To Sojourn

We know very little about Jesus. We know lots about what people said and wrote about him after his death. But the man himself is largely hidden from us. We know that his name was Yeshua, and that he was a Jew living in ancient Palestine. Historians suspect, for complex reasons that we need not get into, that Yeshua was taken in by an ascetic preacher named John.(1) This man initiated Yeshua into an apocalyptic strain of Judaism. This did not mean that Yeshua believed in our modern, cinematic version of the apocalypse—there was nothing of the End of the World in Yeshua’s words. He preached the arrival of a divine revelation, an unveiling of higher meaning and truth. God had touched down as a holy presence, ending the need for complex ritual and dogma. Yeshua took this message with him to Jerusalem during the busiest, most volatile day of the Jewish calendar. Local Roman authorities cruelly executed him shortly afterwards for nothing more than disturbing an already fragile civic peace. And that’s more-or-less what we know. Yeshua did not refer to himself as the son of God or as the anointed one, the Messiah or Christ. Those claims came later, as did stories of Yeshua's miracles and bodily resurrection.

Among the many things that we definitely do not know about Yeshua is the date of his birth. I am not surprising anyone when I report that the Christ Mass is celebrated on December 25 as part of a medieval Catholic attempt to convert non-Christians who celebrated the Winter Solstice. As such, Christmas is yet another thing obstructing our view of Yeshua, making us see what was not there. Which is unfortunate because the message of Yeshua is one worth preserving, whatever your beliefs. Yeshua’s God was an immediate presence, one beyond churches and superstitions. To quote Thomas Sheehan, “In Jesus’ preaching, the happening of forgiveness, the coming of the kingdom, was entirely the initiative of God. And yet at the same time it was not an objective event that dropped out of the sky. God became present when people allowed that presence by actualizing it in lives of justice and charity.”(2)

Behind all the dogma, myth, historical confusion, colonialism, and commercialism behind and surrounding December 25^th, there is a moment waiting for us—a parallel world of human simplicity, existing simultaneously with our own. One of the spiritual goals of the strands of Christian asceticism that provides the core to modern Systema, obfuscated by politics, consumerism, and a martial emphasis, is the actualization of this parallel world. Systema—at its core—seeks, after the words of one of the oldest letters of early Christianity, to transform its practitioners into foreigners and exiles with respect to the world, to inspire a transition from regular time to messianic time, “the time that remains between time and its end.”(3) As sojourners in this world, we place our faith in the sky and the heavens, the ever-present moment of opening that is human being, and the feeling of immenseness that accompanies that moment.(4)

The conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge, in Dicken’s Christmas Carol, is one from regular time to messianic time. Scrooge becomes a sojourner, faithful to the opening, enacting God’s presence in a life of justice and charity. He learns the true meaning of Christmas.

I saw a woman on the street today. She was speaking loudly into her phone, appearing agitated, but not speaking words of anger. She was stressed and frustrated. There was a doctor’s appointment to attend, family coming later that day, and some other difficulties. She looked hurt. Like life had taken something from her and she didn’t even realize it. Listening to her I thought of what Christmas had become. And then I remembered what it could be.

 (1)     Biblical scholars employ at least four criteria when determining whether elements of the gospel material are authentically historical: dissimilarity, coherence, multiple attestation, and language and environment. Whatever is reported of Yeshua that is dissimilar from the early Christian church or ancient Judaism, is coherent with other elements that are likewise dissimilar, written of in separate, unrelated sources, and typical of Aramaic speech and the cultural patterns of early Palestine, is probably authentically historical. See Sheehan, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (Random House, 1986): 25

 (2)     Ibid: 67

 (3)     Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (Seagull, 2012): 1-8
 (4)     Nancy, God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues (Fordham, 2011): 15-16