"Ecce Homo"

Here's a strange thing. There was a Man who came from Nazareth in Galilee ("can anything good come from Nazareth?" they said), who broke down every barrier and lived out of the box. He touched lepers, associated with prostitutes, befriended and respected women, broke the Sabbath laws, outraged the pious and was not afraid of blood.
For a long time the message of that Man was passed on undercover. It was distorted sometimes, but the gist of it remained the same. Miracles happened at the hands of ' 'ordinary' people, because they understood that His message about who He was, told them who they were, too.
A few hundred years later, the authorities - who were a bit superior to those lepers and women and people who bleed or sin or anything - caught on, on some pseudo-intellectual level, to the ideas of The Man and thought it worked. But, sadly, they didn't really take the time to get what He had said, at all. It went straight back 'into the box'. The message passed into the hands of politicians. He had to be labelled - Man or God? Oh, how they argued and wrangled and sat in their robes, debating it all on their intellectual level until they could tell everyone what to believe because they knew best - bizarrely forgetting that the message of The Man was that each person has that same spirit within him or her and is also an expression 'in the image and likeness' of the Life/God that comes into physical manifestation. Subsequently, the men in their robes were made into saints - which kind of means people to emulate. Hmm...
Meanwhile, most people got on with their lives. Those who received the message of The Man (or of other great teachers all over the world, according to their culture, for God is surely big enough to express through many people in many different ways) interpreted it according to their own inner light. But that wouldn't do at all for the councils and the men in robes who decided what was so. No, if you disagreed, you had to be killed (in the name of God, of course, which makes everything alright) or at least converted at sword-point. And, in the name of The Man who never had a council and whose words - according to the Jerusalem Bible - are translated as "on this rock, I will build my 'cabal' rather than 'my church', a long list of terrifying images could be invoked to scare people into accepting the council's ruling....the ultimate being damnation. Maybe we don't believe we will go to hell, but, if we are constantly told we are sinners and unworthy of our birthright as children/expression of God, it's the same thing.
The saddest part of it all, is the massive watering down of what He actually said. The 'good news' is translated as 'Jesus died for my sins.' (What sins were that bad??) and the message is simply, "Be good - but you're not really that good and if you think you are, you are arrogant so be sorry for being bad."
What did He really say? He said, "You are the light of the world." He said, "The works I do, even greater works, you shall do." He said, "You are the salt of the earth" and "every hair on your head has been counted..." Isn't God in everything? Do we need any kinds of council to tell us what is so, when we have the knowledge of our 'parentage'? And we so love an icon and to be sheep, that we walk away missing it all.
Ecce Homo - Behold the Man. If only we look in the mirror or at the person sitting beside us, or a tree, a flower, a sky, the snow and behold the true spirit within! Ecce Deus!