Jesus’s Commands
“See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray…Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand. So, if they say to you, ‘Look, he is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.” | Matthew 24:23-26

Question: What is the general command here? Answer: Don’t be had by those claiming to be the returned Christ, and don’t believe anyone who tells you they have found him.

Scenario: You are one of the 12. You return from being out and about and the other disciples tell you, “We have seen the Lord!” Immediately, the above teaching of Jesus that you heard earlier that very week, bursts into your head: “See that no one leads you astray…If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it…If they say, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ [the disciples saw Jesus while hiding in a house] do not believe it.”

What do you do? You have not seen him for yourself. All you have to go on is the testimony of others claiming to have seen him–the very situation presented in Matthew 24. What do you do? It would be entirely reasonable for you to conclude that to believe the claim would be in direct violation of Jesus’ command in chapter 24.

If this is the case, then rather than doubting, Thomas did exactly what he was supposed to do.

After Bill Clinton won the 1992 US presidential election on the platform of health care reform, a nonprofit foundation commissioned Thinking Tools to design a hospital-management simulator. Released in 1994, SimHealth was played by policymakers and the public alike—including, famously, Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea. Maxis marketed SimHealth as more than mere entertainment: It was a policy tool and could be used to explore and reason about complex systems. Players assumed the role of a newly elected politician campaigning for health care reform. They used their finite political currency to promote policies that aligned with the values on which they based their election promises. They could track their policy changes against their stated values using a compass-like indicator that pitted Liberty against Equality and Community against Efficiency—ideals that are, in reality, by no means opposed.

Unlike SimCity players, SimHealth players could tinker with the underlying model and adjust hundreds of parameters. Yet tweaking the parameters was not the same as tweaking the models themselves, and the game had a clear ideological bias. Much as in SimCity, there wasn’t exactly a win state. But SimHealth’s values were hard to miss. The game trumpeted a somber funeral march whenever the Canadian-style single-payer socialized medicine plan popped up on the screen. As Keith Schlesinger writes in a review for Computer Gaming World, there was one easy way to win: “All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal health care (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100–$300 billion per year.” Unfortunately, this could hardly be called a health policy victory, as it left the virtual citizens entirely without health coverage. Even the private insurance companies went bankrupt in the first few months. The game was a flop, and 30 years later, health care remains an intractable issue plaguing American politics.

Whereas SimRefinery gave players a new perspective on a complex, though defined, process, the US health care industry is so complex that SimHealth only muddied the waters. Paul Starr, who was a health care policy adviser to the Clinton administration, dismissed the game entirely. “SimHealth contains so much misinformation that no one could possibly understand competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them, on the basis of the program.” He was concerned that people would mistake the game for a legitimate description of reality. He despaired that his daughter, an avid player, accepted the game’s libertarian-leaning strategies because that was “just the way the game works.”

All simulations are ultimately constrained by their creators’ assumptions: They are self-contained universes ticking along to preprogrammed logic. They don’t necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we may want it to be.

What makes ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ such a powerful question that inability to deliver a satisfactory answer can push a person to the brink of a suicide?

When I started investigating the history of the question, the first surprise was how recent it actually is. We often think of it as an eternal question asked since the dawn of mankind; but actually, the first recorded usage of the phrase the ‘meaning of life’ in English took place as recently as 1834, in Thomas Carlyle’s highly influential novel Sartor Resartus: “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force.”

Before asking the question, Carlyle’s protagonist goes through the classic steps of an existential crisis. First came loss of religious faith: “Doubt had darkened into Unbelief… shade after shade goes grimly over your soul… Is there no God, then?” Without God, the universe becomes cold and silent: “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” In a mechanistic universe void of any transcendental values, nothing seems to matter any more.

For Tolstoy, the existential crisis stage was marked by being constantly tormented by the question ‘Why?’ He attended to his estate. But why? Because then his fields would produce more crops. But why should he care? Whatever he did, whatever he accomplished, sooner or later, all would be forgotten. Sooner or later, he and everyone dear to him would die and there would be, as he wrote, “nothing left but stench and worms.” Since everything vanishes and is finally utterly forgotten, what’s the point of struggling?

The multifaceted experience of Christ’s cry: the raw intensity of “cursing in fight and toiling,” and the desperate plea of “Stop! Stop it! Enough!” These evocative expressions paint a vivid picture of godforsakenness—that moment when grief plunges so deep that even faith and hope seem to waver. Yet, nestled within this existential struggle lies the possibility of kenosis, a self-emptying love we discover through Christ’s ultimate sacrifice.

Biblical commentators highlight Christ’s cry as a powerful expression of human despair and a desperate plea for help from the gathered crowd. This interpretation draws support from the Greek text, where words like βοάω (Mark) and ἀναβοάω (Matthew) signify a loud cry or an anguished outburst. Notably, Christ re-utters this cry at the very moment of his death (Matt 27:50; Mark 15:37; Lk 23:46). This echoes the cry that raised Lazarus from the tomb (Jn 11:43) and mirrors the cry accompanying the angel’s dramatic arrival in the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:3).[6] However, other exegetes offer a distinct perspective. They argue that Christ’s experience of Godforsakenness signifies him taking on not only the burden of “sin for us, who knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21), but also the very consequence of sin itself: the agonizing separation from God and existence outside God the Father’s divine presence (cf. Gen 1-3). In this interpretation, Christ plunges into the depths of sin without succumbing to it himself.

