Acts

 One of the things that's fascinating about the Christian approach to evil is its overkill approach. You got'cher original sin, brought on by Adam and Eve's failing, which has blighted all humanity and condemned it to hell--AND you have the Devil who is constantly looking to trip you up and condemn you to hell. It would make sense if the devil only went after believers who are washed in the blood of the lamb--but they clearly don't believe that:Satan spends an enormous amount of time corrupting people already condemned to hell. A reduplication of effort if you ask me.

The distinction between original sin and the devil is, at the base, not so much the distinction of the origin or of the nature of evil, as the two ways of handling it: change the world or change yourself. Fight the world or fight yourself. Blame the world or blame yourself. Christianity, in its marvelous way, opts for both, just to make sure you're paralyzed completely.

In Islam, Shaitan is more an imp than a Lord of Hell. And the solution to evil is straightforward: change, fight, blame yourself. They aren't just blowing smoke when they say Jihad is an internal thing: there is no Great Enemy of God. That's just stupid.  And with Judaism, things are (as they always tend to be) more complex--but the Law is still paramount, even if it is not rewarded or reasonable. Still, adherence to the law is how you respond to evil, even if there doesn't seem to be much in it for you.

With Jesus Christ, there was a shift in emphasis, even though Christianity gets gnarled right at ground level, away from obedience to the law towards right action. Whatever you may think of everything that followed, the Sermon On The Mount is a remarkable piece of spiritual teaching.  I learned a while back of the frankly ludicrous argument that Martin Luther used to deny justification by works (The things that Jesus Christ commanded us to do are just too gosh-darn hard, so he couldn't have meant us to actually follow them--and therefore they're just reminders of how we can't live up to God's expectations--and therefore all that doing good works stuff is irrelevant!) After I picked my jaw off the floor, I went back to the sermon. 

Luther was right up to a point: Jesus's exhortations to action are pretty outrageous. Don't even commit lust in your heart, Give to whoever asks you, love your enemies, turn the other cheek. Peacemaking, poverty, meekness--how do you expect us to do all that? And Luther recognizes their impossibility as law. They are indeed something other than law. But while Luther presents the astounding spectacle of Jesus Christ telling people to do things that He wants them not to do--and 500 years of solemn Christianity have swallowed this camel--there is another way of looking at it. 

It's that these are not law, but exhortations to action. 

Treating them as law does give rise to near-absurdities: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father who is in heaven is perfect" is kind of nuts as law, as is 'Ind if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also."--not only is it self-referential, but the principle of 'do more than is asked of you' has an additional recursivity that makes no sense built into law.

Of course four millennia of discussing things as law is awfully hard to buck: the Bible is Authority, and therefore must be Law. All of western theological tradition is based on treating these writings as Torah. What other model can you use to base a serious theological edifice on?

But if you just shut up and actually listen, what Jesus is doing in the Sermon is riveting: he is calling people to action. And he's not saying do your best or give it a shot--he's saying it's impossible: do it. And that's the aspect that brings it from homily to real spiritual teaching with sinew and light in it. Shorn of paradox, , this is no more than Confucian. Do good, be generous, blah blah blah. Nothing the Children of Israel hadn't heard a million times. And as moral teaching it's exemplary. But Luther saw it,but recoiled from, the thing that really must have electrified his overly-preached-to listeners: do the absurd: do the good thing that will ruin you financially. Resist not evil--in order to destroy it. And the paradox is right there, blatant and blazing: it's impossible: do it. 

It's zen-like aspects aside, Jesus's exhortations , while surely not the first time the rabble had been roused, is something different in a major religion in that the vision is not a social one--or not a societal one. Jesus sez change the world: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted. And as he points out in his parable of the Good Samaritan, it isn't dependent on your tribe or your confession: you may be a dirty stinking infidel, but you do God's work, and that's what's important. And Jesus's commission was not to create a blessed community, but a leaven for the rest of the world. 

It's no wonder that this was resisted by his followers almost from the get-go: Saul of Tarsus replaces the central sublime paradox with a wealth of weaselly doctrine and the vision of the Christian community/tribe. Screw the Beatitudes--we want laws and a tribe! And it's dreadfully sad that, by the time of the Council of Nicaea, the Creed they hammered out after centuries of vicious and bloody struggle contains not a single reference to Jesus's teachings. And by the time of Saint Jerome, we have what we wanted: a second Torah. And a religion of transformative, supra-social action, settles down, fixated comfortably on Law.

Because you can't have a kingdom of this world dependent on throwing it all away to help others; you can't have an edifice when the bricks are being passed around from hand to hand. And that 'as we forgive our debtors' thing--what's up with that? So the subsequent Christians slip right on by Jesus to Saint Paul, and they chatter away happy as oysters about Romans and Ephesians--and Jesus's final magnificent act of selfless teaching becomes an act of tribal magic by which only the members of the tribe are saved. And when someone of intelligence and perception really looks at Jesus's words and sees the essence of it, he writhes away in a surfeit of logic and throws an inkpot at it as if it were the devil.

And although there's no indication that Satan acted with respect to Jesus in any other capacity than he had in the book of Job, it's finally no contradiction that Christianity has both the Devil and the deep blue me as the source of evil. Because Jesus's solution to the dilemma is to take the fork in the road: change the world and change yourself. Because, as he points out, it's pretty much the same thing.

"Do all that you can, and try all that you don't:

Not a chance must be wasted to-day!"