What Would Jesus Really Do?

A lot of times, readers assume that because I question the Christian faith that I am anti-Christian. Let me take this holiday weekend to I clarify that I am certainly not. In fact, I am a firm believer and follower in many of the teachings of Jesus Christ. What I am against is hypocrisy and the hijacking of Christ's walk. I believe Jesus came to illuminate for everyone, not a selected few.

Ronald Martin's special, What Would Jesus Really Do?, is being rebroadcast several times throughout the weekend on CNN. It is a brilliant and much needed example in these times of the extreme conservative and right winged, of the good that can come from the Christian faith -- something easy to forget when so much blood has been shed and hatred spewed in his name. While I didn't agree with everything that was said from the panel of pastors and reverends, I was so impressed with certain standpoints, I had to jot them down.

I never thought I would be quoting Jerry Fallwell, but when asked if he believes a Christian is the only right person to elect as our President, he says, "I think that the ideal is that we would have a man or a woman of [Christian] faith who also is right on the issues. But I've known men and women of faith who didn't have a clue regarding national security, didn't have a clue about how to deal with terrorism, had no idea about how to change the federal courts and to defend the unborn. So it's like this, I would rather have an atheist who is a neuro-surgeon of excellent talents operating on me if I ever need a brain surgery than have the best Sunday school teacher in the world who doesn't know a thing about it. We've got to elect a President who, whether he or she goes to church or which church or whatever, understands the issues and the top issue today in our culture is survival. It's the most dangerous time I've known in my 73 years and I've lived through Hitler, nazzi-ism, communism... This is the most dangerous time America has ever faced and the next President has got to have a grip on the gravity of this and the survival of the people."

Pastor Frederick Douglas Heinz III had so much passion in his delivery that when he spoke of the oppression of homosexuals, I was moved to tears and screaming "Hallelujah!" at my television set. He says, "I think it's quite ironic that on this weekend as we celebrate the passion and crucifixion of Jesus Christ that a fresh Jesus has been crucified on the cross of identity theft. Jesus is now associated with those who are against same sex marriage. Jesus is pro-life, yet his pro-life stance stops when we exit the womb? I'm bothered by the fact that we have not really taken Jesus, we've divorced him as it were from the reality of his teachings from the days in which he lived. Jesus basically has been de-radicalized and sanitized to the point where he is totally divorced from the social, political and economical realities of his day. How can we do this when Jesus spent his time as a part of an oppressed people under Roman occupation and oppression? You can not divorce Jesus from that context. What would Jesus do? He'd give the most to those who have the least. He'd be concerned about the fact that we are in a misbegotten war. One that we have no exit strategy for! Jesus says the truth shall set you free. I believe that we can come together as Christians if we put Jesus back in context. Put him back in context and I promise you we'll follow him and we'll be following him together."

Even Pastor Rick Warren, who I disagreed with the most in fact, reminded me by his interview's end, "I don't have to agree with every belief in a person to find common ground. I don't agree with everything that some of my gay friends do and they don't agree with everything I do, but we also have our similarities like working together to fight AIDS. And that's not saying it is a gay disease, but gays agree with me that if Jesus were here today, he'd be hanging out with people who have HIV and AIDS. They are the lepers of the 21st Century. People are scared to death of it. And he hung out with people who had leperacy in those days."

But the most important contention of the evening, to me, of course, being a practicing Kabbalist, came from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach who felt that the stories of Jesus's death were not nearly as important as the stories of how he lived his life. He says, "We hear almost nothing about the humanity of Jesus. We hear Christians speak about how inspired they are by the life he led, but if you go to their church, or a Catholic church in particular, you will only see the death that he died. You see him hanging there on the cross. I think this has direct repercussions on how religion is practiced and how religion is preached. It focuses so much on death and what happens after death as opposed to taking responsibility for how we should be living in the here and now, taking a page from Jesus's book, so to speak. He struggled with issues like you and I. His humanity is what truly makes him so inspiring."

The point Ronald Martin was trying to make in his special, he says, is this: "Faith should be used to break down barriers, not solidify them," he says. "How can people who say they love Jesus be afraid to speak to their neighbor because of their differences or eat with a co-worker or have their children play with their peers across town?"

I wanted to shed some light on one question that Martin posed to almost everyone on the panel that went unanswered. He wanted to know, "How did the Easter bunny and Jesus get hooked up?"

Great question. And the answer is yet another reason to open our hearts and become tolerant of individuals with ways and belief systems separate from our own. Holiday comes from the term "holy day" and though all holy days become secularized, many began as Pagan. The Pagan holiday of Ostara actually means "eastern star." This Easter-n star's movement towards the "rising sun" is where we derived the term "Easter." In ancient times, the Goddess Ostara, sometimes even translated as Eostre, was the Goddess of Spring and Morning Redness. She would often be depicted as standing in a grassy field with chicks and bunnies around her, a red egg (hence the Pagan "ritual" of dying eggs) in her hand. Sometimes she would even be depicted as having the head of a hare itself! The "bunny" and the Goddess Osara were closely related, both being creatures that thrive at night, under the ruling energy of the moon. So this is where we get our symbols of the holiday, Easter, way before the time of Christ. Is it a coincidence that it went from a holiday of the "rising sun" to becoming a holiday of the rising Son? Hmm... doubtful.

Also to check out this weekend, CNN is doing a two-part special called After Jesus on what happened during the years between his death and when Christianity was formed, and for an alternative view om the early days of Christianity, The History Channel brings us Banned From The Bible, a look at all of the gospels that were stricken from the record and why.

I prayed to Ostara on the Spring Equinox to bring us her sense of balance, to wash away the past and to start us anew like the season before us.

This weekend, I pray to Jesus Christ, for all of the things he symbolizes. I pray for my faith to be greater than my fear, for the strength to overcome obstacles in times of oppression, for a tolerant and unjudging nature and to remind me in times of crisis that we are all, in our own ways, the sons and daughters of God who created us in his image and have access to the divine within but never without.