Painting by Elaine Brown Folgar
To turn someone like Jesus into a God is to diminish him. That is what Christianity has done. It transformed an itinerant preacher by the name of Yehoshua ben Yusef into a man-God, but instead of making his words more compelling, the Church did just the opposite, enabling itself to be their arbiter, and by divine commission, put forth its own interpretation beyond question under pain of eternal punishment.
After all, if the words of the man recorded in Mark's Gospel (the other Gospels are all suspect to one degree or another, John's being the most fanciful) are not compelling on their own, why believe them? We either respond or we don't, just as we respond or don't to the dialectic of Socrates or the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau. Do either of those men need divine authority for their thoughts to appeal to us? Socrates, a mere human being, gave us a new way of using our minds. Without Thoreau, there would have been (as both have acknowledged) no Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. Has either Gandhi or King rid the world of intolerance and war? No, but neither have the teachings of Yehoshua ben Yusuf. But that doesn't mean his words are powerless. Socrates taught us how to think for ourselves, Thoreau to question authority and even to resist it, and Jesus and others like him encouraged us to act according to our most compassionate inclinations. The question is, have the very human Socrates, Thoreau, Gandhi, and King done more to bring out our better natures, or has the Christian church, even when it exerted complete control of western civilization for more than a millennium?
Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote when we come upon an idea that resonates in us, we don't wait for it to arrive, we run out and embrace it. The words of Jesus, Socrates, Thoreau, and Gandhi speak to something inside us that, perhaps unknowingly, has been wanting, even longing to hear them. Their words, not any supernatural agent, are all the authority necessary or possible for us. Endow people with divinity and you diminish their effect. It's one thing for an omnipotent God to command a certain way of life. But we humans have to act without divine powers, and for that reason can find those lofty goals ones we can aspire to but rarely or ever meet. Someone said the problem with the greats is they don't realize not everyone is capable of living up to the standards they live by themselves. A Gandhi, a Jesus, or to bring it up to contemporary times, a Ralph Nader, can't see why what they preach isn't acted upon by ordinary folk with the single-mindedness and dedication they feel.
But there are many such exceptional people among every generation, though they are rare in public life. Eugene V. Debs, who suffered and died for us, was one. But such individuals turn up among ordinary folk all the time. They walk the same streets we do, may even be members of our families. They don't attempt to start new movements, at least not intentionally. They go about their lives quietly, showing extraordinary compassion and inexhaustible devotion. They work in home-healthcare and in hospices, but they also drive buses, deliver mail, teach our children. They are the Greta Thunbergs of the world, only without her notoriety. There are Jesuses and Martin Luther King Jrs in equal numbers among any population in every part of the globe, just as there are geniuses among every people on earth in the same ratio, from the Yanamami of the Amazon to the outer reaches of Mongolia and every place in between. We need not—and should not—canonize these people. They are more inspiring as ordinary folk like ourselves rather than as semi-divine beings who enjoy special status with a Supreme Being. We should cherish them, for the least among them are living proof ordinary human beings like ourselves can be and frequently are as good as any "Saint." We can't all turn the other cheek if someone strikes us, but that doesn't mean we are fated to act in the worst possible manner, that we are a species doomed to war and other atrocious behaviors. People like Jesus, Socrates, and Martin Luther King Jr set an example most of us can't live up to, but it's one we can accept and embrace and to some degree make our own.
