Jesus " is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head"

19 And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” 20 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”  Matthew 8:19-20

THE CATHOLIC PREP-SCHOOL  prep-to Ivy League law school Republican-fascist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court reminds me of one of the monsters of Revelation, multi-headed and at complete service to the Antichrist, devouring and destroying at will.  You can take many of the rulings, be they 5-4 or 6-3 that have issued from the Leonard Leo-Federalist-fascist Society, "Red Mass" going lawyer-liar dominated Roberts Court as examples of the Antichrist, those who daily propitiate Mammon and serve the billionaire-millionaire oligarchy and its extension into the petty affluent class who are the semi-suckered, semi-beneficiaries who provide Republican-fascism its electoral success but the one that says the U.S. Constitution legalizes the illegalization of homelessness is one of the most blatantly obvious.  Anyone who says that the United States is a Christian country should have that thrown in their face immediately.  

"Traditional Catholicism" like so much of "white-evangelical" "christianity" is a "christianity" without Jesus Christ, the very central figure of the real thing but who turns out to be disposable to those who will make do with merely notional and pseudo and "national Christianity."  The vindictive Martha Ann Alito wants to put "the sacred heart of Jesus" on a flag as giving the finger to LGBTQ+ as her husband makes rulings that destroy the least among us, the actual presence of the Living Jesus among us, according to his very word.  That's the kind of Catholicism that trad-catholics trade in.  While many others in the "trad Catholic" cult have more style than her, such as John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, the cruel Gorsuch,  the criminal Alito and Thomas, their "catholicism" is no more authentic.    

Under the law that the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court declared constitutional, Jesus and his Apostles as they traveled around, those who followed him would regularly have been vulnerable to arrest for sleeping in public, as Jesus said having no place to lay his head, would have been fined with full knowledge of the police and judges that he had no money to pay and would have ended up in jail and come out harried out of town after town and, no doubt one of the desiderata of the 6 Republican fascists, have lost many rights, most important to them the right to vote.  Jesus would have been made an outlaw by the Catholic-prep to Ivy League fascists on the Court, from the merely less evil and best at pretending that's not what they're about, perhaps Barrett and Roberts, to the middle of that pack, Kavanaugh, down to the worst of them, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch (I can never stop remembering that his mother was one of the many Reagan era felons) they are emblematic of exactly what's worst in our Constitutional system, the elite level of our so-called educational system and of what happens to Christianity under the overriding influence of affluence.  I'm sure that when they go to then next "Red Mass" on the feast day of Thomas More, they're unlikely to hear the bishop or cardinal who preaches the homily about them turning any second-coming of Jesus into vagrant vulnerable to being arrested and imprisoned and stripped of the very last right that he would have to sleep, nor any of the other Mamonist-Antichrist rulings that they have made.  I wonder if that numb nun who testified in favor of her former student, Clarence Thomas, would be proud of her student today, though she's probably long gone.  I wonder if the former president of Notre Dame has any qualms about his preening in the elevation of Coney-Barrett to the court in light of that ruling - I'll bet his being exposed to the most life threatening period of Covid at the Trumpian-fascist nomination celebration would probably have made more of an impression on him, not what his protegee just did to the least among us.

In Walter Brueggemann's great sermon-lecture on Jeremiah's presentation of real justice, Slow Wisdom as a Subversion of Reality, he quoted Terry Eagleton on the real character of Jesus in the Gospels, making it entirely relevant to the "christianity" of such "christians" and what they do to the least among us right now.

But what then?  Well. If we take the antithesis of [the Jerusalem establishment's values] might, wealth and wisdom, we might come up with a triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty. And, of course, that's what we get in Jesus of Nazareth. For God chose foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.  First, you know the gracious act of our Lord, Jesus Christ who though he was though rich, yet for our sake became poor so that by his poverty he might make ready rich. unlike most responsible American citizens, Jesus appears to do no work, is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard.

It turns out that the life of the Crucified One exhibits the counterpoint to the great seduction of Jerusalem. He is the embodiment of weakness as he stood vulnerable before imperial authority.  He is the embodiment of foolishness.  Terry Eagleton describes him this way,   He is presented as homeless, property-less, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear his vote for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful, The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over the top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents. Forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow. So far Eagleton.

He is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head or even healthcare.  The remembered Jesus sits amid our posturing, it reminds us that the great imperial triad of might, wisdom and wealth never delivers the security or the happiness that it promises.

