The laughing Christ is not the happy hippie you project onto this man as savior. He was only selling salve to our violence, a means, not an end—salvation. Why does he laugh in his torture? Why would anyone? That is a smile knowing of the fate of one’s persecutor—the smile of vengeance, one’s father coming, his “I’m going to get my dad!” and all the violence that fearfully vengeful idolatry implies—you’ve felt that feeling, the wishing of death, so angry…you cry, and laugh in the same heave hoe that starts all of men’s wars, that ambivalent, fascinating all-in and in-it-for-the-god-damned-blood, raaaaaage—it is our fellow man that we have always raged against; And god is death, he is the curse of the dead prophets visited upon murderous man, his survivor, Cain’s curse and Lamech’s—yours and mine: Seventy times seven, tit for tat, eye for eye, mimetic fiends to the cocaine of violence; violence we still pay good money to partake of in the abstract. Sports being the descendent of war, as all softer-bellied sons are to their fathers.
The logos of love, non-violence in mirrored volley with justice and desire—‘two-on-one,’ rejected in favor to the ways of men—a self elected taking of favor, we sons of Jacob. Usurpers and Assumers. Going ones own hubristic way, Pharisaical separation indeed, the choosing of a life half-conscious of murder, half-bound in ever-blinding repression, a psychic and necessarily psychotic being we are. Cursed to wander and wonder, to guilt and woe; and if man says to himself—to you, “yes but this guilt is contrived, you mustn’t feel it, my man! It is only an illusion of a foolish past.” well you must reply coldly and with calculation: “Are we not inheritors of our fathers’ violence? Is not our birthright born of murder? Have we not “survived” our dead—and thereby, too, the dead of all time? A great guilt is our cause for Love! If not for this sorrow, then for who’s occasion? If we celebrate not our fathers’ countless bloody victories on back to their antiquities, then we cheaply praise our present and will call it coincidence. We cannot acknowledge our dirty inheritance, but we’ll take the money. It’s what our fathers did.” And instead of reckoning with all of this Logos of Killing and Surviving—of Sacrifice as the dominant law of men, their One Word, their contrived truth atop the True Pattern, the Grand Pater, the grandfather, the grandest of fathers, of our fathers—yours and mine and theirs’, God; we whitewash their tombs in ritual blood sacrifice, in memory of their deeds and great tricks—unknowingly, but we do feast on their bones—the pesky inheritance. Cannibalistic uncleanliness, our past. Cover-ups in our fearful atonement, lest the ghosts escape. “Yes, pile the rocks high, Henry.” Henry is a descendent too, of Cain, as is any man—as are all men. As are you and I: rejectors of a Love accepting of violence and loss in grand accordance with Peace among men and mercy mild; Goers of our own cursedly bloody and wandering way.
What else could a messenger fearfully doomed to the shooting, ears of the kings deafened by so many before him, do but laugh a hearty ‘good riddance’? And the trickster once again tossed dishwater up to heavens to cover Mawu with a bit of muck. She couldn’t manage Shame. Nor could Christ, Love—for love shames man, his past, his pride—his fathers. Pride cometh before the fall, but shame, the shame of love, provokes pride, proud in its murder, it’s survival. Pride should be well pitied for his weighty, guilty past, then along with Shame, praised for their potential child, Humility. Humility begets peace.
Perhaps both in the vengeful laughter of all The Father’s dead sons—fellow prophets-past, ill-fated blood brothers: Abel, Remus, Osiris, Mawu, Apollo; and in Humiliation, Truthful Humility at his incapacity to bring the Logos of Love to bear against the Original sin of humanity, the Logos of Violence, Victory, the building of the City of Man, a false Capitol in the Kingdom of God; Jesus Wept.
