Ever since Father’s Day I’ve felt second-rate after reading the heaps of praise on dear old dad. I wasn’t so great in the Ward Cleaver role.
It has struck me since that God the Father, as we have conceived, sent his only Son to a certain life of suffering and death, and was pretty abusive toward Abraham as well.
Do that today and you would have the Department of Human Services on your case.
Abraham is about ready to sacrifice Isaac when the clouds part and they call the whole thing off. Likewise, Jesus is agonizing at Gesthemene and realizing that life is not under his control in the here and now. While he laments, his three buddies fall asleep. Hey, you mopes, can’t you see what he is going through? They believe Jesus has God on his side, so they decide to catch some Zs. They have their own problems. Even Peter would like to keep a distance.
While Jesus is in the garden thinking of the suffering in the world, on cue an angel comes and tells him to persevere before the Centurions crash the gate.
What the apostles didn’t get, and I didn’t get, was that Jesus in the desert and Jesus in the garden are not about him as divine but a guy trying to find his own way along the Via Dolorosa.
I was raised Catholic. We do not read the Bible, selections were read to us on Sunday and explained to us by a priest. If you don’t understand, chalk it up to Sacred Mystery.
There’s a lawyer on hold threatening to sue me for no sin of my own. We get paid in scraps. Trump gets more love in Iowa with a conviction on 34 felony counts. Republicans are promising woe unto the scribes, throw them into prison if not into the raging inferno, for insisting that the election was not stolen and that facts are facts. It makes you sweat blood — figuratively, for chrissakes!
Of course I have a messianic complex like Trump. Who doesn’t? That’s why increasing numbers love the liar with a gold toilet and a black heart, an anti-Christ in the allegorical sense.
So Jesus says, hey can’t you see me praying over here? And they say, hey can’t you see we got problems too? We’re all alone here together, even the Son of God is, and fate is closing in.
In the garden you can see the radiation therapist in his smock telling you how it will be with your prostate cancer. It may be written in the Bible that every man gets it but they don’t generally die from it. They die from the cumulus of their bad habits. If you had just followed the Ten Commandments and behaved better in junior high school and weren’t such an intemperate jag who blows up when the kid gets thrown out stealing third base with two down.
Steve Bannon is shouting at me Victory Or Death! He looks like Death. Does he wash his hair? Brenna Bird is our state attorney general. Let that soak in for awhile. Jesus got smothered in a ton of chicken manure, crucified under a collapsed pullet house conveyor, and a wrongful death claim was filed.
But then he rolled away the stone. Wouldn’t you know, God the Father told him he had to go down to Hell first and see how the other half were living with Judas before he could take his seat at the right hand in the Kingdom up there. Tom takes umbrage when I say that a story is half-baked and insult him with sarcasm. God was pretty ironic in putting a scourge on innocent Egyptians, children in his likeness, just doing what the Pharaoh ordered. Dolores thinks I could do better by paying attention to matters at hand, when I would rather just wander around in the desert of my own head. She is right. I should do better. So could God.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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Maybe we should return to God the mother.
You got some mad writing skills, brother!❤️