The Easter season for many Christians is a time to celebrate the rise of Christ from the dead to reign in heaven. And whether you accept the story of Christ as atonement for your sins, or something more subtle, on the order of giving yourself completely over to God, the Passion story is a compelling and humbling example of self-sacrifice.
For many Christians the Easter story begins and ends with that sacrifice. Nothing more need be said. But there’s a practical layer to the Easter story that Christians entirely focused on heavenly transcendence too often fail to consider.
It is the conspiracy Jesus does not want you to miss.
What secret could Jesus possibly hold that we don’t already know, that hasn’t been explored sufficiently by theologians, or canonized in the church?
You might know something about this secret if you pay attention to the entire Passion narrative. The Bible loved prophecies, and the story of Jesus entering the city on a donkey or young colt is the echo of a predicted fulfillment of a Messiah who will return to restore Israel and its people to glory and self-rule.These were important hopes back then. In some respects, those hopes remain today. Many Christians openly hope for the return of Christ, and think that is the secret Jesus wants us to know about his comings and goings in this world. But like many good conspiracies, those people may be wrong.
We instead find the real and noble conspiracy, and one Jesus does not want us to miss, in the message everyone seems to want to avoid in the story of Christ. He was a radical in every sense to those who ruled in his era. The leading religious authorities were skeptics of his claim to be the Son of God. The Romans considered him at best a weak imitation of a true king. All were more interested in his supposed abilities to do magic than his actual message. “Blessed are the meek…” Jesus is quoted from the Sermon on the Mount.
Hardly the claims of a king. Not in that era.
So fixated are we on salvation during the Easter season that the real conspiracy of Jesus goes uncelebrated. His clearly political motives in defying both sources of profound authority seem so worldly, almost unnecessary for the Son of God. And then his unwillingness to defend himself, so that he would appear to be a fool in front of foolish men? What sort of secret was that to keep from all his accusers.
Before his capture and trial, Jesus tried to educate his disciples on the secrets of his ministry. They begged him to speak plainly, not to rely on colorful parables and organic stories about yeast and bread and water to convey his message of spiritual grace and hoop.
But Jesus chastised his own disciples, telling them, “Are you so dull?’
And that is the real conspiracy of Jesus. He warned his disciples that much of God’s wisdom need be hidden from authorities in order to be heard and accepted by true believers. In the hands of the authorities, true wisdom becomes twisted into thorns of power to be jammed down on the heads of those seeking hope and truth.
In fact, the reaction of those in power to the notion that “Blessed are the meek…” is to turn that conspiratorial truth into a threat. The powerful see weakness where Christ sees power. Those with selfish interests turn that call to humility into an excuse to dominate.
If you truly want to believe and accept Christ, and especially the sacrifice he made in the name of all people, to instruct us on the power of humility and devotion to God, must be to personally sacrifice the will to turn religion into a political force designed to deliver advantage unto yourself.
Because barring that, people fall prey to their own desires, and go out preaching in public about their piousness and devotion to God. And those people Jesus distrusted most of all. “Do not pray in public…” he warned. “Or make a show of your piety.”
That is the conspiracy of faith that Jesus does not want you to miss. He hid his own authority and truth behind the will to be mocked, even tortured, rather than claim some position of power for himself. He hid his messages in metaphor, and indeed, the entire Bible follows that formula for concealed grace. Those who take scripture literally gloss over the real meaning of this conspiracy of truth. They turn the Bible into a weapon rather than a tool of grace. They force interpretations of scripture on the heads of believers like religious crowns of thorns.
Thus they aggressively miss the conspiracy of the Bible entirely. Yet that conspiracy is what the Easter season is truly all about. The willingness to place humility before politics, and endure sacrifice before personal gain.
Without that will, it does not matter if Christ rose from the dead or stayed in the tomb. The secret of faith lies buried behind a stone if the kingdom of God cannot be accepted on those terms. All other claims are a celebration of self. And nothing more.
One can’t help hear the news about Hulk Hogan’s legal judgment against Gawker.com, a website famous for sharing sex tapes and exposes of celebrity and individual scandals.
But Hulk Hogan’s life was not ruined by the release of yet another round of grandiose (and possibly gross, I have not watched it) video of his penis. So what? There are 7 billion people on this earth. About 50% of them have penises of one shape or another.
Millions of Donald Trump admirers are hoping the man can run all the way to the White House with an incomparable vision for America.
And make no mistake. Donald Trump is a real “family values” man. After all, he has publicly lusted after his own daughter. Nothing like a little incestual father-daughter thing going on to attract all those creepy faux-Christian dads posing with their daughters in purity vow photos. Trump’s a hard act to follow, you might say. But these guys look like they’re on their way.
The word “hate” has come to mean a specific thing these days. “Hate crimes,” for example, are committed with an intent to target a specific person or people for their beliefs or lifestyle. Terrorism is a form of hate crime as well. The world is full of it. Full of hate and vengeance, retribution and revenge toward those we hate.
Trump has refused to apologize for any of his arrogant plots. Just this week he attacked the Pope, for God’s Sake, over a question asked of the pontiff out of context. Yet Trump turned it into an opportunity to make himself look like more of a Christian than the leader of the entire Catholic faith. Trump is a pirate.
It has long been said that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” The same is true of piracy. At the same time Trump has been rising in the polls, a band of land pirates out in Oregon took over a nature refuge in protest of the fact that people would not give them free grazing rights on public land. So they attempted to take back their perceived chunk of America with guns and threats. They were pirates, in other words.
When Justice Antonin Scalia was found alone and dead in his own room, conspiracy theorists on the political Right exploded with accusations he was assassinated. Some pointed a finger at President Obama, claiming it was a Leftist plot to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court with a centrist or left-leaning judge.
And of course, there is the ultimate American assassination, that of President John F. Kennedy. The events of that day are shrouded in highly suspect machinations of his body’s transfer and treatment during the flight back to Washington. There is little likelihood there was only one shooter that day in Dallas. The controversial editing of the Zapruder film points many fingers at a conspiracy to change the story of Kennedy’s assassination to a chance shooting by a lone gunmen. But all of sane America knows that’s a lie. There was a murder, and there was a coverup. And we should ascertain that everyone from the CIA to the mob had some hand in it.
But it’s not always the case. The political right essentially assassinated Jesus 2000 years ago. The conspiracy to have him captured and tried before Pontius Pilate was calculated with murderous intent. Those political conservatives running the faith did not want competition from some radical, liberal country preacher. So they conspired to have him killed. It’s what the Right always does when it is losing the political battle. Dead men can’t prophesy against them.
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Rubio is certainly moving his lips to spit out conservative doctrine. Yet he somehow comes off like one of those Clutch Cargo cartoons from years ago. You know the one, where the creepy lips are projected through a static cartoon face in 1960s low grade animation? And that would be accurate except for that fact that Marco Rubio and his cartoon logic on issues such as abortion date from the 1950s at best. So let’s talk about rape, since that what Marco Rubio thinks he does best.
Scholarly studies of such issues show that rape is indeed often used as a war on women. In her treatise title “Rape, Women and War,” scholar 
If you tune into Republican rallies with their angry moods and Take Back America chants, it truly brings to mind the crowds of men assembled outside the house of Lot. They keep making demands and pressing on the liberal aims of Lot, which are simply to make his house and home a place of protection for the immigrants that have come into his care.
So this is all playing out according to a strangely predictable plan. If I didn’t know better, I’d call it predestination, or pre-ordination. Take your pick.
