Luke 15 is the most well-known chapter of Luke’s Gospel. The chapter has all three parables in rapid succession: the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the prodigal son. Even if you haven’t darkened the doorway of a church in fear of catching fire—which these parables were designed to fix that unhealthy mindset two millennia ago—you’ve heard of this chapter of Luke. And for good reason.
The context for all three is that “…the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them’” (Luke 15:1–2). So, Jesus pulled a hat trick of rabbinic parables to silence the religious elite and show them the kingdom in their midst.
A Subtle Segue
Over a thousand miles away, a man sat on a throne controlling the state of Israel and the political climate. While the Pharisees puzzled a minute over these parables, Jesus turned to his disciples and taught a fourth parable. But before we get there, a not-so-subtle segue.
On June 14, Trump hosted a 250th anniversary military parade that doubled as a birthday highlight. It was… “attended.”
On that same Saturday, “No More Kings” protests and marches nationwide broke out across America to coincide with Trump’s spectacle: from his military parade to failing to place his hand on the Bible to embracing both his perceived kingship and messiahship, to the rhetoric of Christian nationalist and fundamentalist revisionists. In Missoula, there was a lively showing—as one would expect. I knew many people who attended.
That Saturday, I sat at home and manically tried to make progress on the book, now on Amazon. In it, there was a Theology of No More Kings, and the gateway through it. In part, it felt like being stuck between two conflicting sides, arguing over an orange. The marches were right, but it would mean a lot more than most people thought. There is also an inverse—and also not easily reduced—dilemma with Christian nationalists: Do you think you’re ready to be king? Do you think you have all your sins and issues figured out? Is your plank still in your eye… and has it also calcified… maybe been adorned?
Regardless, it feels like angry kids arguing over who gets to be in charge.
The Engine of Government Is Still Us
“Self‑deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the ‘solutions’ we can think of will actually make matters worse.”
Leadership and Self‑Deception
The current state of American politics, from what I’ve heard from historians and Boomers, isn’t anything new. Cultures have been here before, and America has had other politically uncertain times. I can’t imagine leading up to either World War I or II that the massa populi were feeling content with the current state of affairs.
In the States, among millennials and younger, probably also in Boomers and above, there is nihilism about politics that has proliferated through not the laziness and selfishness of younger generations but through the cacophony of meaningless and political bullshit from the generations before us. Our nation and global societies, all still located in real locality and the real world, while being interconnected across the globe, have all experienced such nihilism both before and currently.
We’ve all experienced doctrinal and political entropy mix up, stale, and calcify in the gears and consciousnesses of our own subjective and cultural-political contexts. If someone votes, it feels as existential as what doctrinal statement you adhere to. How does one voice matter when all that matters is aligning with the preferred loudest one?
“God didn’t want to judge us. He wanted to live with us.”
The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening
In The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening, one of the things we hit hard is that the top of the pyramid only exists because of the bottom. The massa populi (like the vox populi) are just as responsible for their choices as the 1% at the top. In fact, the only reason the 1% exists is because of the permission and enabling of the bottom. From Genesis through Judges to the Gospels, the book explores how one of the mysteries the Gospel revealed two thousand years ago was that you and I are completely responsible for our own lives, even if not at fault for everything. The less soft way of saying that is that the people are responsible for the leaders they follow.
The massa populi isn’t powerless—it’s disoriented. Its memory has been colonized by myths of helplessness.
Master and Slave: A Dualism We Keep Rehearsing
“Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two‑thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
This is a bit backwards from lines like “People shouldn’t be afraid of governments. Governments should be afraid of their people” from one of my favorite movies, V for Vendetta. My problem with that line from the movie is that I still take issue with the idea of a government being afraid. What is “government” but a collective of people engaged in the ongoing work of governing people? Why does fear need to be a pervasive state?
From my personal observations, such things lead to PTSD and psychological messed-up things. In fact, it is this fact that rulers and abusers exploit to maintain their control of narrative and status. BUT, it is still the “victim” that buys into victimhood, into an identity, and ultimately agrees to live by such a narrative. This is what Nietzsche, 200 years ago, had his finger on when he was railing against Master/Slave dualistic mindsets.
I contend that this dichotomy Nietzsche was pointing out is the same dichotomy Jesus abolished and that the Apostle Paul proclaimed when he said, “There is no Greek or Jew, male or female, or master or slave in Christ Jesus.” Such labels are arbitrary and front-facing: egoic emergences of the collective unconscious.
Today, we see the same Master/Slave dualistic mindsets have been making babies like bunnies. The book revisits this bifurcation of reality we’ve pathologized, bringing the Master/Slave dichotomy to the fundamental core of a Subject/Object mentality that has become neurologically understood, mapped, and confirms the Narrow Path that leads to life through ego-death and resurrection into mystical union with the Divine and all Creation.
