The Burden of Jesus


Dear Eugene,

To create a God who carries our burden without taking over is philosophically unwieldy.  It's like trying to sell a car that should run for you but you'll still need to run it with your legs, a Flintstones joke.

A God like this needs a great deal of PR work whichever way you work him to make him work.

If you are carrying a burden, you'll want to persuade yourself to suspend your disbelief in and dissatisfaction with him.

If you are not carrying a burden, you'll want to drum up a different aspect of his value to keep him fresh and relevant, your loyalty to him valid and necessary.

If someone else is carrying a burden which concerns you only as a thought curio, you'll be tempted to explain away your care-less-ness with such God's inaction or impotence.

If someone else is looking with indifference at you carrying your burden, especially one who feels to you being a good person to blame for your trouble (and getting better every passing heavy-laden minute), you will be more than tempted to take over this God who refuses to take over, and order a thunderbolt or two and charge them to his account.

So if Jesus, the God who suffers and dies for our burden without taking over, without substituting our living as to render our experience meaningless, without trivializing Alex's being Alex, Eugene's being Eugene, and each and every human life's being singularly worthwhile even--and especially!--in pain and sorrow, is a pure human invention to sell religion, then the inventors, whoever they are, have a very very bad business plan.  Jesus' suffering doesn't happen in a parallel universe, and our suffering isn't merely a shadow of his.  This "God" and his way are so confusing and confounding that his religious enterprise is virtually unmarketable.

So it is little wonder that throughout Christian history we've tried so hard to market Jesus otherwise, to variously quietly devastating and wildly disastrous results.

Yours, Alex

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