Obscured

 "In 1500, and for almost a thousand years before that, the Western world was completely enmeshed with God for everything it saw. That meant that the industry of religion had both a huge influence and market. It meant that Jesus could only be accessed through that industry". The Reformation of the Internet - Duo Dickinson.

"Christ and His Cross stands between us!". Michelangelo - The Agony and the Ecstasy. 

"Before whose eyes Christ was displayed as Crucified" Paul - Galatians 3:1.

A recent posting here (The Depths of it All) gained an interesting response from someone I've enjoyed discussing issues with a great deal this past year. I was, apparently, being somewhat transparent in my passionate appeal to call to those who read the piece to be pastoral in their approach to people in the particular light of the present troubles.

Friends will know that one of my all time favourite movie moments is from the film of Irving Stone's 'The Agony and Ecstasy', quoted above, in which the renascence artist faces the clerics of his day concerning their charge that his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel amounted to nothing more than obscenity. Michelangelo's response not only drips with righteous anger, but is informed by a theology that the poison of the religious machinery of his day couldn't begin to comprehend.

This wasn't a minor aberration, as Duo Dickinson shows in his essay, but a road-block that made Luther and the Reformation essential for the health of Christianity.

The problem - a serious error in thinking - had been continual in Roman Catholicism for some ten centuries, and it was most commonly expressed in Art.

In the opening of his work, Vicars of Christ - The Dark side of the Papacy, ex-jesuit Peter De Rosa shows how the apparent 'kindness' of modesty had insured that any religious depiction of Jesus upon the cross never showed Him entirely naked. Christ's genitalia were always covered, thereby ensuring that something as cruel as this execution could be venerated by the faithful, but this omission allowed a far worse cruelty to fester.

The cloth hid the fact that this Jesus was a circumcised Jew, and with this mark veiled from the public, the lie became easy to perpetuate that it was the "unbelieving Jews" who had been solely responsible for Christ's death. Centuries of pogroms, ghettos and badges of disgrace followed, finally allowing a particular anti-semite to profess that his 'struggle' against the Jews was identical to that pursued by the church.

Lies are most pernicious when they are embroidered with what makes the eye and then the heart desire them. The lie here allowed the Papacy free-reign to practice terrible things.

Evil always follows when we seek to hide the true nature of Christ and our faith to one another, and replace this with a contrivance of what is deemed 'expedient'.

When Paul addressed the church at Galatia, it was because they were adopting an approach to God which masked that naked, exposed raw truth of what the Gospel was, and what was entailed for each of us to trust in it - the negation of lies.

The Good News of God revealed in Christ has to, once again, break through the present 'religious' architecture of this moment and end our adherence to the presumed myths of the day. Vital Christianity makes that untainted manner of connection entirely viable.