Yesterday, I wrote about my own personal search to understand the phenomena of our politics, not from the raging tirades of the left or the right, but from as far away from them as I could get. When I try to understand something complicated and big, I try to imagine myself out in space, an alien hovering over the earth, looking down in wonder. How would I describe to my fellow aliens back  home?

Sometimes you have to step very far back to see it. And I am trying to make sense out of it all, as you are.

It is in the air, I don’t wish to join the argument, I want to understand it for myself. Others can understand it for themselves. I would think people would be pleased not to argue, but in fact, many seem to hate not arguing and resent it. They no longer know any other way to talk.

In my piece yesterday, I wrote that if Jesus were alive in America today, watching the angry politicians and the billionaires and millionaires and lobbyists posturing and plotting, if he came to Washington and watched the  the rape of working people and the pillaging of their communities in the name of the new economy,  if he saw what corporations have done to the idea of work and security, he would have been lighting torches, calling on his disciples to pick up their swords and head for the Capitol and the architects of their betrayal.

This idea shocked a sometime friend of mine, who wrote on Facebook that  there is nothing in scripture that would suggest or bolster the idea that Jesus would be doing any such of a thing as I described. How wrong, I thought, she was.

This brought me back, not only to the scripture, but to my dog-eared biographies of Jesus.

I cannot imagine a more political act than his shocking assault on the wealthy priests in the Temple of Jerusalem, an act of defiance and rebellion that was ultimately to cost him his life.  And one that kept bring me back to our own temple, our capital city, a gathering of the new priests. When you think about it, the parallels come together.

“But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in  him?,” asked Jesus. [John 3:17}  And who, in our political debates, is asking that?

When he comes,  does Jesus send the poor and the refugees away, ban them from safety, condemn them to suffering and death?

Would he blame the poor for being poor, the refugees for being displaced,  the dispossessed for wanting a place to live? Would he urge us to hate more, fear more and torture more? What would he think of these new Christians, each one competing to wave his name around like a flag in the wind.

“Then Jesus went all about the cities and villages,” said Matthew, “teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and disease among the people.” [Matthew 9:35].

I imagine him this year on a political debate stage, listening to women being degraded, the poor ignored,  the angry inflamed, the talk of carpet bombing, the turning away of refugees, the calls for more torture, more police, more anger and judgment, more war, the violence and hatred cheered on and praised. Wow, my analogy was even more accurate than I imagined it to be.  The Romans have returned, not the messiah. We’re just missing the lions.

Out walking in the woods today, in the wind and sun, another epiphany came to me, it was like a vision, and it came to me, the understanding I was waiting for, the thing I was searching for. It was exciting, I rushed home to write it.

Jesus is so much larger than life, everyone can and does see in him what they want to see and wish to hear. We don’t really follow his example, we just use him in every way that we can. If he is the son of God, we will soon regret it. There is no faith that takes a Lord’s name in vain.

Jesus is perhaps the most exploited spiritual figure in the history of the world, invoked constantly by people who seem to know nothing about him or his values.

I am not a Christian, he is not a god to me, but a powerful inspiration, the ideal for humanity. He was on fire to make the world a better place, to give the poor and the oppressed hope, to heal the sick,  to drive the moneylenders and lobbyists and glutinous politicians from their mountaintops.

So there is Christ. And then there is the antichrists, more than one.

In some Christian writings, Jesus the Christ (or Christian Messiah) will appear in his Second Coming to Earth to face the antichrist, who will be the greatest false messiah in Christianity. Just as Christ is the savior, protector of the poor and the idea model for humanity, the waiting antichrist will be the false messiah, a single figure of concentrated cruelty and greed. His message is the opposite of Jesus, he preaches hate and suspicion and fury.

In our time, the antichrist has, of course, been politicized, he has become another tool of the “left” and the “right,” the people who choose labels over thought and preaching over listening. If you Google “Anti-Christ,”  you will see that the label people have each chosen their own demons, the two most popular antichrists on the Internet: George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Since his very Jesus-like preaching for the poor, Pope Francis has come onto the Google  list. Imagine, the rising new antichrist – I guess we need fresh ones – is Francis,  the one most faithful to the message of Christ.

How dare he evoke the true Jesus.

That tells us so much about our time, and how much we seem to each need our own demons.

The name “antichrist” is only found in in the Bible once in, John 2:18 and 2 John 7. The Apostle John was the only writer in the Bible to use the term  “antichrist.” In these verses, many different antichrists (false teachers) will appear between the time of Christ’s first and Second Coming, but there will be one great antichrist who will rise to power during the end times. He will deny that Jesus is the true Christ. He will be a liar and a deceiver.

When I read this, I think of H.L. Mencken, he wrote of the same man, he called  him “Mob Man.” He is, he wrote, an ideal monster, governed by emotions.

“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not.  Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race…In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true.”

His heroes, added Mencken, are mostly scoundrels.

The antichrist, for me, is not a devil, but a political mindset, feeding off the rage and and disconnection and technological separation of people from one another that marks our time. This idea of the antichrist is not a single presidential candidate but a system, is a state of mind, a state of rage. The new antichrist is he child of lies and betrayals, of lobbyists and power-hungry billionaires, of angry e-mails and blogs.

When I think of Christ sitting and watching our political debates, I imagine him (I admit it, I am thinking of the screenplay) weeping at the blasphemous people who take his name in vain for greed and political power. Listening to the promises of carpet-bombing women and children, rounding up families of enemies, torture, exile and the persecution of the enemies they seem to need so badly.  The leaders who are too cowardly to lead, they can only follow.

Is this, he might wonder, his promised Kingdom of God, the revolution he promised the sick and the poor, the refugees and the persecuted?

I think of the centurions marching out in the new America, tearing mothers from their children, sisters from brothers, deporting millions, storming into homes in the night, a great exodus of misery to top the flight of the Jews out of Egypt.

I think of women once again derided and dismissed, shamed for their looks, pitied, like rescue dogs and saved by their men once again.

The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that criminals teach us about the power of evil, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core. In these angry preachings, there is for me the smell of rot. I don’t know if Jesus was a god or a man, but I am certain he was no hypocrite:

“Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” [Matthew 23:28]

So maybe Jesus would turn them all into pillars of fire.

Would Jesus storm the Capitol, turn the debate stages into dust, find there the antichrists the Bible said he would face when he returned? It sort of fits.

I think so. I would be most pleased if he came back now to liberate the spirits of men and women and remind them of who he was and what he believed.

“And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.”

Yes, for sure, I can see him in the Capitol, preaching that this was not a house of merchandise either.

And the lobbyists fled in terror, and the congressmen men and women hid the files of their SuperPacs, and hurriedly deleted the contents of their smart phones, and the billionaires rushed to find their corporate jets, and the poor and the refugees and the defamed and dismissed rushed to the Temple and set it on fire.