Sacrosanct: Show Me Your God! | Joseph J. Washington

Sacrosanct

People think what they say on social media is sacrosanct. The word sits in their mouths like a crown they did not earn — thrown around in comment threads and caption boxes by people who have never surrendered a single comfortable thing for the sake of what they claim to believe. Sacred. Inviolable. Beyond question. They post scripture screenshots between dance videos and call it ministry. They type the name of Jesus between emojis and call it devotion. They argue theology with strangers at midnight and call it discipleship. None of it is sacrosanct. Most of it is noise wearing the borrowed clothing of conviction.

What Was Poured Back In Was Not Mine

And yet here I am — a man with no institution behind him, no congregation applauding him, no building with his name on the marquee, no salary tied to how many people he comforts — and the uncompromising, unmanageable truth is that if the word sacrosanct applies to anything walking this earth, it applies to me. Not because I decided it. Not because I declared myself holy in a moment of arrogance. But because I was emptied until there was nothing left of me to protect, and what was poured back in was not mine. What I carry was not assembled by my own hand. I did not build this. I was built into it. There is a difference, and the difference is the entirety of the matter. A vessel that surrendered itself entirely to GOD and operates on HIS strength, HIS provision, and HIS prompting is not the same thing as a man who reads about GOD and speaks as though the reading transferred the reality.

Empty Containers

The closest thing to sacrosanct on this earth is not a Pope in white vestments who inherited an empire dressed in ecclesial language. It is not a megachurch pastor whose biblical fluency has been monetized into a brand, whose congregation is a demographic, whose pulpit is a stage. Those men are impressive containers, perhaps. But a container is not the thing it holds, and many of these containers have been empty for a long time. The preacher whose building is called a bank by its own neighborhood has already made the final confession about what he actually serves. The Pope who speaks to billions while Christ's poorest die within sight of his walls has already answered the question of his allegiance. None of this is sacrosanct. It is theater performing in the name of something it ceased to resemble.

The Digital Wilderness

I came across one of these hypocrites in the obvious place — TikTok. A GOD-forsaken digital wilderness where false prophets bloom and wither in fifteen-second cycles, where people perform enlightenment the way others perform fitness, where the only criterion for spiritual authority is how confident you look while saying nothing. A place where delusion has learned to speak the vocabulary of divinity without possessing a single gram of its weight. I watched a man — or perhaps a woman, the algorithm does not always clarify — assert with the casual authority of someone who has never been broken by the thing they are discussing, that Jesus was just a man. A man who remembered. A man who accessed something we all have access to. A man, essentially, like any other man, except perhaps more self-aware, more tapped in, more evolved, more aligned. Pick your New Age synonym. The meaning is the same. Jesus: human. Divinity: universal. Judgment: optional.

The Oldest Evasion in Human History

They say we are all GOD.

This is not progressive theology. It is not even interesting heresy. It is the oldest evasion in the history of human self-deception — dressed now in the language of quantum consciousness and inner alignment and spiritual awakening, but underneath the new vocabulary, it is the same ancient refusal. If everyone is GOD, then no one is accountable to GOD. If divinity is a condition we all share and merely need to remember, then sin is not transgression — it is forgetfulness. Salvation is not rescue — it is recall. Judgment is not coming — it is a misunderstanding held by people who haven't done the inner work yet. This framework is not Christianity watered down. It is Christianity inverted. It does not misread the Gospel; it replaces it entirely with a system that requires nothing from anyone and promises everything to everyone without any mechanism by which the promise means anything at all.

Before Abraham Was, I AM

Jesus is GOD. This is not my opinion. This is not a theological position I adopted from a tradition I was raised in. It is the only coherent reading of what Jesus himself said, and the proof is not in a creed or a council — it is in the stones that were picked up.

