Sacred Mysteries

When I started this project of analyzing Christianity, with my trinity essay and new blog of daily biblical analysis and interpretation, I seriously had the idea that Jesus Himself is just that, a metaphor. That someone, a genius obviously, decided to write a story of Jesus, perhaps the author is the true Jesus that wrote a story to deliver His messages. If that’s the case, then certainly the entirety of the Gospel shall be able to be deciphered into a universal truth. This includes Mary, which is an interesting figure here. However, as I read today’s passage, I realized that is simply untrue. While Jesus shows no favoritism to any ethnicity, and is even rejected by the Jews for not living up to their expectations, we have seen a conflicting and contradictory account from His closest ones, His own mother, the virgin Mary. This gives doubt to the Jesus story hypothesis, as why would the author include such trivial detail? As such it’s more likely that the Gospel actually happened, let’s disect it.

In today’s passage, Mary met Elizabeth and exchanged thoughts, Mary replied Elizabeth by praising God. If you pay attention to her final statements, you can see her Jewish beliefs being expressed very frontally. Mary, being a Jew, had thought that her son, Jesus, would be the messiah of the Jews, she was unfortunately wrong. We see others seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of the promise that God gave to the Jews. Now why would an author write in some characters that simply makes the message unclear? It is thus easier to believe that the gospel actually happened, and what we are seeing is a conflict of interest between Jesus and His colleagues. His colleagues, which are Jews and ethnically inspired, saw Jesus in an ethnic central way. Jesus, however knew that the world is not for a single nation, the world is a whole in entirety, and He wishes to deliver some important messages.

The reason I was thinking of Jesus being a fictional character made by someone else wishing to deliver some message is because of one vital event, perhaps the center of Christian faith, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. If the gospel is simply a metaphorical story, then we can take away Jesus’ death as merely metaphorical as well, and I already had an idea for that. However, since it’s more likely for Jesus to be an actual figure that truly happened in history, that means He genuinely died on the cross, and then resurrected on the third day, and finally went to heaven. This, complicates matters, by a large margin. And even if this is just fiction, there is still one thing that is still unclear, the baptism. While I can just talk about His birth first, it seems that is a topic of another day. The baptism is in need of an examination for now.

When Jesus came to John, he was shocked that the Lord would ask to be baptized, and even claimed that he, John, should be the one baptized, and not Jesus. In my opinion, Jesus wishes to show that He is human, like everyone else watching, He is no less human than any of them. The baptism uses water, obviously, and the meaning of water is quite easy to decipher. Water is commonly used to clean stuff, including our body. As such, the baptism is more of a metaphor for the cleansing of our spirit, cleansing us from our previous sins. Water is pure, and by washing our body with it, we make our body pure as well, just as in the baptism, we purify our spirit. Then what about the Father saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased,” and the dove which is supposedly the holy spirit? That is not that hard to answer, let’s see what it means.

In my personal opinion, the Father and the holy spirit interacting with Jesus is a metaphor as well. It is a metaphor for the reconciliation of the spirit with their true nature, God, a rebirth into purity, purity that allows the spirit to finally, hear God again. This fits with our interpretation of the trinity, the Father is God as our guide and source, saying that He loves us, and He is pleased with us. Of course, God had always loved us before baptism, but only now our spirit is purified to see God’s love. God is pleased with us as we are now purified. The holy spirit, as we know is simply an extension of God the Father, and fits nicely. Now that we have deciphered the meaning of the baptism, mostly, it’s time for the most challenging part, the crufixion.

In the Christian faith, Jesus dies to atone for all of our sins. And of course, physical pain is not His only risks, it seems His spirit is at risk as well. Of course this is the only logical explanation. But how is His spirit is at risk? And furthermore, I seriously doubt this entire line of reasoning. How does Jesus sacrifice Himself? What would even happen if Jesus didn’t sacrifice Himself? Furthermore, the fact that Jesus would then obtain glory of a magnitude incomparable to any human in existence seems to make His sacrifice almost meaningless. And what is Jesus trying to save us from? If we try to fit this into our deduction that God encompasses the entire existence, we know that this seems weird. God sacrifices themself to save themself from, what? We won’t abandon this idea however, we’ll just store it until I can figure out what any of this means.

In my opinion, the death of Jesus represents a sacrifice towards true freedom. Freedom of the flesh, but not just being able to control our flesh without the flesh controlling us, this grander freedom is also the freedom of the material world. And thus gaining complete control it. By dying, Jesus is set free of His chains that is called the body, and now He can pretty much do as he pleases. This idea is supported by the fact that after Jesus is resurrected, He can appear whereever, using His physical body, since He can eat grilled fish and have His disciples touch Him. He’s not appearing as a ghost, He’s manipulating the law of physics in a way that He can simply manifest His body with the energy around whereever He appears. As such, His death represents true freedom from this world, and His ascension the final reconcialiation with God.

But wait! There’s more to this, if His death is a metaphor for true freedom, then it’s more likely that Jesus is a fictional story, but we know the chances are low, so, what now? That means Jesus actually died on the cross, and was then resurrected after three days. However, if that is so, what for? Why would Jesus go all of that simply to deliver one message? Especially when not many people actually get His message, instead they distort it into what Christianity is now. My point is, what would happen if Jesus did not die on the cross and no sacrifice of the lamb of God was made? Would humankind be damned for all time? But we know humanity is God as well, so God would be damned? What kind of damnation, or perhaps oblivion that faces us in the event that the tree of the cross was never chopped down? These are all important questions, but they are for another day, and another time, have a nice day.