CROSSED

The H is silent.

I’ve been thinking a lot on this one.  Mainly because it has spurred some anger.  Second because it reminds me of this:

But…back to people getting mad…the American Family Association jumped up to defend Jesus.

This past weekend, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” aired an extremely violent and gory segment mocking Jesus Christ…just for laughs. And, it’s available now online thanks to Kmart, Sears and J.C.Penney …TAKE ACTION – Kmart, Sears and J.C. Penney have the responsibility to demand their brands not support programs that mock people of faith. Sears, Kmart and J.C. Penney are underwriting this attack on the Christian faith on NBC network. Let them know you are offended.

I cannot help but feel they missed the joke.  You see, Jesus is not the joke here rather Tarantino’s fast and loose use of history for his own cinematic uses.  This is especially the case in his recent hits Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained.  This is not an inherent problem.  But the core of the joke is that the Jesus we see in Uncrossed is not the Jesus most people think of when they hear the name.  Like Gandhi II, it is based in the fact that we do not see Jesus as that kind of dude.

But you know…there is a sadder truth.  This Jesus is not so far than the Jesus reached by some.  This is the tough Jesus of guys like Mark Driscoll and others obsessed with “Christian Masculinity”.  This version of Jesus is the fuel of end time obsessives.  The adherents of Left Behind anxiously await an angry, violent and vengeful Jesus who returns, sword waving, bloodletting and mayhem for the minions of the Anti-Christ (clarification, if you are not a Christian?  You are one of these minions deserving a cruel and bloody death-followed by an eternity of suffering).  And yet, some of these people are upset that SNL would mock Christ as a vengeful, angry and bloody thirsty God.  Which, again, not what is happening.  The skit is, again, playing on the fact that most Americans of any belief system do not perceive Jesus as a violent killer.  It is an absurd image because most people do not think of Jesus as being like that.  They think it is ridiculous.  Well, unless you think Tim LeHaye and Mark Driscoll are founts of Wisdom.  Then, Djesus Uncrossed is pretty on target.

Or as writer David R. Henson writes:

In the end, whatever the fallout from the skit, American Christianity didn’t need Tarantino or SNL or anyone in Hollywood to think up something as absurd and as base and as hysterically inaccurate as DJesus Uncrossed.

We’ve already done that for ourselves.