FOUNDRY WORK
Although he is exceedingly rare and incomprehensibly fine, Christ is the pattern, not a one-of-a-kind mold that is destroyed after casting. The work of Christianity is casting in the rarest metal more sons and daughters of God just like him. The doctrine of theosis is that humankind has the potential to become co-creative gods in the image of their Creator. The doctrine of apotheosis is that there can be only one pole star that rises above all of the others to attain oneness with the Father in the peak of the canopy of heaven. Almost inconceivably, Jesus Christ undertook the radically democratic task of apotheosis for all. He wanted to make pole stars of everyone and turn everyone into an “only begotten” forged in the heat of the highest degree of the celestial kingdom. Jesus’ sacrifice showed that the only route to oneness with the Father is through melting the hard, myriad parts in the refining crucible of pure suffering. Whether now or later, suffering enough to be convinced of the oneness of everything is an inevitable contingency of Christian apotheosis. “Whosoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27 ESV). In the Christian worldview, God isn’t one who creates a world without suffering, but the one who transcends and transmutes suffering into the singularity of unbounded love. Foundry work is not about maintaining the liquid state of metal in the eternal glow of the furnace but casting that metal into new and better forms. The fire always precedes the second birth into a new material estate, and a hotter fire produces a more refined and individuated casting.
THE MOTHER’S QUEENDOM
Most of the Greco-Roman world had a Platonist worldview around the time of Christ’s birth:
[113d] “Such is the nature of these things. Now when the dead have come to the place where each is led by his genius, first they are judged and sentenced, as they have lived well and piously, or not. And those who are found to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the Acheron and, embarking upon vessels provided for them, arrive in them at the lake; there they dwell and are purified, and if they have done any wrong they are absolved by paying the penalty for their wrong doings,
[113e] and for their good deeds they receive rewards, each according to his merits. But those who appear to be incurable, on account of the greatness of their wrongdoings, because they have committed many great deeds of sacrilege, or wicked and abominable murders, or any other such crimes, are cast by their fitting destiny into Tartarus, whence they never emerge…
[114b] … But those who are found to have excelled in holy living are freed from these regions within the earth and are released as from prisons;
[114c] they mount upward into their pure abode and dwell upon the earth. And of these, all who have duly purified themselves by philosophy live henceforth altogether without bodies, and pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough.
But, Simmias, because of all these things which we have recounted we ought to do our best to acquire virtue and wisdom in life. For the prize is fair and the hope great” (Plato, Phaedo 113d-114c).
This perspective on death and the afterlife has dominated the western religious mind for more than twenty centuries. It is through Plato and other philosophers that Christianity has been interpreted. The architecture of the original Christian mystery finds a more native habitat, however, in agricultural cycles and the mysteries from whence it sprang. Mithraism, for example, did not point to a celestial home “without bodies… in still more beautiful abodes,” as the ultimate destination for the righteous soul. Rather, Mithraism’s rites demonstrated “overcoming the world” through ascending rebirths. Resurrection into a mortal body was the vehicle for attaining eventual theosis and oneness with the Father. The architects of the soul may draw up celestial blueprints, but it is on earth that the plans are carried out. The eternal life they describe is lived primarily on physical planets. The ordinances of heaven are performed on earth because only an embodied soul can accomplish them.
The disciples of Jesus recognized his virgin birth principally in astronomical terms. Christ’s Advent may have been heralded to master astronomers by the most portentous of signs: a comet manifesting as a temporary pole star gestating in the usually empty womb of the Mother. The sign was called Bethlehem, meaning “House of Bread,” where the ultimate seed of the bread of life germinated in the womb of Hathor, the polar Mother Cow. This exceedingly rare potentiality occurs only in an astronomical window lasting a few hundred years, and opens only once every 26,000 years, but coincided exactly with Virgo coming to term with the delivery of the Sun that turned the age from Aries to Pisces.
The association of bread and the cow in the first century, in addition to the recognition of Egypt as “the breadbasket” of the Mediterranean world, is depicted in the white bull of Mithraism sprouting grain from its tail. The Sun produced from the womb of the celestial cow is the golden calf, the same golden calf cast in the foundry of Israel’s infamous apostasy while Moses communed with Yahweh on the mountaintop. Solidifying Jewish monotheism as the antithesis of the familial pantheon of creator gods, this story has been handed down for centuries as the ultimate symbol of damnable idolatry and pagan depravity. Unwittingly perhaps, one of the most profound indicators of the intertextuality of the Old Testament as a proof text for the incarnation of the Son of God in the flesh and the divinity of Christ is the worship of this very calf.
Early on in the Christian movement it was assumed that Jesus was sired out of wedlock. John 8:38-42 explains this rumor:
“I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.”
They answered and said unto him, “Abraham is our father.”
Jesus saith unto them, “If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard from God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father.”
Then said they to him, “We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.”
Jesus said unto them, “If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.”
The first generation of Christian disciples did not argue for the conception and birth of Jesus by any means other than the natural. Rather, the fact that Jesus was raised by a faithful stepfather, where otherwise he might have had none to raise and legitimize him, was a thematic acknowledgment of his arrival to the Roman world with a status no greater than a common slave.
Jesus’ stepfather, Joseph the tekton, raised Jesus as his own and taught him in the artisan’s ways. Rather than tainting the gospel of Jesus Christ in scandal, Jesus’ inauspicious back story satisfies Isaiah’s prophecy that the Davidic servant would be completely undesirable to his people. It cannot be overstated that for most of human history, to be born without any privilege, naked and exposed, was to subject the newborn to unimaginable danger:
“Lepers and slaves were not the most defenseless of God’s children. Across the Roman world wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in their hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it… and Aristotle himself had lent it the full weight of his prestige…Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves…Only a few peoples- the odd Germanic tribe and inevitably the Jews, had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Everyone else had always taken it for granted, until that was, the emergence of a Christian people” (Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World).
Jesus probably barely survived infancy because he was born to poverty and of suspect fatherhood. Isaiah states, worse still, “He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:2-3). In an era when every condescending god was a beautiful specimen with glorious traits, Jesus was so unappealing, if not scandalous, in his birth that had he come from almost any other background he might have been refused in his first hours. The primitive Christian narrative and the anticipation of Isaiah emphasized that this magnificent being destined for a slave’s torturous execution was deliberately clothed from his infancy in a commonness so vulgar that it was immediately life-threatening.
It is in this context that the Magnificat of the Virgin Mary stands as the unparalleled testimony of the divinity of Jesus Christ. It preceded any miraculous healings or calmed seas. For Mary the water had already been turned to wine.
“And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever” (Luke 1:46-55). In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ birth as a Son of God is brought about by His ascending from grace to grace through the initiatory ordinances of the gospel. Christ’s journey to apotheosis had begun long ago in ancient ages, and continued when he left the Father’s presence, already anointed to His greater purpose. With perfect knowledge, informed by memory and forethought, the Father chose this supernal star child to bear the grief of the whole world on his shoulders. From his first breaths in the Nativity cave, Christ transubstantiated all of the cruelty on the planet through the very fluids of his body and the flesh fastened to his bones. He was all of this and more beyond imagining, and yet, somehow, in a way equally incomprehensible, the point is not to worship only, but to imitate. “If ye love me keep my commandments” was not the dictate of an overlord to his subject, but the earnest appeal of our magnificent brother whose sinews, nerve fibers, and flesh were woven by the Queen of Heaven Herself. “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his faithful love toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:11-12). As had long been anticipated, with the coming of Christ to the lowly cattle stall, the Madonna and her Child were the celestial Gods on earth.
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 