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Jesus, The Trickster
There have been some excellent conversations here recently about the ultimate nature of Christ’s teachings. I specifically zeroed in on the notion of turning the other cheek to kickstart the conversation and it eventually morphed into other areas. One reader named “Paul” asked in the comments to that post: “Can anyone explain how the idea of “turning the other cheek” is consistent with Jesus’ throwing the money changers out of the temple?”
I think this is a great question because it opens up so many other questions for us to mull over. Most importantly perhaps: do any of us really live our lives as completely rational and logically consistent acts? Whether you believe in Christ as man or god or merely a myth or fairytale, I would unhesitatingly say that we as humans do not live our lives like that. The Last Temptation of Christ, which I watched again a couple days ago, does a great job of showing that Jesus simply changed his mind as he struggled with the truth and what God really wanted him to do.
I personally believe that at least part of the purpose of a lot of religious and symbolic stuff is to get you contemplating these types issues and difficult questions and struggling to resolve them. It isn’t to just give an answer. It is to cause problems for you internally that force you to grow.
On that note, I’ve been studying up on my trickster mythology (for reasons which I will explain separately later on). The Trickster is a figure who culturally isn’t too well-recognized by us anymore, even though he takes on many shapes in pop culture, from Bugs Bunny to the Pirates of the Carribean’s Captain Jack Sparrow. Crystal Links offers some good basic info about the trickster archetype:
The trickster is an important archetype in the history of man. He is a god, yet he is not. He is the wise-fool. It is he, through his creations that destroy, points out the flaws in carefully constructed societies of man. He rebels against authority, pokes fun at the overly serious, creates convaluted schemes - that may or may not work - plays with the Laws of the Universe and is sometimes his own worst enemy. He exists to question, to cause us to question not accept things blindly. He appears when a way of thinking becomes outmoded needs to be torn down built anew. He is the Destroyer of Worlds at the same time the savior of us all.
The Trickster lives inside and outside of Time. He is of our world, yet not of our world, so our laws will not always apply. Other symbols, associated with him include keys, clock, masks, infinity among other mythological images
Starting to sound like Jesus yet? It should. I realize that a lot of traditionalists will gasp and back away from the idea that Jesus was trying to “trick” anybody. How could anybody who proclaimed that they are “the way, the Truth and the life” be considered to be a trickster? In order to dismantle that notion and re-assemble it into something more useful, we have to decide what the nature of “Truth” is. Is the truth something simple and easy? It can be, but it can also be something earth-shattering, complex and difficult. It can be something that we can’t for the life of us ever possibly put into words. In that sense, Jesus could spread the ineffable Truth simply by confounding and confusing and getting us out of our old habits and patterns of thinking.
More specifically though and more in keeping with the Trickster myths, Jesus actually did pull some crazy stunts. Didn’t he? What about that whole thing where he died and then came back to life again?
“Ha! Gotcha, sucker!” we can imagine him saying to the Devil as pulls a sort of Three Stooges routine, pokes the devil in the eye smacks him on the head and floats up out of Hell, throwing down the power of Death once and for all. Ttricksters, too, are often identified with culture heroes who bring boons to the people, such as Prometheus who brought us fire. Jesus certainly fits the bill here as well. Jesus tricked the Jews and the Romans with this stunt too. He proved that the power of his Kingdom transcended the pitiful laws of this material world we inhabit. His teachings also invert power structures and invite creative solutions to old problems and assumptions which we thought there was no way out of. In fact, most of his teachings, life and even his miracles can be seen with a new beauty, humor and irony when viewed through the lens of the Trickster. And it makes sense that he would continue to play games on us even still with things like the Da Vinci Code, gnosticism, and other attempts to pin down his true message and nature. He’s probably laughing at us right now for taking this all so seriously and getting so tripped up over ourselves.
There’s one other great Trickster story that comes from the Yoruba religion and is attributed to Eshu Elegba that I want to share:
Eshu was walking down the road one day, wearing a hat that was red on one side and blue on the other. Sometime after he departed, the villagers who had seen him began arguing about whether the stranger’s hat was blue or red. The villagers on one side of the road had only been capable of seeing the blue side, and the villagers on the other side had only been capable of seeing the red half. They nearly fought over the argument, until Eshu came back and cleared the mystery, teaching the villagers about how one’s perspective can alter a person’s perception of reality, and that one can be easily fooled. In other versions of this tale, the two tribes were not stopped short of violence; they actually annihilated each other, and Eshu laughed at the result, saying “Bringing strife is my greatest joy”.
Matthew 10:34 draws a startlingly similar parallel from Jesus’ own words:
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.”
