Just so, Jesus came not to save us from who we are, but from what we think we are—from the fiction we’ve bought into—and, like Obi-wan, to show us who we really are. To dare us—double-dog dare us—to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Jesus puts on a show just like Obi-Wan, but it’s the flip-side of Obi-Wan’s.
Like Obi-Wan’s Jedi robe, Jesus’s shroud falls empty, but for Jedi Jesus that’s just the start.
Jesus does something Obi-Wan never does. Sure, like Obi-Wan he materializes out of nowhere. The door’s locked. That doesn’t stop him.
But unlike Obi-Wan he’s not just a Force ghost like Obi-Wan is when Obi-Wan appears to Luke all shimmery.
Jesus is flesh and blood, he eats—fish, a honeycomb.
Thrust your hand into my side, he tells Thomas.
Go ahead—here, let me help you. You want meat? I can do meat.
And Jesus can do meat because he not only isn’t a ghost, he isn’t just a resuscitated, revivified corpse either.
Jesus is something else altogether, something entirely new. He’s no longer a mind trapped in meat, in The Matrix, as we are. He’s not even just a Glorified Body. He’s a Glorified Mind in total control of the meat, in control of the materialization.
“Matter is plastic in the face of Mind,” as Philip K. Dick says.
VALIS, Appendix, ¶ 4, p. 257.
Parenthetically, Dick isn’t the only one who thought so. Robert A. Heinlein did as well,
as he makes clear in Stranger in a Strange Land. Hang tight and I’ll get to that later.
Jesus is showing off his Glorified Body to show the disciples, to show us he’s totally hacked The Matrix. Even better, he’s showing us he can hack The Matrix any old time he wants with complete impunity.
O death, where is thy sting? O meat, where is thy victory?
1 Corinthians 15:55
as Saint Paul says.
Remember the scene in The Matrix when Agents Smith, Jones, and Brown spray Neo with a fusillade of lead—and Neo in response raises his hand, stops the bullets midair—and the bullets fall empty to the floor?
Like Neo, Jesus is showing off his Glorified Body to show the disciples, to show us, to show The Matrix he’s untouchable.
Hoc est enim corpus meum. For this is my body.
Glorified. Totally badass. Real dangerous.
Jesus is showing off his Glorified Body to show us what we really are. We’re not sorry-ass sinners. We’re Jedi. We’re Neo. We’re X-Men. It’s just that right now we’re the kinda buggy beta version, a couple test cycles short of product release.
But then that’s the whole point of a beta, isn’t it?—to debug the code. We’re the buggy beta version just figuring out that the reason life is so darn hard is because for starters we face not just the daunting task of debugging our own code, but the even more daunting task of figuring out how to debug our own code—when Jesus comes along with this exhilarating challenge, this double-dog dare, this totally badass demonstration showing us we can not just debug our own code, we have the potential, the power to hack the OS—The Matrix—with total invulnerability to get whatever functionality we want.
But only if we take in the Mystery of Doing and Not Doing the Meat—take in, consume, absorb, assimilate, integrate, incorporate body, mind, and soul the Mystery of the Glorified Flesh.
He that eateth my flesh—
—and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
John 6:58
The whole notion of which—eating his Glorified Flesh, drinking his Glorified Blood—is profoundly weird. Totally, utterly alien.
But are you going to let an encounter with the alien stop you from exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life, from boldly going?
Remember in Contact when Ellie’s blind colleague Kent hears interleaved in the message beamed from Vega—the rasterized video of Hitler opening the Nuremberg Olympics—a second signal that turns out to encode tens of thousands of pages of technical specs for the wormhole machine? What if there’s another whole reality interleaved with ours, an encoded reality whose real presence requires something inexplicable like a Blind Kent to paradoxically hear it, a reality whose real presence the orthodox Christians have indeed detected but totally garbled, a reality the rest of us totally ignore because the orthodox Christians have convinced us it’s all nothing but gibberish?
He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
When everybody else was watching, repelled by Hitler, Blind Kent was listening, taking in, absorbing the experience in an entirely different way.
A Literal Miracle
The traditional Eucharist is the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus, crucified to save those poor sorry-ass sinners.
The Über-Eucharist is the Real Presence of the Glorified Body of Jesus 2.0. Hacker Jesus. Rebel Alliance Jesus.
Philip K. Dick believed utterly in the Eucharist, in “the literal—not merely figurative—truth of the miracle of the Mass,” as he put it.
Don’t rush past that: a literal miracle was intrinsic to his world view.
In fact, the literal miracle of the the Eucharist was for Dick The Red Pill because for Dick the literal miracle of the Eucharist was what revealed Really-Real Reality: a miracle is a ‘miracle’ only if you don’t grok what’s really real.
For Dick there’s always some weird, profound, paradoxical superposition of parallel worlds at work because for Dick what’s really real is in fact something that we don’t grok, can’t grok. Yet. So in one breath he insists on the literal miracle of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, in the next he’s just as adamant about the Real Presence of the divine in beer cans in gutters. Because for Dick—profoundly, paradoxically—what’s going on in the Eucharist and what’s going on in the gutter are not different. And he’s absolutely right. Bread and wine, beer cans and Burger King wrappers, makes no difference. God, Dick tells us, is—
The Über-Eucharist transubstantiates the whole world. That’s the essence of the Über-Eucharist. That’s wherein it transcends the traditional Eucharist. Of course, that’s exactly what crashing The Matrix means…
Coming 5 November 2021
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 
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