That such a Supreme Court majority who would leave Jesus with nowhere to lay his head is certainly relevant to judging not only their Christianity but, perhaps even more so their schools, their associates, their families Christianity.  Anyone who didn't take the chance to influence them to do better.  I think it reflects especially badly on the hierarchy of the Catholic church who run the prep-schools and universities which produced such banally evil lawyers and judges.  That the elite universities which provided most of them with their law-school credentials were once Protestant and are now gaudy baubles on the crown of Mammonist monsters certainly has something to teach about the inadequacies of secularism as certainly as the ability of that tendency to dominate elite Catholicism.  I have come to distrust or at least hold in deepest suspicion religion with a lot of overhead holdings.  Coney-Barrett's membership in what I take to be a charismatic-"catholic" cult which has a host of bizarre club beliefs attached but which allowed her to vote for that ruling, and many others, has similar lessons to teach.   If I were Pope, one of the first things I'd do is abolish the "Red Mass" abomination, a mass held to be attended by professional liars in the legal profession, the worst of those sitting on the Supreme Court bench, I'd also get the religious orders out of the business of credentialing such affluent rich men and, now, women who wouldn't just leave Lazarus starving on the doorstep, they'd call the cops to remove them and throw them in prison.  They'd certainly never visit them there anymore than they'd provide them with healthcare or food or clothing or a place to lay their heads.  

If I were able to do it, I'd make the members of all of the federal judiciary directly provide the best of legal council to the least among us as a condition of them holding seats on those courts, the lazy Roberts Court certainly has lots of time on its hands, they take so many lavish, billionaire financed vacations.  I would like the least among us who are the victims of their "justice" in their faces, there's no place in the Constitution that would prevent the quartering of the destitute in their many homes and travel vans.  I wonder if Clarence Thomas ever parked his billionaire gifted trailer on public property, I'm guessing he has.   If he does in the future, I want him and his criminal wife arrested.  

I'd love to have Roberts and his wife have to wake up to face the destitute at their breakfast table face, to face, having to face the reality of their lives.  Not to mention the rest of them.  I'd like them to have the product of their work pushed into their view, into their hearing, into their feeling and smelling.   

It makes me think of when Mark Twain read about a rich woman being outraged at the idea that she should have to see some workman attending her church, being in close proximity to them.  He pointed out that she'd, no doubt, be offended by seeing the carpenter, Jesus, there, no doubt finding his working-man smell and appearance offensive. And that would be the working poor, not the destitute. Along with outlawing destitute PEOPLES' right to a place to lay their head, lots of towns and cities are making it illegal to feed them.  No doubt Jesus feeding the multitudes would get him jailed in many an American town with this Court's OK.

I'd like to have all of the elite Catholic schools, churches, cathedrals, monasteries, etc. required to house the homeless as a condition of their tax-exempt status, I'd include the secularized Ivy and Ivy equivalents in that.  I'd like the wall that shields the senses of the rich from the least among us torn down along with the legal fictions that produce that difference, to start with.  But I'd like to start that by sticking into the faces of these "justices" the product of their "justice."  They just legalized the harrying of the poorest of the poor out of town and out of mind for the petty affluent, that much should be the topic of the sermon of the next "Red Mass" that they dishonor by their "honors" presence.  Though I doubt the Catholic hierarchy is going to do that in any great numbers, it being dominated by the servants of Mammon, itself.  I doubt that the next generation who are going to Catholic-preps are likely to hear anything to that effect, either.  I loathe the Catholic preps and universities as they are in most places, more concentrated on football and basketball and how to plug their product into the elite than they are on what they would laughingly refer to as "Catholic moral values."   As Kavanaugh and Thomas and the rest of them prove, that means meddling in other peoples' sex lives, even as they do the same things, themselves.   

They make me the most ashamed I've ever been at being associated with Catholicism, and there was plenty to be ashamed of even before then.  They are, all of them, a product of elite Catholic institutions or were never taught better by the Church. I don't regard what they do as having anything to do with Jesus so I am certainly not ashamed of being associated with Christianity.  I take Jesus seriously, the Son of Man who had no place to lay his head.   He got hassled by the priests and the experts in the law back then, too.  

Post Script: Going over this in my generally hap-hazard attempt at editing on the run, it occurs to me how dependent the legal tradition that the judges follows relies on the English common law, which you'd have thought we'd left behind the second of July 1776 and that reminds me of how the great English radical William Cobbett pointed out how the Tudors and Stuarts destroyed the great English social safety net when they dissolved the monasteries and ransacked the churches turning what were once distributors of aid and comfort into manner houses and estates for the super rich among them.  For whatever faults you can name in the medieval Catholic Church, they were the ones who maintained what would be called in response to the Reagan pillaging of public assistance, the "social safety net."   The trad-catholics might hold a collection once in a while for what gets called "charity" now but the like of those who indulge in the base sacrilege of the "Red Mass" and who are the majority on the Supreme Court are fully in with the Tudor tradition, the Poor Law under Elizabeth illegalized being destitute, too as the remnant of far stingier aid to the poor in England had all kinds of rules to regulate their movements.  A pregnant woman who strayed outside of her own parish could have her tongue bored through with a hot iron, as I recall.  I don't think the Roberts Court would be above OKing a modern day equivalent of that.  Such is those "justices" notion of "justice."   I suspect that if you go over the use of the phrase English common law, it will very often be attached to something shafting the least among us.   We should have dumped that with so many other things by now.