“The greatest triumph of the devil in the modern age is convincing people that it doesn’t exist.”
Even in my early teens, I questioned the contradiction between Palm Sunday, which marks the triumphal arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, and the days that followed, culminating in his crucifixion.
If Jesus knew he was to die on the cross for the sins of mankind, as Christians maintain, then why the set up on Palm Sunday?
Christians say things like, “Though Jesus felt happy with the welcome he received on Palm Sunday, he knew that he was going to be betrayed and killed soon.”
From a rational perspective, that makes no sense. And though the mystical and metaphysical dimensions manifested fully with Jesus, they are not irrational. To live and act from a higher source than the mind of man in this world requires tremendous understanding and faith, not a suspension of disbelief.
The term suspension of disbelief has been defined as a “willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe something surreal; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”
That’s what we do when we go to the movies. And too often that’s what people do when they go to church. It’s a main reason why evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics are the biggest voting bloc that put evil in the White House, twice.
I attended Catholic schools until I was a junior in high school. But three years after being swept up in an instance of violent abuse on a friend by a nun in the 8th grade, I left the Church at 17.
It was neither whim, nor teenage revolt, since I had questioned, observed and researched the Catholicism while in high school before announcing to my shocked parents one Sunday as a senior that I wasn’t going to Mass that day or ever again.
Over 20 years later, after recovering from a brush with death from food poisoning, an elderly Chinese woman approached through a crowd on my first day outdoors and spoke evocatively of the Buddha and Jesus.
This was not the detached Buddha of transplanted Buddhism in America, nor the deified Jesus of Catholicism and Christianity. She evoked the essence of Buddha’s compassion and Jesus’ forgiveness as lived human beings.
After that I began to ask, what actually happened to Jesus? Was he meant to die on the cross, as Christians believe, or did something go terribly wrong?
A contemplative is someone who takes the time, allows the space, and applies the art of completely quieting the mind in order to attain “union with God.” Many insights come during deeper states of meditation.
One was the realization that things went very wrong the days after “the people saw Jesus riding on the donkey, and knew He was the prophesied Messiah.” It’s called Palm Sunday because, “in Biblical times, the palm branches symbolized peace and victory, and the crowd threw palm branches at the feet of Jesus, acknowledging that their hero had arrived.”
So what happened in Jerusalem? Put simply, it appears that Jesus overestimated his fellow Jews, and underestimated the dark forces arrayed against him.
Jesus had met and prevailed over the devil in the desert, and felt he had vanquished evil. He began attracting huge crowds, and had every reason to believe that he could carry his message from the countryside into the capital of Jerusalem.
But the devil (which is collective darkness plus intentionality, like jesuitical AI is becoming) laid a trap for him. The people were not up to his call for radical change, and Caiaphas was able to organize a plot and convince the Sanhedrin. They held a mock trial of Jesus, turned the people against him, and got Pontius Pilate to execute him.
Did Jesus know he was going to die as he rode triumphally into Jerusalem? His last words on the cross attest otherwise: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” They also show that Jesus was a human being, not God as Christians blasphemously believe.
An incident prior to Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane confirms this insight. Alone while his disciples slept, he sweated blood.
Hematidrosis is a condition in which capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture, causing them to ooze blood under conditions of extreme physical or emotional stress.
Why would that happen if Jesus knew all along he was going to die on the cross? It wouldn’t. He didn’t know before then, and the realization that he was about to die a horrible death caused terrible stress.
However, he then accepted his fate with equanimity. That verifies his greatness as a human being, as opposed to his deification as the “Son of God,” which he would have found abhorrent.
While he was teaching, there’s a story of Jesus encountering a man who asked to follow him. Jesus said “Then come.” The man said he first had to go back and bury his father. To which Jesus shockingly responded, “Let the dead bury their dead.”
That indicates Jesus lived in a culture very much like the present one in America. It also attests to why, after an interregnum of relative normalcy under President Biden, the American people reelected the devil’s Conduit in Chief, proving that evil still rules this land.
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