Siberia is a region of Asia which has come to symbolize a wilderness far from civilization where Big Brother can exile dissidents. Stalin can send messages into Siberia; the exiled cannot send messages out. Indeed the exiled can barely communicate among themselves. Starved and tortured, an exile can barely communicate within himself. The English have an expression that the nonconformist has been "put in Coventry": same thing, though without the Stalinist extreme of the late Soviet. (Americans don't have quite so handy a term for it that I can think of. We have "sold down the river": but that references individuals who were slaves in the first place, no one cares how well they can communicate.)
Jesus is a name for the entity that Christians claim is the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Jews. Etymologically the name seems to mean "son of the father," blessed of God ... or a series of such meanings (as do also other Semitic names.) (Barabas, for example, also means son of the father: in Arabic too). Christians (and others) have used Jesus to symbolize someone who's virtuous (while everyone else is sinful), someone who's right (while everyone else is wrong) ... I'm going to put the two symbols together into an oxymoron: and see what they do. (First I set a comet tail tangent for our entrance, referencing a fictional entity related to Stalin's Siberia.)
Stephen Hunter, one of the most wonderful of all male-oriented fiction-weavers created a character in his novel Tapestry of Spies, that he then recreated in his novel Havana. The guy has been a loyal Commie all his adult life, a brilliant assassin and strategist and spy for Koba, committing brilliant crimes for the sake of converting society into an absolute tyranny of bureaucrats claiming to serve anarchism. (We real anarchists, we independents, hate that crap.) The trouble with being a crook for Koba is that soon Koba will fear you and send you to Siberia. (When I was in the federal prison at Jesup, arrested by the FBI for accusing my graduate school of fraud and pretending that once I was flat broke, utterly helpless, old and starving, that I was actually going to do something about it, I met prisoner after prisoner who testified that they'd been an assassin for the FBI, or a coke dealer for the CIA, or a go between for FBI-CIA-HellsAngels assassins and pot farmers. The Kobas of the US betrayed them too. Me they merely betrayed all my life, sending me to school, lying about how free I was. I'm their natural enemy, because I conspicuously never bought it; they, my fellow federal prisoners, in contrast, had been loyal crooks and murderers for US: covert versions of the uniformed soldiers we seed around the world.
In Havana our spy is thrilled to catch and eat a cockroach in his cell: a rare bit of protein for the deracinated genius. But a moment later, Koba's Siberia thugs come and drag our genius before some higher level Koba thug, and guess what? Koba has another self-sacrifIcing task for his exiled master mind. Will the master spy cooperate? Will he again suffer and sacrifice himself on behalf of Koba and world Communism? Of course he will. Or at least he pretends to agree. (The master spy in Tapestry may have had something else up his sleeve as well: like stealing a few hundred million dollars from Koba and the Soviet!)
Now: notice some of the parallels possible to draw between Jesus, God's scapegoat, and the long-suffering Commie spies of Hunter's fiction:
In the first case Jesus cooperates in being arrested, kangaroo'd, and tortured to death because it's the only way Christian assumption has it that God can figure out to save human beings from sin. Now: according to the Gospels, Jesus got resurrected: into immortality. According to Christians Jesus is alive again, with a real body. He spent three days in hell to singe away his own trivial little tad of sin, but his permanent residence is heaven, where we can think of him as interchangeable with the father: like Hamlet and Hamlet. I like to think that Jesus is alive, body or no body, and can travel wherever he wants: back to earth, back to Jerusalem ... back to hell ... where he can seek out his tormentors and piss in their mouth. (I like to imagine that I'll be able to do the same, with him, or without him, once I'm finally dead.) (Oh, please.)
But meantime, imagine this: Jesus is resurrected. Jesus goes back to Jerusalem. The again living Jesus gets treated exactly the same the second time as he did the first: sees he'd be treated the same to infinity. Jesus thinks, "Hell": learns how to dance, meets a bunch of nice Jewish girls, and takes turns among them rewarding himself for a change. Or: Jesus is still locked away in the same prison he was first locked in: his spirit can go to heaven on occasion, but not his body. And God comes to Jesus in prison (or sends an angel) and says, "I have another mission for you: man still isn't saved. I want you to go out and let them mis-try and crucify you all over again."
What will Jesus say to God the second time? Will Jesus say "Yes"; but then go and steal a few hundred million-trillion dollars in gold and move it offshore-off-planet to Aldeberan? Will Jesus say "Yes," go to Cuba and try to save Fidel Castro from Earl Swagger?
How much sacrifice should Big Brother expect from his master spies?
When God whispered to me about secrets of literature, secrets of Shakespeare, then about summoning the global village via cybernetic librarianship of the planet seen as a network of independent communities, free of Big Brother everywhere because a vigilant mankind refused to tolerate any more Big Brothers, I said "Sure": and conceived of my doctoral thesis (1965), then founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970, NYC. And so forth and so on.
Now I'm deaf and blind and half-impotent, subsisting on welfare while other fed and local services are denied me by bureaucracy after bureaucracy: some of the bureaucrats mere amateurs, mere receptionists. What will I do if God comes to me now? "Paul, I have here a solution to human survival even more profound than an anarchist internet. Are you ready? I'll even buy you a hamburger: and maybe a hearing aid. While we're at it, we'll take care of that cancer on your ear."
I don't know. I fear I'd do it. Though I wish he'd ask Jesus first. Or Koba's spy.
Would I steal the hundred million dollars? I'd seriously be tempted.
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