Kurt Vonnegut’s essay on the Sermon on the Mount is text I come back to again and again.
He is a Humanist, and he makes Jesus Christ Himself accessible.
He writes about a moment in the Bible days before His crucifixion, where Jesus is sat with Judas, Lazarus, and Mary. Mary offers some perfumed ointment to rub onto Jesu’s feet. Jesus says, go for it.
Judas ain’t havin’ it. He interjects that it is a luxury ointment and should be sold and the proceeds given to the poor.
The Bible tells it, after much translation and languages over the century, that Jesus replied:“For the poor always ye have with you; but you do not always have me.”
Vonnegut goes on to explain how as a child, he observed that this was always used in the spirit of what Vonnegut describes as “The poor people are hopeless. We’ll always be stuck with them.”
Vonnegut posits, that as know jokes are always the first thing lost in translation, that this is only a divine black joke. He writes that he imagines what Jesus originally said in Aramaic went more like: “Judas, don’t worry about it. There will still be plenty of poor people left long after I’m gone.”
And said with the wit of Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln. So I leave you with his words:
“If Jesus did in fact say that, it is a divine black joke, well suited to the occasion. It says everything about hypocrisy and nothing about the poor. It is a Christian joke, which allows Jesus to remain civil to Judas, but to chide him about his hypocrisy all the same.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
This has always sat with me and had me reflect, because it is an interesting side of Jesus to a humanist like me.
