Jesonian … March 24th, 2018

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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There is much to be gained by studying the lifestyle of Jesus.

It’s not just the miracles or the Messiah “rap.” It’s mostly his message and his management style. Since he was human, he was completely capable of error–to such a degree that the Good Book tells us “he learned through what he suffered.”

We also can garner great insight from the mistakes Jesus made.

One of those was Judas.

We will never know why Jesus chose Judas. It wasn’t because the Iscariot was predestined to be the betrayer of Christ. If you believe that, you should go home, don your Medieval helmet and launch a Crusade to take back the Holy Lands.

Maybe Jesus saw something in the young Judean. It never came to fruition–but there still is much we can curry from studying the relationship. It is a tenuous friendship which came to a head ten days before the Resurrection–in Bethany just outside Jerusalem.

Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who had recently risen from the dead, held a party. I think having a brother who survived “grave circumstances” is well worth some nachos and punch. At the height of the affair, Mary decided to crack open a family heirloom–a flask of expensive burial perfume reserved for the family–which she chose to use to anoint the feet of Jesus. It was an extraordinary, tender moment between Mary of Bethany and Jesus of Nazareth.

The aroma filled the room–an intoxicating fragrance.

But Judas was pissed. He had probably been pissed a long time–and he decided he had found an Achilles heel in the Master’s footsteps–perhaps a way to make Jesus look stupid.

So he complained that Mary had used such an expensive gift for such a trivial purpose. To accentuate his point, he suggested it should have been sold and the money given to the poor.

Judas was convinced he had ground an axe to a sharp point to swing at Jesus’ reputation.

I don’t know why he hated Jesus when he loved him so much. Or maybe he loved him so much that he learned to hate him. I am not privy to the mental state of Judas from Kerioth.

But I do know that Judas thought he was right, and he believed that others were going to back him up. Instead, Jesus rebuked him. I suppose you could say that Jesus did it nicely. (Perhaps you could explain what a “nice” rebuke is.)

Jesus said Judas was out of line–that he had lost the meaning of the moment, and had put a price tag on intimacy.

But here is where Jesus made his mistake: he allowed Judas to leave the room without resolving the conflict. He gave too much credit to the Son of Simon. He figured Judas had heard enough teaching about forgiveness that there was no need to pursue it any further.

Jesus was sadly mistaken.

There is no such thing as a misunderstanding. It is always “your misunderstanding and how right I am.”

Unfortunately, all misunderstandings end in betrayal. If they are not confronted, talked out and healed, the unresolved conflict will eventually open the door to one party or another striking out.

Then we have the scenario of feeling pressure to say “I’m sorry.”

It usually comes forth like, “I’m sorry if I offended anyone.”

Another possibility is, “I’m sorry, and please forgive me.”

It’s amazing how that particular statement, which seems to be filled with humility, can suddenly turn back into anger if the wounded individual does not proffer forgiveness.

The truth is, there is only one response that is correct when ignorance, wilfulness, short-sightedness and nastiness spring from our being and attack another.

“I was wrong.”

Not “I was wrong but…”

Nor “I was wrong in this case, but in another situation it would be different…”

“I was wrong” takes the risk that there will be no forgiveness.

This is what Jesus needed to hear from Judas–even if it required Peter, James and John physically holding Judas in place. Keep in mind–peace-making can be a messy business.

But misunderstanding, “I am sorry if…” and “I am sorry, please…” do not bring about reconciliation.

They are ways for us to maintain our solitary purity while seeming to appear transformed.

You might ask, how do I know this? Because the Good Book tells us that Judas left the party in a snit and went out and plotted with the enemies of Jesus–to betray him.

This was an expensive mistake:

If you leave misunderstanding unhealed, the wound may pour forth blood.

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From the Ground Up … May 24, 2012

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I don’t pride myself on being intelligent. I have found that true intelligence lies in possessing the ability to identify your ignorance. Unfortunately, lots of folks I meet need to let the “smart” move away from their ass to their brain, with a pit stop at the soul. Yet I don’t think most people’s arrogance is a malicious act, to hurt anyone. I believe it’s because we’re all defensive over our weakness and it troubles us rather than alerting us to what our task truly needs to be.

