Christ-ianity, or Zeus-ianity?

“It’s Called Manifesting, Look it Up!”

I picked a shirt up off the store rack a couple weeks ago and spun it around to show my wife. The words were printed on the shirt were nearly identical to something my wife had said earlier that morning: "It's called manifesting, look it up!" She had used it ironically while talking about how her business was going to grow and new clients were just around the corner. The mindset of manifesting our desires reality is something that our modern culture has in common with the ancient Roman world. In the roman empire, you manifest glory. You carry your head high, you boast, flaunt, you embody the glory of Rome and her emperor, and you do it over and against every other culture and against every other god. To be a Roman was to manifest Rome in all of her glory.

I saw a tweet recently making the rounds in scholastic circles that perfectly captures the mindset of the both the Romans and their Christian counterparts when it comes to manifesting the divine. It was by a man who calls himself The Hellenist on Twitter, and the tweet features two pictures.
The first was Zeus, the god of lightning, and under this picture it said this:

“Real gods, like Zeus, are forms of the good: strength, power, beauty, health, and virtue.
Fake gods, like Jesus, are forms of the bad: weakness, powerlessness, humiliation, ugliness, and emaciation.
Which gods we worship determines what we manifest. Manifest the good, manifest Zeus.”

Zeus was the god of thunder and lightning, rain, and winds, and his traditional weapon was the thunderbolt. He was called the father (i.e., the ruler and protector) of both gods and men. He was the prime deity in the Greek pantheon and he was worshiped throughout Rome. Zeus himself is depicted as strong, usually as naked, but reproductive organs are purposefully de-emphasized in Roman sculptures because it symbolized the ideal Roman man, not driven by lust and impulses, but by virtue, civility, and self-control. He is muscular, he is perfectly handsome in every way. Zeus, to the Greco-Romans world, was what we all aspire to, and if you are going to incarnate someone, to embody someone, it was Zeus.

The second was a picture of Jesus, naked, hanging on the cross, suffering and looking up to heaven as if about to cry out for help. The picture indeed shows a form of "the bad": weakness, powerlessness, humiliation, ugliness, and emaciation.

The call of Rome was a call to embody the strong, the powerful, and the virtuous; to embody Zeus, Artemis, Venus, Asclepius, because "Which gods we worship determines what we manifest."

The Offense of the Cross

Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, says:

“18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” (1 Co 1:18–19).

Rutledge, in her book simply titled The Crucifixion, writes about a statue unveiling at Westminster Abbey in 1998. Multiple statues had been installed in the niche’s over the door that had stood empty for over 500 years. And when they pulled the curtain back, it revealed the statues and busts  of ten men and women, all twentieth-century Christian martyrs.. MLK, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, archbishop of Uganda, Janani Luwum, and others. All of them died while bearing witness in some way to the kingdom of God, but there are no plaques telling us how they died, “there are no guns, no nooses, no machete’s, the point is not how they died, but that they died" (Flemming Rutledge, Crucifixion, 73).

The death of Jesus is different because the “how” is of unique importance. The Apostle Paul regularly makes a big deal about the way Jesus died:

“He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:8).

When the Christians spoke about Jesus, they nearly always refer to him as "our crucified Lord." They rarely, if ever, say murdered, or killed; they always included the shameful act of crucifixion. They never shy away from it.

“But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor1:23)

A Propagandized Death

Crucifixion is a propagandized death, whereas the deaths of the martyrs were clandestine, underhanded, and often done in the pursuit of some means of power, the crucifixion of Jesus was different. It was public, it was especially dehumanizing, it was purposefully dishonoring, and it was intended to change the publics mind about Jesus himself, not just to get rid of him. The cross was meticulously designed to create maximum dishonor and shame in order that their followers no longer want to be associated with him. Their propaganda campaign was a success.

