Historical Setting, 626 C.E. The farm in the Vosges
While Brandell is completely committed to a journey somewhere he knows nothing of, using shear creative imagination to solve a problem he has no control over, he is simply answering God’s dare. He has no imagination for any of the dangers of travel. He doesn’t know the loneliness of strange places or even the pitfalls of standing against the edicts of the Church right here. He just has no idea.
I, on the other hand, know exactly what God is calling me to do. And instead of jumping head long into it teaching the message for which I am a mere earthly sign — that life is many times over, resurrection in spirit, in healing, in hope, in love, in renewal…
And I haven’t been speaking of the sign my life was intended to reflect. On this metaphorical earth I am the resurrection and the life of one metaphorical human. While in heaven, the spiritual truth in the full eternal reality of the love of God, Jesus is the resurrection and the life for all spirit. On metaphor earth, the visual image shows an invisible heaven. So, I have been remiss. I’ve been quietly living a farmer’s life for these years now, while the Church gropes blindly in the darkness of ignorance, feeding the spiritually deprived a diet of edicts and platitudes and contrivances of doctrine to fit earthly politics, sending people plundering after anything but the love of God.
So here it is in our house on the shelf for precious things, a little icon from the imagination of some stranger master artist showing a story I have been hesitant in telling. And even though I saw it when it was happening, I hardly understand now how the error persists in the retelling of the Gospel as stories that are disparaging of the Jews. It was a Roman hate, not a God hate, or a gospel hate yet it seeped into gospel words.
Surely Brandell has no way to know anything of this. Clearly, the Roman trick of redirecting blame to the victims of crucifixion seeped into the Gospel of John. Now for all these hundreds of years the Church and the people who obey the law of the Church, just let those words say what isn’t even possibly true: “The Jews killed Jesus.” It was skewed to suit the ancient Roman politics and to accommodate Gentile Christians in an emerging sect of Christianity rising in the turmoil after the destruction of the Temple.
For Brandell, setting the record straight is his holy mission. For me, this is personal because it is the pages of the story of my own family.
(Continues Thursday, February 1, 2023)
Lazarus Ink 