Trivial Messiahs
October 21, 2011
Watching clips from the Steve Jobs memorial at the Apple HQ, I was struck once again by how we have imputed messianic significance to him. For sure, he made my long distance running around the suburbs of Philadelphia less tedious by allowing me to carry the Stones, Zeppelin and Dire Straits wherever I went; and I can actually see my son at college through the miracle of skype while never leaving my family room. But that's pretty much it for me.
We live in a world that is pretty easily satisfied in its messiahs these days, do we not? A gadget man becomes a saviour. Who would have thought it?
Of course, our messiahs are a function of our understanding of the human condition. Where the problem of the fall is not alienation from God but rather boredom, the messiah is the one who nails that boredom to the cross and casts it as far from us as the East is from the West.
Trivial messiahs save a trivial humanity from a trivial problem.
We live in a world that is pretty easily satisfied in its messiahs these days, do we not? A gadget man becomes a saviour. Who would have thought it?
Of course, our messiahs are a function of our understanding of the human condition. Where the problem of the fall is not alienation from God but rather boredom, the messiah is the one who nails that boredom to the cross and casts it as far from us as the East is from the West.
Trivial messiahs save a trivial humanity from a trivial problem.