In Luke, he says he has come to cast fire upon the world and that noone may be his disciple who doesn’t hate his father and mother. It all sounds so deadly serious until we hear it side-by-side with the words and exploits of his cross-cultural trickster buddies. Of course, he was playing a joke on us. And here we are trying to rationalize and missing the whole point of all his cosmic tomfoolery! He meant to upset us, to get us riled up, to get us to react and to ask questions and to have fun and not take ourselves too seriously. Hey, even death couldn’t stop him, so what the hell do we have to worry about?
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July 17th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
A decent Jesus parallel from a Native American Coyote legend:
http://members.cox.net/academia/coyote.html
July 17th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
The gnostic Jesus is totally a trickster.
Switching places with Simon of Cyrene right before the crucifixion? LOL!!!!!
July 17th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
I actually would put Jesus right in the same bag as Lucifer, Eshu, Loki, Raven, Coyote, Prometheus, Jack & the Beanstalk, Bugs Bunny, etc… and Zen tricksters too!
The trickster forces us to contemplate paradox and our own endless capacity for self-delusion, the limitations of our own ridiculous reality tunnels, thats what forces people to wake up!
They resent it, but they need it too.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Well I even think the non-Gnostic Jesus is still a trickster. For that matter, I don’t think there is any such thing as the “non-Gnostic” Jesus. I think the efforts to put labels on Jesus, like gnostic, etc are simply another good example of people trying to dispell the power of the Trickster, who blasts all that shit away into the meaningless rubble it is.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Also the gede of voudon, Ganesh, all the playful childlike spirits of European folklore … anyone who gets ahead by cunning and misdirection and teaches people a much-needed lesson in the process
July 17th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Hmmm… it seems to me that when people impose a strict literalistic doom’n'gloom straightjacket onto a mythological figure they have domesticated and neutered it and removed its trickster function.
I mean i see what your saying i think but if you look at the functions of the different types its hard to argue that 700 club jesus leads to gnosis or the recognition of paradox though it may be a necessary step on the ladder towards that.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
What I’m saying is that the Jesus at hand doesn’t change, only the clothing they dress him up in and the rationalizations which are built to hedge him in.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
I dunno, OTOH, it may just be that I can’t allow myself to see the orthodox Christ as a trickster - he hasn’t played that role in that setting in many, many centuries, or arguably ever.
Like “Ha ha! My greatest trick was convincing people to take stories about my life literally so that the Roman Empire could find a new ideology to control people with guilt and fear!” I just don’t see that figure, as usually rendered, in any sort of liberating way.
Perhaps this culture has just spoiled Him for me and so I can’t see whats right there?
I dunno. Or maybe I just like the gnostic stories better.
July 17th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
I think you will find if you investigate the figure of Hermes (Ormuz) and/or the Azoth you will find the ‘crucial’ (etymologically significant!) role of Christ as the pivot or point of inflection between opposites (also the link between astrological ages, in the mythological sense) to be well-established in medieval thinking.
Sorry, this comment is confusing. The associations of the Christic figure in this role could (and has) filled books.
July 17th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
hmmm…. found this
Jesus as Trickster Rebel
René Girard makes a very similar argument in a book i read once called “I see satan fall like lightning” that jesus “broke the cycle of memetic violence” by turning the other cheek
guess i oughta remove the beam from my own eye, etc…
July 17th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Yeah, that is the article I linked to the other day by Walter Wink in my original post on turning the other cheek. Gotcha again!
July 17th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
LOL
lazy reader, I
July 18th, 2006 at 1:22 am
The Ballad of Joking Jesus
I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother’s a Jew, my father’s a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,
So here’s to disciples and Calvary.
If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine
He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.
Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said
And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet’s breezy … Goodbye, now, goodbye!
(From Ulysses.)
July 18th, 2006 at 1:41 am
I can’t resist. Too appropriate.
I love the Trickster. I love Jesus cast in this light, and it’s no stretch at all to see him as such. What interests me even more is how to embody the trickster ourselves in everyday life. And hey, right on, I have my next writing topic.
The world needs more pranksters keeping everyone and each other on their physical, psychological and spiritual toes. I’m starting to understand more why I was such a fan of the surrealist and dada artists in art school. They had their shortcomings as a whole, but the good ones were master tricksters.
A final thought before I shut this dastardly computer off. Ask yourself not so much ‘What would Jesus do?’ as ‘What wouldn’t Jesus do?’ Yeah I totally stole that from somewhere, but if the sandal fits, make like a tree and steal that goddamn sandal, then walk a mile in it, or more appropriately, walk two miles in it. Then get naked. (Naked for Jesus).
