>>6498912 (pb)
>>6498608 (pb)
>Make Israel Respect Christ Again
Again?
Let's go back to the beginning…
The Pharisees came to ask Christ, “Teacher, tell us who is my neighbor?” They didn’t ask him, how does one behave to one’s neighbor? They asked him, point blank, the question: Who is the guy whom you call neighbor?
And Christ told them a man (a Jew) was going down to Jericho, fell among robbers, was beaten up and left wounded. A teacher goes by, a priest goes by, sees him and walks on. And then an outsider comes along, the traditional enemy (a Samaritan), and turns to the wounded man, as an internal turning (compassion), and picks him up, takes him into his arms and brings him to the inn.
There is no way of categorizing who your neighbor ought to be. Christ told them who your neighbor is not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you speak, by the ethnos, but by (((you))). You can recognize the other (hu)man who is out of bounds culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who – you can say by providence or by pure chance – is the one who lies somewhere along your road in the grass and create the supreme form of relatedness which is not given by creation but created by (((you))).
This story of the “Good Samaritan” has been so thoroughly assimilated into Christian religion that its meaning seems obvious and unproblematic: it illustrates a universal ethical duty to those in need. But in reality, its deeper meaning is far different and has been overlooked was the ethnic difference between the two men. The Samaritan, as an outsider (a Palestinian), has no duty whatsoever to the wounded man – his duty is only to his own kind – and therefore his action, in historical context, is a violation of ethical decency, not an instance of it. He does what he does because he is moved by what most English translations call “compassion”, but what the original Greek text describes more literally as a “stirring in his guts.” This is crucial to the answer to the question – who is my neighbor? The answer is that it could be anybody, so long as it is a fully embodied relationship and one that is actually felt as a personal call. Remove this embodied quality, turn a personal experience into an ethical norm, and you have “a liberal fantasy.”
The corruption started with “the church” trying to manage and, eventually, legislating Christ’s teachings, creating an “institution” that would guarantee it, insure it, and protect it by criminalizing its opposite. This depersonalized Church, weaponized later as the state religion of Roman was corrupt from the beginning.
The first corporations were created by the church and were known as “Samaritan corporations.” The church gradually became the template for all subsequent institutions to this day. Even the secular ones (e.g. NGOs) that wear the mask of care and pretend to do better for people than what people can do for themselves. The misappropriation of Christianity in order to gain worldly power and wealth at the sheeple’s expense should not be swept under the rug, but these things occurred despite Christ’s teachings, not because of them.
This domestication of the Gospel is a historical process perceptible to all – Christianity changes the world – but, to quote Paul, it is also a “mystery of evil” - a mystery because it’s meaning, and perhaps its dynamism as well, depends on and derives from the Revelation which it corrupts and betrays. This mystery, is now more clearly present than ever before. In other words, the attempt to make institutions perform in place of persons is now reaching a kind of theoretical maximum. One of the ways in which this is expressed is through chronic fiscal crisis – we can never afford all the services we believe we need.
What’s amazing is that this “mystery of evil” is unmasked from where it originated…
http://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2015/10/22/christ-and-anti-christ-in-the-thought-of-ivan-illich