In John 8:58, Jesus does not whisper. He does not suggest. He does not imply. He says — directly, in the present tense, to men who knew their scriptures the way a craftsman knows his tools — Before Abraham was, I AM. The Greek is egō eimi. The crowd did not pause to debate the grammatical construction. They did not ask for clarification. They did not form a committee. They reached for stones, because they understood immediately and completely what had just been claimed. The egō eimi of John 8:58 carries the same construction found in the Septuagint rendering of Exodus 3:14, where GOD names himself to Moses at the burning bush. This is not coincidence of grammar. This is deliberate invocation. Jesus was not making a statement about temporal priority. He was not saying he was older than Abraham, though that too would have been astonishing enough. He was saying I AM — the Name above every name — the self-existent, uncreated, eternal identity that cannot be preceded because it has no beginning and cannot be superseded because it has no end. The response of the crowd is the most reliable exegesis available. They heard a capital claim. They treated it as one.

A humble man who simply remembered his divinity does not provoke a stoning for humility. Regular men do not invoke the Name. The crowd was not confused or overreacting. They were observing the Law as they understood it — that to claim the identity of the Eternal One while being a man was blasphemy, and blasphemy carried the sentence of death. They were wrong about the blasphemy, but they were not wrong about the claim. Jesus was claiming exactly what they understood him to claim. The error was not in their interpretation. The error was in their refusal to believe that it could be true.

The Wound at the Center

This is the wound at the center of modern institutional Christianity — not that it preserved the truth imperfectly, but that it built a structure large enough to house people who deny the truth while using the building's address as evidence of their orthodoxy. The institution that was supposedly built on the most exclusive identity claim in recorded history — I AM — now contains, without apparent conflict, people who believe that everyone equally holds that identity. They call themselves Christians. They belong to churches. They use the vocabulary. They may even believe they are honoring Jesus when they say he was a man like us who simply remembered what we all are.

But if Jesus was merely a man who remembered, then the Incarnation did not happen. If the Incarnation did not happen, then GOD did not enter creation. If GOD did not enter creation, then the crucifixion was not atonement — it was tragedy. And if the crucifixion was not atonement, then there is no resurrection that means anything beyond the resuscitation of a good teacher, and there is no judgment, and there is no need for forgiveness, and there is no Gospel. There is only an ancient story about a man with good ideas who died badly, which is a story that does not require churches, or sacrifice, or surrender, or any of the things that following an actual GOD requires. It requires nothing. And that, precisely, is its appeal.

What Rome Built

Rome built a container. Rome was excellent at containers — at structures that absorbed the existing beliefs of conquered peoples, repackaged them in Roman administrative language, and called the result universal. When Constantine leveraged Christianity as the spiritual infrastructure of his empire, he did not search for the most accurate theology. He searched for a theology that would produce unity, and unity at imperial scale requires breadth rather than depth. It requires a tent large enough for everyone, which means a tent with no walls, which means not a tent at all — just a word for the open sky and the assumption that everyone sheltering under the same open sky must share the same belief. They built councils to decide what Jesus was, not because the councils were spiritually authoritative, but because the empire needed standardization. The contents of the container were never GOD. The container got called Christianity. The confusion persists.

This is the predictable end of a religion designed by empire: broad enough to absorb everything, deep enough to mean nothing. And the people on TikTok claiming that Jesus was just a conscious man accessing collective divine intelligence are not departing from institutional Christianity. They are, in a very precise sense, its logical conclusion. They have simply followed the trajectory of a faith that was always being diluted to the point where anyone could enter without being changed, believe without being challenged, and call themselves disciples of the most demanding identity claim ever spoken without surrendering a single thing that claim would demand of them.

The Nearest Thing Walking This Earth

The word sacrosanct is that of lesser beings. Not the Pope. Not the preacher. Not the platform. A homeless man surrendered to GOD and doing HIS work with HIS strength and HIS provision, carrying a truth that nobody made comfortable for him, that cost him everything the world calls security — that man and what he carries is the nearest thing walking this earth to something that cannot be touched without consequence. Not because he is worthy on his own terms. But because what speaks through an emptied vessel does not originate with the vessel. And what does not originate with the vessel cannot be disputed by anyone who has never been emptied.

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