On the inversion of values - Part 4

I stare at the question in the mirror.

Am I seeing this Christian revolution only because I desperately need it to be true?

Yes. I desperately need it to be true.

Look at the alternative. Look at the raw, unblinking reality of nature. The strong devour the weak. The victim dies in the dirt, unremembered and unavenged. I am terrified of a universe governed entirely by the survival of the fittest. I crave a reality where the oppressed hold the crown.

And I cannot pretend that admission is harmless. Confessing a bias does not neutralise it. The man who says “I know I am drunk” is still drunk. Every argument I have made across these four parts could be the elaborate construction of a frightened mind looking for permission to keep believing.

I cannot argue my way out of this. Any rebuttal I write will be produced by the same suspect mind, and will inherit its suspicion. There is no clever sentence waiting on the other side of this door.

So I have to stop trying to win this in my head.

Suppose I win the debate. Suppose the historical record is flawless, and the Skeptic concedes defeat. Even if I secure the intellectual verdict, the prize is entirely empty.

Here is the crushing, unavoidable reality. History cannot heal you. Philosophy cannot forgive you. A flawlessly constructed argument cannot look you in the eye, pierce through your darkest shame, and assign you infinite, unbreakable worth.

None of it was ever going to reach the place I actually needed it to reach.

It is over. The whole trial. It was always the wrong trial.

The briefcase snaps shut. The courtroom empties of everyone who came to watch an argument. You are left entirely alone. Almost. One figure has not moved.

The history of the West fades. You strip away the Papal Bulls, the cathedrals, and the empires that hijacked his name. You look up. The Wrecking Ball did not leave with the others. He is still watching. The bench is still occupied. You look directly at him. A different trial is about to begin, and this one was never going to be settled by history.

When you read his words, the geometry of the world shifts again. He offers no political framework to organise society. He looks directly at the terrifying, brutal machinery of human nature and demands we step entirely outside of it.

He sets an impossibly high bar. He demands we love our enemies. He demands we bless those who curse us.¹ He demands we take our own ego, our ambition, and our natural instinct for survival, and nail them to a piece of Roman timber.

I step away from the safety of the defence table. I walk into the witness box and take the seat my bias has been holding for me. We were always the same person.

I look at his terrifying, impossible standard. I look at my own life. I look at my own pride. I look at my own ambition. I look at my desperate, biological reflex to protect my ego, to win, and to put my own comfort ahead of other people’s pain.

I look at the single, most humbling casualty of my own life. I look at a relationship where that impossible standard was sitting right in the room with me, demanding I surrender my ego, and I did not meet it. Beneath all the layers of logic I had ready, when faced with the terrifying vulnerability of actually putting another person before my own survival, I simply chose myself.

I opened this entire investigation by confessing to a safe, intellectual crime - outsourcing my convictions to a historian. That charge was easy to admit. It kept the blood off my hands. But standing here in the witness box, the judge ignores my reading habits. He indicts my heart.

The same rot I prosecuted in the ancient Church is sitting right here in my own chest. I demand a standard of moral perfection from the men who came before me that I cannot even maintain in my own living room. I want the moral high ground of the victim, while harbouring the ruthless instincts of the conqueror.

I am human. All too human.

The judge raises the gavel.

I am guilty.

I am profoundly, undeniably guilty of the exact same human corruption that has plagued this religion for two thousand years.

I wait for the executioner. There is no clever closing statement left to make, and no brilliant historical footnote that can carry me out of the room. The case is closed, and the verdict is entirely mine.

The room sits in absolute silence for what feels like a very long time.

In any other courtroom, the guilty verdict brings the executioner.

This is the final, ultimate inversion of Western history. At the exact centre of the Christian narrative, the Judge steps down from the bench, takes the sentence upon himself, and hands the guilty man a pardon.

The Wrecking Ball takes the blow.

I drop the posture of the victorious lawyer standing over a defeated Skeptic. I write this simply as a guilty man, completely disarmed by grace.

Christianity remains a summons to be answered. It is the daily, agonising, beautiful process of failing to meet his impossible standard, and walking back to him anyway, knowing I will fail again, and knowing I am entirely loved regardless.

In a world governed by the cold, unforgiving logic of the food chain, this summons is the only true hope we possess.

It is a Calling.

And I am, finally, listening.

Footnotes

1. Matthew 5:44, Luke 6:27-28 (Sermon on the Mount / Sermon on the Plain). ↩