THE FIRST AND LAST OUTLAW
Do you like rules? I like rules. Rules and laws give us a sense of order. The law of gravity keeps you sitting there instead of floating away. That is a good rule. And there are others. Traffic laws are good, that is, if people would just obey them. Just the same, sometimes, you have to break the rules. Sometimes there are exceptions to the rules. Some rules are bad and need to be broken. Gandhi said that before you break the rules you have to spend a long time obeying them. I guess this is because otherwise you are just being a delinquent.
One rule in particular that I don’t like is the law of death. This, as far as we can tell, is the law of the universe. Everything in the universe is already dead or it is dying. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is that energy eventually runs down. It becomes disorganized, dissipated, flat. This is called “the lukewarm theory of the end of the universe”. In this scenario, things don’t actually disappear, matter just levels out. Everything just becomes a kind of cosmic soup. Everything everywhere is going to come to some kind of an end. That is the rule of death, the law of the universe.
On the personal level, the law of gravity eventually works against you in the same way. Gravity pushes everything down. It compresses your spine. It bows your shoulders. Eventually you are not able to get out of bed. Gravity takes you down, down, down until you are in the ground, ground, ground; that is, in the grave. I guess that’s why they call it “gravity”. Everything comes to an end, including you.
Because everything comes to an end, it makes more sense to be a negative person instead of a positive one. Everything, no matter how good it is, has a flaw. It will fail. It will end. If you want to find something that is wrong, just pay attention, you will find it. So if you want to win an argument, go negative. Then you only have to be right once to prove your point. If you choose to be positive, you have to be right all the time! We sit in coffee shops, cafes and bars examining the thermodynamics of hot coffee and cold beer and playing a sad game called: “Ain’t it Awful?” Everything is going to hell. Everything is running downhill. Nothing is the way it used to be. It is all heading for chaos. When we say things like this, we are right. We win the argument.
Christmas is days away. If we rewind about 2000 years and nine months from what we believe is this event, we can picture a young woman who will soon become the mother of Jesus. This young woman does not know about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but she knows about all the other rules, especially the law of death. She is an ordinary person living out an ordinary life. Her life, like her up-coming marriage, has been arranged. It is pretty much fixed. There are likely to be few surprises. She will marry a man who works as a carpenter. She will live in the shop. She will have children and hopefully survive that. Some of those children will die. She will cook and clean and raise the ones that live. When and if she grows old, her hope will be that they will take care of her. Then she will die. Those are the rules, pretty much fixed in place.
But then, things start to become a little less orderly. She becomes pregnant. Her story is that she was visited by a messenger from God. The message is that she is going to have a son and name him Jesus. This is not a big surprise. She knows that childbearing is in her future and Jesus is not an unusual name. But then the less orderly part begins. According to the messenger, the child will be conceived without the help of her intended husband or anyone else. She knows that this is impossible, that it breaks the rules of reproduction as she knows them and the rules of biology and gynecology as we know them. She knows that it is foolish to be anything besides negative and pessimistic and she wonders how all this could be.
According to the rules of her society and religion, which are pretty much identical; this young woman, pregnant out of wedlock, obviously guilty of fornication and what might be called “premature adultery”, should be stoned to death. Instead, against all odds, her intended, an extremely righteous and religiously observant man, decides to break this law and takes her as his wife and her child as his own.
From the beginning, this child has no choice but to become a bit of an outlaw. But first, he takes Gandhi’s advice and spends a long time obeying the rules before he starts breaking them. Then he starts by turning water into wine and follows that up by feeding 5000 some people with a few fish and a little bread. He miraculously heals persons that are sick. He walks on water. He raises the dead. Before he is done, the rules and laws of chemistry, biology, anatomy, gravity, physics, society, and finally even that nasty law of death lie broken to bits.
Religious rules and laws get his special attention. He breaks the laws about the Sabbath day over and over again — mostly in order to heal persons that are sick or lame or blind. Like his father, he saves a woman from being stoned for adultery, not by marrying her, but by shaming her accusers. He breaks holy man protocol and talks to women and children. Some of the women are foreign, un-kosher women, others are just local whores — also off limits. So are a bunch of the unacceptable men he hangs out with. Worst of all, at the same time, he claims to one and the same with the almighty God.
But you know, it’s just like everything else. It only takes one failure to prove him wrong. It all gets him in the end. He seems to be fresh out of miracles. He is unable to heal wounded hands and feet. He is unable to save himself. When they hang him from a cross, gravity works against him. It carries him down, down, down and into the ground, ground, ground. He’s broken his last Sabbath. He’s broken his last loaf of bread. He’s broken his last law. When it comes to himself, he doesn’t seem able to break that nasty law of death.
From what we know now, death is the rule of the universe. We have sent probes far out into space. From what we can tell, everything out there is cold and dead. It is just rock, metal and gas — inanimate objects. It is completely improbable that there be any life at all. So it is completely against the rules that you and I are alive. But here we are, walking around on a green and living planet. We are exceptions to the rule and downright miraculous. Someone, something, somewhere has broken the rules.
Did something like that happen with Jesus? Will there be a different end to him and you and me than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of death? Is the first Outlaw, who set life in motion, also the last one? That would change everything. Who knows what can happen now? It is no longer the wisest thing to be negative and pessimistic. We might have to find something else to do besides sit around and watch it all go down the drain. If anything can happen, it is no longer foolish to be positive and optimistic. So that young woman from 2000 years back looks at her extraordinary messenger, says “Amen. Let it be.” and sticks to her story.
