get a life
Taken with this first century AD notion and religion with doctrine of God Incarnate, that Pantokrator, the Creator of all that is,
deigned to come to Earth as a creature: why? Why? why all of it: nativity, baptism, preaching and teaching, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and expectation, why? Pathetic, self-obsessed minuscule ant-sized creatures on an obscure little planet in a remote solar system on an outlying ring of an average galaxy among some two trillion galaxies, Why? It boggles the mind.
It staggers the imagination. Is it Truth, or is it our ignorant, arrogant flat-Earth egocentrism? If true, Why?
Doing something that I generally oppose, mixing two Gospels, Mark and Matthew, Jesus says he's come to preach (Mark 1:38) and Matthew says he proclaimed "Μετανοεῖτε repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). Matthew calls it the kingdom of heaven, Mark calls it the kingdom of God, same thing. Jesus is not talking about pie in the sky, He's talking about here and now, on Earth.
Μετανοεῖτε means literally "think differently, get a moral conscience." It does not mean "we are truly sorry and we humbly repent" and go on with life; it is not Pantokrator being obsessed with your "sins" in some theologically ludicrous trivial go to confession and repent that "I have said bad words." In the present active imperative second person plural command form of the verb μετανοέω, Μετανοεῖτε commands, in our Southernism, You all think differently in a moral sense, change everything about yourself. Get a life. And he lives, preaches and teaches as "show and tell" so it's clear what he means by "a life."
Why? so that you will be worthy of inclusion in the imminently to come kingdom of God - - which God will bring about here on Earth (not in the sky) by radically changing everything and putting the Son of Man in charge, with Jesus as that Daniel 7 cosmic figure returning (Jesus' Second Coming) as God's regent ruling the kingdom of God on Earth.
Why? It may be human imagination, or rationalization of an unexpectedly suffering and dying Messiah, developing first century BC Jewish messianic expectation into a religion (in which case, as Paul says, we are fools); but if it's Truth, it's incomprehensible.
I'm currently taken with Simone Weil. For all her brilliance and upbringing in a family environment of unobservant Orthodox Jewish atheism, Simone Weil bought into the Christian Gospel as Truth. Although she refused baptism into the Church because it would have made her an organizational Insider, violating her life vocation as an Outsider. I admire Simone Weil, her thinking and her grasp of humanity as part of the Universe, while also thinking that living in the early half of the twentieth century she did not realize what we now know about the Universe. If Weil had known, would she still have believed our Truth, or would she have seen Truth as Steven Hawking did?
Anyway, it's all part of my own active and contemplative search for Truth, nomesane?
RSF&PTL
T89&c
top pic: outside on 7H porch with hot & black as the day opened, the cloud's reflection in St Andrews Bay at my feet was brighter than the sun's light in the cloud itself.