would be incomprehensible to all of us. It is unfathomable just how radically different this world would be with honest charity in our hearts. Our subconsciousness screams for self-sufficiency. It yells in our ear to increase our own personal well-being as much as possible, to seek the next high at all costs. Charity comes in and smothers it entirely, taking over your consciousness, dumping buckets of peace in the process. It replaces those same screams with beautiful incentive to help, to lose yourself. Jesus came down and laid down this potent fact of reality 2000 years ago. He showed the purest of love to everyone and everything. He was a most perfect example, a beautiful contradiction to every human conscious that has walked this earth or will ever walk this earth.
HE NEVER EXPECTED YOU TO BE TOO CRAZY, ONLY A LITTLE CRAZY (to the world)
A man claiming to be a walking God on earth, never expected anyone to just have faith. Faith without anything to show for it is delusion. How did this one-man 2000 years ago expect people to actually just believe him? We have the bible. We have witness of his followers who say they saw him walking around after he had been brutally executed. We have solid collective evidence that was a real person, and his followers were real...But that’s not enough. Nowhere near enough evidence to lose your entire life into someone who simply claimed something, off of documents that could have been edited or potentially forged. Who knows? History is only a confidence interval, not perfect knowledge.
He gives us subjective “feeling.” He gives us a feeling that is an outlier to anything of this world. It is something that if felt, can only be denied for so long before you simply must accept there is something actually happening. It quite literally is a shot of charity. It feels like “love” in its purest form, almost an unnatural shot of charity that kills all negative cravings. It is a pureness of peace that once felt, won’t be forgotten. Peace in its purest form is such a blissful feeling. Once again, how odd that science, intellect and logic would never accept “feeling” as a basis for evidence or progression, but God directly contradicts this…again. It almost seems that at this point, God is tediously trying to be contradictory to every drop of human rationale purposely. It almost seems that way… because it is that way. One man named Jesus has led to a worldwide religion, with even non-believers knowing who he is. I can’t imagine too many people not knowing who he is or never hearing of him on earth. Islam accepts Jesus as being a powerful man of God, so that’s roughly 2 billion people who also know of him. So, we can see that almost the whole world knows of this “Jesus”, which reduces the issue of ignorance to a very slim degree. Then, God tossed the foundation via witnesses and sufficient documents and the rest of knowing him is “feeling,” Feeling is truly the nail in the coffin, it is the overwhelming majority of the equation. The other matters simply lay down a foundation to source that faith from. It definitely has a vital purpose, nonetheless. As funny as it sounds, followers of Christ may be looked at as crazy…but not TOO crazy. Christians have the correct equation that leads to knowledge.
CONCLUSION
It’s quite clear that God’s ways are not societies ways, and God made sure to be different in every way possible. We tend to say that a lot, right? “God works in mysterious ways,” but sometimes we don’t actually sit down and look at the many ways he specifically chose to be contradictory. There is a reason for this. Everything about Jesus runs the opposite direction of society and the world. When I say run, I mean RUN. He wants you to detach from everything of this world, to let go of what you’re holding onto, to trust in someone you cannot see. He wants you to be looked at as crazy, to be perceived as weird. He wants you to sit on the sidelines of what looks like fun to the world. He wants you to not just let go of your resent but toss it on him. He wants you to reject retaliation, to instead ask bullies if they need help. He wants you to take the meanest projections from others you can imagine and respond with service. He wants you to be calm, to detach from your emotions, to be a leader at any time. Most of all he wants you to be free of fear, “Be not afraid, only believe.” He wants you to roll your dice on him, to put all your cards on the table…to take that risk entirely on him. With this detachment comes a change of how you feel, walk, talk, see things…every part of your life will be dramatically affected. Your consciousness will be swimming in charity as you peacefully walk through this existence, without fear. No attachment to the world but all attachment to him.
This average looking, poverty-stricken individual lived 2000 years ago. He stabbed a deep sword into everything human rationale stood for, with not an ounce of shame. He laid the reality of peace in this life, and it’s set in stone. His ways will never budge… society can pick at it, stomp on it, try to negotiate with it, but it is forever engrained, never to be moved. As much opposition as it faces, society’s fragile attempts are like tossing a cup of water into the massive ocean, it goes completely unnoticed.
-Jarom
NO ATTACHMENT IS FREEDOM 