It was a plan hatched right out of some fascist playbook; Jesus was a man with a movement bringing hope to those at the bottom, and so those at the top must stop it. And so they lie about him, they spread horrible rumors, they belittle and ridicule him. And when they had him and could have just killed him and fed him to the dogs, never to be seen again, But instead, they decided to give him a propagandized death. They made him look like a mad-man, parading him through the streets in a “king Costume” made out of a purple robe and some thorny stick, mocking him as he went. They took his clothes off because it was shameful to look upon someones nakedness. They ripped out his beard, not because it hurt (which it did), but because it was one of the symbols of male status and honor in the Patriarchal Roman world.

Crucifixion removed anything and everything that held even the smallest tinge of humanity, let alone honor. They dressed him like an idiot, treated like a dog, pinned on the wood beam like an insect. And of course the most important part, they grouped him in with some thieves and insurrectionists and let people make whatever associations they want. It was diabolical. According to Fleming Rutledge, crucifixion was so brutal and calculated that the Romans ensured that not a single name of any crucified person was preserved to history… except Jesus.

They even paid special attention to what would bring the most dishonor in the eyes of the Jewish people; They fashioned a sign that said “King of the Jews,” in order to create as much offense as possible to the Jewish people. Anyone passing by would have assumed that Jesus of Nazareth has been crucified in accordance with the commands of Deuteronomy 18:20, which spells out that the punishment: "Any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death." The goal was to help the local Jewish people to connect "Jesus" with "false prophet."

Furthermore, hanging someone on a pole or a tree was a symbol that they were cursed by God ("anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deut 21:22-23).

Not only did they want the people to think that Jesus was cursed by God, they wanted to create the fear that if you followed him, you would be cursed by God as well, so they “hung him on a tree.” 

Embodying the Divine

Let's stop for a second and think about those Christians who gather and proclaim that they follow “the crucified and risen Lord.” If you are his follower, you share in his crucifixion. Those who were baptized into the church were "baptized into his death” (Ro 6:3)

I want to bring us back to our original thought by our Hellenistic friend: “Which gods we worship determines what we manifest. Manifest the good, manifest Zeus.”

Zeus invites you to side with the strong, the victor, the capable, the wealthy, the beautiful, the powerful. When the body of Christ strives for power, victory, wealth, beauty, and success, who are they embodying? When you want everyone to see that you have it all together; when you want them to be jealous of you and when you project an ere’ of holiness, perfection, balance, and success, who are you embodying? How much money and effort has the church put into embodying things which do not match the image of Jesus on that cross?

Jesus invites you to side with the weak, the oppressed… those whom the followers of Zeus hated and killed.

The story of the God of the Bible, from beginning to end, is the story of a God who plunges deeper and deeper into the despair of humanity. With each movement he reaches down to those at lower and lower places in society, more and more hated and despised people.

You can follow this trajectory through the text:
~ When God called Abraham, he went for those who don’t fit in with the world around them.

~ When God tabernacled with Israel in the desert, he was going for all those without a place to belong, all those who wander.

~ When God entered through the birth of Jesus, he went for those born into poverty, the oppressed, the single mothers like Mary, those at the bottom crying out for justice.

~ When Jesus went to the cross, he dove to the depths of human despair; he went for the hated, the despised, those we would rather forget.

The person at the very top went for the persons at the very bottom and made them visible; he reminded the world that these people exist, and that God will go to them. To worship Jesus means to embody Him. To claim his name and to seek places of power, prestige, and status is to take his name in vain, dressing him up as Zeus. It is to make a mockery of his true identity as the one who has come to bring "good news to the poor."

We are not Zeusians. We are Christians. This is bad news for those at the top, and good news for those at the bottom.

Discussion Questions:

Where do you see the modern church striving to represent the characteristics of Zeus, instead of Jesus?

How can the church embody Jesus in an empire that favors the likeness of Zeus, instead of Jesus?
How can you do the same?

Who, in your eyes, are those who can find the most hope in the crucifixion?
Who are the forgotten? Who is it that we have forsaken in our land that we are not prone to love? What does the cross say to them?