July 18th, 2006 at 8:06 am
any message of change has to trick us out of our own dogma. we create our own homeostatic bureaucracy internally that only a conman could break down. a few slieght of hand demonstrations and making an elephant dissapear……no wait a minute that was chris angel. um, christ the angel came to us in variety of forms. the healer, the terrorist, the rabbi, the humble servant………all roles that some play well, but when integrated into one single person then they become a powerful shaman capable of shattering walls.
July 18th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Roshi Joan Halilfax, a buddhist nun and anthropolgist, speaks about how the fool or trickster is central to a community but does not get acknowledged as an important role today.
There is always a need for humor in life. Humor changes our vibration and helps us heal. That was part of how Jesus and his friends helped heal the crowds, as have other religious leaders through out history. This does not always get documented though. Or , people don’t acknowledge it because religion is supposed to be “serious business” according to the pharisees and other such folks.
As for Jesus being angry…he was a man, living in a human body, experiencing human emotions for starters.
July 18th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
I gotta agree with Rev Max’ first assertion. I don’t see Jesus as a trickster really– more like a master debater or a prodigy of Pharisee doctrine who time and time again found ways (unintentionally) of confounding the elders with his interpretation of Scripture.
You asked if any of us really live our lives as completely rational and logically consistent acts? Of course not– because we’re human. Jesus was half-human (if you believe that he is the Son of God) so he was capable of emotion but to say that the godlike other half was of the Trickster variety does a disservice to Christ’s message.
You may as well say Socrates was a Trickster. In many ways he was, but we all know he was a mere mortal, and yet he has more in common with Jesus than, say, Bugs Bunny or Coyote.
July 18th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Good, cause he was a trickster, as I’ve written about elsewhere
Actually, to be doctrinally correct, Jesus was not half-human. He was both fully human and fully divine. But who’s counting.
Good, then that means what he’s doing is working. I wouldn’t expect a bunch of people to agree on the exploits of a master Trickster. If they did, he wouldn’t be a Trickster. As I said above, he wasn’t there to make a bunch of people to agree on everything. “Bringing strife is my greatest joy.”
July 18th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Based on some of the comments people have made, I suspect that folks don’t fully grasp the purpose or role of the Trickster phenomena. If I understand it at all, it is not necessarily sly or even humorous (though it may exhibit these elements)… rather, it is about challenging the accepted order of things, whether that be in the context of a society in flux or in challenging an individual’s accepted notions. The degree with which it affects things -resonates - has to do with just how dogmatically flawed or out of balance things are… in this context, Jesus clearly assumes the role of the trickster.
July 18th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
he would also refuse to deliver his message to some communities because of the level of dissent…….
July 19th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Socrates wasn’t a trickster. He was a philosopher.
You may as well say President Bush is a trickster. I can say YOU are a trickster, Tim, but that doesn’t make it true.
I understand the parallel you’re trying to make, but really… isn’t this overkill?
As for Christ’s divinity, I’m assuming your source is The Bible.
Finally, if Tricksterism is about challenging the accepted order of things, where’s the cut-off? Where does Tricksterism end and Mischief begin? And how does Eshu bringing strife to two tribes equate with Christ’s message? Do you even know what Christ’s message is? Do you think Christ was THAT concerned with “tricking” the Pharisees, or do you think he was concerned with alleviating the suffering of poor people and healing cripples?
July 19th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Another thought: where does Satan fit into all of this? At one point he’s tempting Christ in the wilderness… a trickster trying to trick another trickster?
Plus, the notion that Christ went to Hell is not universally agreed upon. It’s funny to imagine Jesus poking Satan in the eyes, but it is a point of contention among Christians.
I think of the “South Park” episode where Jesus and Satan are boxing, and everyone has their money on Satan because he’s so big and buff… all except for one lone bet for Jesus.
Of course, the lone bet was placed by Satan, who rigs the fight by taking a dive.
It’s hard to imagine Jesus doing such a thing, because his image is synonymous with sincerity. Maybe what you are trying to assert is that, contrary to the image modern people have of Christ (doleful, patient, humble), the real Jesus was contentious and interested in stirring up debate, a “rabble-rouser” if you will.
But I think ‘trickster’ isn’t the right cateogrization. Save that for Norse gods like Loki and Native American deities. They worked hard to earn the title.
August 11th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
[…] Most interesting to me was the excellent post I read recently by Tim Boucher of Pop Occulture, called Jesus, The Trickster. I recommend you go read the whole thing. It’s not that long and is very interesting. Here’s my own comment on the thread of his post: […]
March 18th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
[…] You’re the Hat Man, I’ve heard about you Being who you are, and doing what they say you do I offered my kindest thanks, and he just smiled And kept on walkin’ along […]