I have told you many times in the jonathots that human beings consist of the heart (our emotions), the soul (our more spiritual side, a mind (our brain and the control center to our bodily functions) and a strength (which is the human form with all of its components and hardware).

About a week ago I had a tremendous revelation–like most such epiphanies, other people probably thought of it years ago and I just stumbled upon it on my way to the barn. May I present my thought? Each of us has one weakness. I don’t know whether it’s genetic, spiritual or part of the natural order–but it is our “cross to bear.” The question that remains is whether we’re going to climb up on that cross to crucify ourselves, or instead, whether we will create an awareness of our weakness and gear our lives in a direction to play that Achilles heel to our advantage.

My weakness is my body. I was dealt a hand of genetic mumbo-jumbo. I have heart disease and diabetes in my family. I have genetic predisposition to obesity. Apparently, it’s essential for me to be bald. Now, I knew this early on. Truthfully, realizing our weakness does not constitute victory over the situation–because the fact of the matter is, if you’re like me and have a weakness in your body, you can start feeling sorry for yourself very strongly, which drags your emotions into the pit as well. Once your emotions are swallowed up, you find very little of a spiritual dynamic for improvement, so your faith wanes. When your faith wanes, your brain takes over with doomsday proclamations, causing you to be less sharp mentally and to come across dull and uncaring. So as you can see, one weakness–in my case, a physical one–if it is not isolated, can quickly own your entire body.

It’s the difference between carrying your cross and dying on one.

Fortunately for my soul, heart and mind, I did not become defensive over having a weak body. Early on I realized that what I ate was not nearly as important for making me slender and beautiful as it was to keep me from killing myself and infiltrating the other parts of my being, which did not need to suffer from my innate weakness. With the body I have been given, I shouldn’t still be alive at sixty years of age. I applied two very simple principles to the situation:

1. Don’t fight the weakness. When you try to turn your weakness into a strength or an excuse, you miss the point. You already have three other strengths, so what you want to do is to keep your weakness from overwhelming your other parts. I have been fat all my life–but I’ve never become emotionally fat, spiritually fat or mentally a fathead. Once you stop resisting the notion that you have a weakness and resenting the hell out of it, you can actually find the power to use that weakness to your advantage.

2. Once you calm yourself down and realize that weakness is common to all of us and is what makes us part of the human family, you can start working from the ground up. For me that was easy. Since my particular cross to bear is physical, I went back to what makes the human body more profitable to its own cause–food, exercise and nutrition. It’s about eating what comes out of the ground. Everything that flowers from the earth is high in vitamins and minerals and low in fat and calories. Everything that doesn’t come out of the ground normally is high in fats and sugars and lower in nutrients. Once I understood this, I worked on my taste buds instead of developing arguments against the reality of the earth system. And because of that, I am still here today.Even though I have had occasions to overeat animal fats, sugars, salts and starches, I have certainly, over my lifetime, eaten more fruits and vegetables and things from the ground up rather than the other choices.

You have to decide where you’re coming from. If your weakness is emotions, then from the ground up you need to live a life of great humor and transparency. If you have a weakness in the spiritual realm, where the things of faith seem illogical and meaningless, then you should address that weakness by finding the most practical application in the everyday life to discover the presence of God. If your brain is your problem, then you should find the chemical imbalances or address the learning disorders, and using reasonableness and patience, attempt to “tune up” that great, fleshy computer.

If we didn’t have a weakness, we would continue to try to dominate each other, and human existence would be a stand-off instead of a fellowship. And let’s be honest–the most obnoxious people in our lives are those who believe they are strong in everything when everybody else knows their true limitation.

From birth, my body has been my adversary. It will be with me until the day I die, when it more or less becomes “dusted off.” So I spend my time using my emotions, spirit and mind to counteract the weakness in my body, providing my strength what it needs from the ground up–fruits, vegetables and everything that sprouts from the earth. (A golden nugget–if it grows in the earth, eat a lot of it. If it walks on the earth, well … more often than not, walk away from it.)

Can it really be this simple? Well, it had better be. Otherwise, none of us will ever be intelligent enough to figure it out.

 

  

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