Thread by @ThePerilousDeer, you can tell that Jesus is a prankster or trickster by nearly [...]

you can tell that Jesus is a prankster or trickster by nearly everything he said and did in the month after he rose from the dead.

I'm nervous saying this because someone might come around and try to make it sound ""upright and holy"" instead of vibing with the pranks.

if you do that in my mentions I can't promise I won't try to prank you.

most of the parables before he died were pranks too. more serious in this case, a lot of the time, but what does "serious" mean anyways? for a lot of people "serious" means "grave / heavy / dead" which is wrong.

the people who did best with Jesus were the ones who could put up with his games without taking things too seriously, even without taking seriously their own doubt about how seriously to take things.

prime example may be the Samaritan woman at the well. lots of similarities with the Nicodemus story here. One-on-one sorta encounter, away from Society, Jesus refuses to have an Actual Conversation and instead starts rattling off metaphors that don't make any sense.

(with Nicodemus, it was being born again, with the Samaritan it's about the water that will quench all thirst.)

Nicodemus just kind of stumbles around and is weird. Poor guy!

The Samaritan, by contrast -- well, she keeps stumbling around too. And she's a mess. Keeps trying to redirect the conversation, keeps trying to do little cutesy political talk about Controversies,

but she is dopey enough to play Jesus' game with him, even as she tries not to play it. "Well I can see you are a prophet" and "Give me this water! (????)" etc.

As a result, her story ends with her conversion, and that of a whole town full of people, whereas Nicodemus' story doesn't end at all, at least immediately.

Same thing with Peter vs. Jesus after the resurrection. Jesus give him a bunch of bs ... "Do you love me, do you love me, do you love me?"

Dude back off, honestly.

Poor guy! But Peter plays along, and he gets the prize of those who play along -- by the end of it he has confessed three times, unwittingly, that he loves the Lord, just as he had denied him three times before.

contrast this with the rich man who goes home sad instead of giving up all his stuff to follow Jesus. if he felt that strongly about it, what he should have done is started a fight or something. played the game out a little longer, see what happens.

he cut the game short.

unfortunately, most of what is taught in churches is the praxis of cutting the game short and not having any fun with it. Jesus patiently sighing ad infinitum while you do your little human activities, in your little human ways, with your little human foibles.

honestly the guy plays too hard. Mary is balling at the tomb and instead of comforting her he says "Who are you looking for."

lolz for days but also gee whiz man can you tamp it down a bit?

BUT if you play the game with him you'll find that he's charitable and trustworthy, AND you'll find that he's really smart and good at unraveling things.

I try not to talk about "charismatic" stuff too much on here because a lot of people think it's weird and probably demonic, especially when you start talking about tricks and games.

but in my practice with the Spirit I have often been gamed in a way that strikes me as tracking closely with the scriptures.

one time God seemed to say to me everything I had ever feared about myself, in the most domineering, god-like (devil-like?) tone you could imagine.

oh snap!

one time as I was praying there appeared an image in my mind of Jesus going up to all the people I was trying to forgive and shooting them in the chest so that they flew back into walls and shit, Tarantino style.

It was hilarious but kind of disconcerting.

a similar time, I was trying to forgive someone close to me for something he had said and suddenly it seemed that God was saying, "You can let him go to Hell or you can go to Hell with him."

frankly I didn't WANT him to go to Hell. but that was only the beginning of the game.

I don't want to say too much about how the game progressed in these cases, because to get the blessing you have to be willing to play with him without even knowing which game you're playing or how it's supposed to end.

Maybe the Spirit is always super straightforward with some people, not saying everything has to be a trick. but since it's a pattern in the scriptures I guess I'd say, Watch Out for it.

the devil tries to do the same thing but if you get used to God's grace you learn to recognize the ways he cheats so as to close the game too soon, as a way of deceiving you or of getting one of his barbs in you.

not all games are good.

a lot of preaching down through the ages has been as straightforward as a brick falling off a ledge. You got good, you got bad, you got God in the heights, you got Man with his feet in the clay, you got virtue, you got vice, and there you have it.

problem is that these straightforward things are not at all straightforward. They need to be "gamed" with the Spirit to be understood, otherwise you end up adopting all kinds of bad postures as you try to mold yourself into what you assume these arrangements should entail.

Job is an extended game where one man said "I am not going to mold to THAT" and then went off high-key accusing God of a bunch of junk and saying reality isn't even worth existing.

Job played the game and won; his friends didn't play it and lost.

The only way to lose is not to play.

So much damned attention gets paid to whether Job was Technically Being Righteous in everything he was saying, and to just how mad God may or may not have been when he "confronted" him.

I have some opinions about that but also it's a giant red herring. "Job played the game and won" is the first thing you need to know. The story doesn't address anything directly except that Job played the game and won and that his friends didn't and lost (until they repented).

If you're reading this, there's a good chance that you have never played the game as hard as Job did.

Read the stuff he said, it was pretty mean and he wasn't gonna back down until he was satisfied.*

(*actually he did back down after God's first speech, but God wasn't pleased with this and gave him a second speech for good measure. "I'm gonna keep answering your request until you are well and fully satisfied," is the best interpretation if you ask me.)

Also, something that doesn't get taught usually is that Job freaking started that fight with his friends.

The first round of speeches is a bunch of normal good comforting stuff. They didn't start accusing him of gross sin until he started saying outlandish things like

"I'm righteous and God ought to treat me that way and also none of you care about me which is why you're trying to comfort me with empty words."

I'm not saying we should all start fights with our friends who are trying haphazardly to comfort us

BUT

if we do

we've just got to keep playing the freaking game.

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