At Easter, the Old Testament is Crucifying the New

April 1st, 2018

Awake Goy

April 1, 2018

Quite frankly, we do not practice Christianity, which is based on love, forgiveness and humility. That’s what the New Testament is all about. What we practice is a modified form of the Old Testament, flattering ourselves with the illusion that we are, after all, the “good guys”, the chosen people of God, that we shall be saved and that all others are doomed (and probably deserve to be doomed) — the Muslims, the Bahais, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the agnostics, the atheists. We pay lip service to human brotherhood, but in practice we are predators.

Who could possibly see any legitimacy in the claim that the Old Testament granted divine justification to the patriarchs to take the promised Lebensraum by force? (Exodus, Chapters 8 to15, Deuteronomy Chapter VII, verses 1-6, Chapter XX, verses 16-18, and Joshua Chapter VI, verse 21, Chapter VIII, verses 18-29). There is not only xenophobia in these verses, but misanthropy. Who would, in good conscience, repeat the words of Psalm 58 about others with whom we have discord: « These men are born sinners, lying from their earliest words ! They are poisonous as deadly snakes, cobras that close their ears to the most expert of charmers. O God, break off their fangs. Tear out the teeth of these young lions, Lord. Let them disappear like water into thirsty ground. Let them be as snails that dissolve into slime and as those who die at birth, who never see the sun. God will sweep away both old and young. He will destroy them more quickly than a cooking pot can feel the blazing fire of thorns beneath it. The godly shall rejoice in the triumph of the right. They shall walk the bloodstained fields of slaughtered, wicked men.”?

If you emotionally and physically experience faith, if you instinctively feel it, if you believe, you would agree that we can be saved only by GRACE, i.e. by the same transcendental force, by the same incomprehensible generoristy — that gratuitous act of creation. We ought to endeavour to to the right thing, to be good to our families, to our neighbours, to our colleagues, to be just, but our good works can hardly be enough to deseve eternal salvation. We are only the vessels into which Divinie Grace is poured, like wine is poured into a chalice, and yet, it is the wine that matters, the wine that still states of its grapes (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 6).