However, Frost introduces his own poetic shift in these braided traditions by suddenly plunging into an incarnational focus at the end of the poem with the Christological figure of the brave soul. In the sixth stanza, he writes, “Nor is there wanting in the press / Some spirit to stand simply forth / Heroic in its nakedness, / Against the uttermost of earth…./ And the mind whirls and the heart sings, / And a shout greets the daring one…. / And the awe passes wonder then, / and a hush falls for all acclaim.”25 Frost’s previous reference to the daring souls as those “that are slain” and the description of this choice as a “sacrifice” is strongly reminiscent of the thirteenth chapter of Revelation, where silence falls in heaven before Christ appears as the Lamb “slain before the foundation of the world.”26 Scholar Cai Pei-Lin has noted that, besides the biblical resonances, Frost also appears to allude here to Milton’s figure of the Son of God.27 In Book III of Paradise Lost, God asks if anyone in heaven is willing to descend to earth to “redeem / Man’s mortal crime, and just the unjust to save.” The angels stand “mute / And silence was in heaven,” until the Son stands forth to become mortal flesh for man’s sake, telling the Father: “Behold me then: me for him, life for life / I offer…. / Account me Man; I for his sake will leave / Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee / Freely put off.”28

Frost’s allusion to Milton indicates that the sacrifice of this soul that all the other spirits behold at the top of the mountain is, in fact, the sacrifice of the Son of God in becoming flesh. Pei-Lin has also noted that Frost’s later description in “The Trial by Existence” of this event as God breaking “a flower of gold” is another reference to Milton. Further on in Book III, after the Son has declared his intention to become incarnate, Milton moves into a description of amaranth and gold as flowers connected with the Tree of Life and divinity itself: “Their crowns inwove with amaranth and gold / Immortal amaranth, a flower which once / In Paradise, fast by the tree of life / Began to bloom, but soon for man’s offence / To Heaven removed where first it grew, there grows / And flowers aloft shading the fount of life.”29 The association of this golden flower with the Son means that its “breaking” in the final stanzas points to a certain cruciform move inherent in the Incarnation itself. Thus, Frost pushes past Dante’s reticence by emphasizing that the vision at the top of this purgatorial-type mountain is Christ: in other words, the beatific vision is God-in-the-flesh. The human souls in his poem ascend the cliffs in order to look with “awe [passing] wonder” on Christ as the “brave soul” that chose to become flesh and broken for our binding together.30

From this turn towards the Incarnation, Frost moves into a deeply sacramental view of the world, one in which spirit and matter are irrevocably knitted together and purified by Christ’s presence. After describing the Son of God as a broken flower of gold, Frost continues to explain that God has used this broken flower as “the mystic link to bind and hold / Spirit to matter until death come.”31 Christ is portrayed here as ultimately fulfilling what Frost sees as the essential poetic vocation: to unite spirit and matter. The Incarnation is the final word, there will never be a future in which the spiritual is disconnected from the material. For Frost, paradise cannot be the place where one beholds pure spirit; instead, it is the place where one is finally able to experience their full unification in a divine affirmation of creation and matter.

In the last stanza, Frost turns to the experience of earthly life. Although spirit and matter are bound together in Christ as the broken flower, this does not mean that persons have this perception during their life. In fact, forgetfulness and lack of perception are a key aspect of earthly suffering. Frost draws attention to this in his recognition that “the essence of life here” is “still to lack / The lasting memory at all clear, / That life has for us on the wrack / Nothing but what we somehow chose.”32 These lines express how earthly life is often characterized by an inability to perceive meaning or freedom within suffering; Frost thinks this is because we cannot remember our own will to become enfleshed. However, he finds comfort in the fact that we are not alone in the suffering of earthly experience: “in the pain” there is “one close, / Bearing it crushed and mystified.”33

The description of this “one” as “crushed” and “bearing” human pain immediately recalls the image of Christ as the crushed flower in the previous stanza. His sharing in human flesh means that he is capable of being “close” in human suffering, and this proximity of divine presence is capable of transforming that experience. Frost’s grammar here is creatively ambiguous: one can read “crushed and mystified” as applying both to Christ himself and to the pain that is borne. This connection reinforces the idea of transformation. The descriptor “crushed” alludes to the breaking of the flower and also likely to Isaiah’s prophecy of Christ as “crushed” for man’s healing.34 The description “mystified” likewise contains a multilayered significance. Its more modern and common meaning of confusion echoes the forgetfulness of human experience that Frost attended to earlier in the poem. However, it also has the etymological source and older meaning of “full of mystery,” “mystical… of secret rites,” and mystic as “one who has been initiated.”35 This reading of the word in Frost’s final line emphasizes the sacramental significance of human experience and all of physical creation. Finally, Frost says that it is through this union that we are “wholly stripped of pride.”36 The binding together of spirit and matter allows for a process of purification that is a creative reworking of Dante’s Purgatorio, closely linking purgation as well as paradise closely to earth.

“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of Paradiso by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain. For Frost, the Incarnation is the religious pinnacle and affirmation of his poetic vocation to unite spirit and matter. It means that no matter how deeply one may enter into the spiritual, one never gets beyond the physical: they always mutually reveal one another. The religious concept of a sacrament or mystery expresses this very thing and is thus deeply incorporated into the ending of Frost’s poem. These theological themes make sense of the way that Frost continually uses his poetry to ascend to the highest spiritual places and yet always return with the conviction that “Earth’s the right place for love,” for Christ is the one in both these movements come together: in which divine descent and human ascent are united.37