[W]hat we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death. The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day.I'm not a religious Christian but I am a "cultural Christian" - in other words: I live my life according to Jesus' only two commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."
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Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged.
Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will.
The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical. What about the cult of Comrade Guevara...?
It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of ‘equality’ as a bludgeon to flatten opposition.
Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him.
He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution.
One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: ‘I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.’
Later, when the rock-star rebel ‘Che’ was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at
La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials.
Guevara’s view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. ‘Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.’
There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people’s blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others. Care to choose?
(Maybe I should put the word God in quotes because I'm not sure if I use it the same way as other people. But it's impossible to define my "God" simply and honestly without sounding like a pretentious fool and a raving lunatic.)
I've been called a "moralist" by disapproving educated elites plenty of times. And I have to confess that I believe that Jesus' commandments are the "absolute standard by which our actions are judged" and I answer only to one Lord - and that will never be Caesar, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin or Che Guevara or anyone who thinks of government as God or bows to the power, might and coercion of an earthly Lord.