However, the Master/Slave duality that preexisted before Nietzsche was able to place his finger on it 200 years ago has proliferated through our globalistic advancements—for all it’s afforded us—by splintering other versions of it:
- Depression/Grandiosity from The Drama of the Gifted Child
- System 1 & 2 (Thinking Fast and Slow) or The Master and His Emissary
- Leadership & Self-Deception: Being in boxes of self-justification and colluding with labels
- The Asshole King/Little Boy and Bitch/Little Girl dichotomy (i.e., “mommy” and “daddy” issues)
- Male Leadership/Women Submission
“The contempt for others in grandiose, successful people always includes disrespect for their own true selves… Grandiosity in the adult guarantees that the illusion continues: ‘I was loved.”
Alice Miller — The Drama of the Gifted Child
These examples show the Master/Slave duality at play on the ground level of society.
However, we can also see how it’s emerged in politics. The divide between Left and Right mirrors the same dualist mindsets and psychological divisions the massa populi embody and live out, and thus direct the machine of government above them. The Left, ironically, attempts to embody the personal, subjective, and creative ideals of the right hemisphere, while the Right attempts to force a singular left-hemisphere worldview to which all can bend their knee.
For the last 20 years, the rift between the two has only grown and further polarized, leaving over 2/3 of Americans ready for a viable third party and concerned for America’s democracy last election. Those 2/3 represent how much more, in the allegory, there is to the human brain than how we treat ourselves: Bottom/Top/Back/Front/In-Between/Gut/etc.
The same truth applies to society’s discontentment with billionaires: billionaires only exist because a human system and population are willing to feed them. The ultimate reason American politics is where it is at is because of the us, not because of them.
Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, nailed it: “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and live as if it were true.”
Shrewd as Serpents, Innocent as Doves
“The left hemisphere’s version of reality is self-consistent but dangerously incomplete.”
McGilchrist —The Master and His Emissary
It’s with this humbling frame that we pivot. Trump’s power has been in his unquestionable loyalty to his ego and control. However, the “game” he’s playing—that every politician has been playing—is not the problem. In fact, the “game” itself can be played, just like Trump, but “innocent as doves.” It is simple. Call his bluff and be authentic. Flip the table.
If you want to beat the game, stop playing it and play a different one. This is the same game of Genesis when we scapegoated and blame-shifted in the garden as it is when the people demanded a king to rule them, to be just like other nations. God is not interested in babysitting or domineering us. That’s our shtick and dualistic thinking.
The idea of an authentic and honest politician is such a foreign concept. I’d imagine that most politicians have felt like they’ve had to play by the old rules and comply with the powers before them… but why? This idea, this concept, is so simple, so plain, that it works. But the problem is that someone actually has to become it, and accept it, and not rely on gimmicks, posturing, platforms, and swinging the masses with bullshit. It has just felt easier to do it the other way.
This is what Jesus’ teaching about being shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves was meant for. He was calling out the bottom-level and religious people’s scapegoating of leadership and government (and God), and telling them to learn the same lessons from the people they’re bitching about. If you’re so miserable about your state of life, then go and do the same things, but do them right, good, and with the Divine.
The Parable People Still Don’t Know What to Do With
Perhaps this is no clearer than when Jesus taught his parable about the Shrewd Servant of Luke 16 (that was a long walk). It hasn’t been a popular sermon, in part because people aren’t entirely sure what to do with it (that dualist Master/Slave mindset from before). Here, Jesus tells a story about a bad money manager who gets fired and uses his employees’ accounts to give favors to people who owed him money so that they would owe him a favor after he was fired.
The master comes back, sees what his servant did, and instead of condemning him, he praises him. This is not what the story should have been—and that’s the point. His point at the end, when he’s explaining the parable to religious people who hated the story, was that “the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.“
Ready or Not, Here We Come
Recently, I’ve had some conversations with some people in the business networking circles here in Missoula, a blue island in a red state. The consensus, still, is that the Left is stuck in in-fighting and individualistic elitism and hypocrisy, that there is no leader or someone able to get everyone to work together, and that if someone “could just do what Trump does but right” (a version of this comment came up a few times and I’ve been testing it for a while) it’d work.
Yeah… it would. It would change the very party that adopted it. It would change a lot of things. And I think, for it to happen, a person would have to change a lot before doing it. And the people “following” would also have to.
People are ready for it, and it’d be great if we had more politicians with authentic Divine callings and lived by it, but the crux of the matter is that we have to start it now, ground level, and be it ourselves, massa populi.
We’re already kings and queens—and priests: it’s time to start acting like it.
That is the call for the “Christian nation” and “No More Kings,” and probably the invitation to the entire world, as well. If we’re tired of kings and judges, stop depending on them and grow up. It’s not pretty, but it is glorious. And such things usher the coming of the Son of Man.
What we need is some serpents with wings. Kind of like seraphim swirling around a different kind of throne.
“There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol.”
René Girard
