But For One Man

[Daveparts]

But For One Man
The Servants of Pilate
By David Glenn Cox



Or woman. History has shown us, time after time, in a universe two billion years old, that the answers aren’t always what we expect or from whom we expect. As Marcus Aurelius once observed: "either gods or atoms." Either there is a plan far too complex for us in our seventy-odd-year lifespan to understand or we are merely left alone in the universe to figure it out for ourselves.

The answers we seek are not always to be learned from the smartest or the wisest. The answers can come from the lost, the conflicted, the poor, or those whose generic background itself makes their lineage special. Special because they do more than just understand who we the people are, they are us and we are them. They don’t need to explain because they are us and we don’t ask because we are them.

The powerful are the powerful, not because of wisdom or earned station, but by caprice and radical forces in the universe. Then comes one, like a comet or a meteor, who collides with the powerful through that same caprice and changes our world and changes our lives and our course. The collision forces us to ask again: Gods or atoms? It forces us to reflect on the caprice in the universe, to ask: if there is not a force for good and evil inside of us, who are we and what are we and what is the point then of this wise ape?

Is righteousness in the eye of the beholder, that those who murdered Christ now claim him as their own? But he knows them not. Those bankers whose tables he threw to the ground, the priests and religious orthodoxy he blessed out in the temple while he spent every day of his life with the outsourced of his time. He defended the harlot and condemned the rich. He spoke for the poor and healed those without healthcare.

The religious blight have stolen his cloak and dressed themselves up in it. It galls them that it won’t fit them and that they can’t buy it, so they steal it. They cut the cloak to make it fit, so that they might dance in the limelight and proclaim themselves as holy. But Christ was a leftist and a revolutionary; he came, not to save them, but to save us from them. The religious blight have stolen an inheritance that is not theirs, and, from time to time, must be reminded of this fact. Not by the media or the powerful but by the powerless, by those sanctified through their lowliness.

Who, like Christ, had nothing, which freed them from the fear of losing anything. The generic character of a John Smith who comes, not to argue the truth or explain the truth, but to explain that the argument is over and the truth has prevailed. Not to speak sharply to power, but plainly. Not the smartest or the wisest, not the richest or the handsomest of us, but simply us. A flawed, failed, imperfect diamond; a random, irresistible force of the people that collides with the immovable object of power.

A shaman, a holy man, a plain man, a flawed man, an everyman, with the assumed name of Smith because it doesn’t matter what his name is: it's your name, it's you. With the name of John, like John the Baptist, to proclaim what is coming after him. That maybe we are all crazy or maybe we don’t know as much as we like to think we do. That God works not in grand strokes but in gentle waters, through us and not above us. That righteousness is judged in the heart, not by the collection plate or the attendance record.

That, as the Old Testament proclaims, here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own. To advise that you will hear no trumpet to call you to righteousness, you must do it just because it is right. Even when you think you can’t win, especially when you think you can’t win, for that is true faith. It takes no faith at all to put your trust in the rich and powerful, to only play for the side that you think will win, even when you know in your heart that they are wrong. Or maybe to think yourselves innocent because you didn’t do it yourself, you being only the Servants of Pilate.