Antichristos

I love Jesus. I always have.

That has to be said at the start, because nothing that follows makes sense without it. I did not arrive here through anger. I arrived through recognition.

I was a child when my body stopped working. Lymphoblastic lymphoma, far advanced. Years of treatment. The body becoming a project managed by specialists. Decisions made around me instead of with me.

I died three times.

The first was the worst. Everything collapsed — geometry giving up, edges going, the noise peaking and then cutting out. Then silence. Not peace. Neutral. And a choice, not spoken but known: left and up meant leaving, right and down meant returning. I thought about it. That is the part that surprises people. I evaluated it. I was young. There was still a lot I wanted to do. I chose right and down.

The girl in the next room died that night. She did not get to choose. No fairness in that. No lesson either.

The second time, a drug the nervous system could not carry. I stepped out and sat in the chair beside the bed. The third time, during a lumbar puncture, I sat on the doorframe in the corner and watched them work on my back.

I knew where the chair was. I knew where the doorframe was.

That changed me. Not because I found God. Because I lost the story.

The story said God is watching, God is in control, God has a plan. The ward said a child is dying and the girl next door is screaming through the night. If God has a plan, the plan includes the ward. If God is in control, God is in control of the screaming.

Something in the logic was broken. My body knew it before my mind could say why.

The scaffold started cracking. Not all at once. Cracks do not announce themselves.

I still loved the hymns. I still felt something real in the gathering. I still read the words and heard truth in them.

But the container was wrong.

The teaching said love your neighbour. The container said: not that neighbour. Not if he believes the wrong thing. Not if she loves the wrong person. Not if they worship in the wrong building.

The teaching was warm. The container was cold. I could feel the difference in my body. The teaching opened something. The container closed it.

Then Anselm’s argument arrived. Something than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist, because existence is greater than non-existence. A logical steel trap, and it would not let go.

In that moment I knew God existed. Not as faith. As structure.

I also knew the scaffold was wrong.

Both were true at once. That is the position nobody prepares you for. Not atheism. Not faith. Harder than both. The certainty that the ground is real and the building on top of it is not.

The ground hums. The building sorts.

That argument became bedrock, and it never left. If God is perfect — complete, lacking nothing — then why are we here? I could not find the answer. I also could not stop looking. That looking became the work.

One evening in the bush I laid it out for my father, cleanly, no rhetoric. He listened. Then he said: you should read Hume. No engagement. No counter. Homework.

The issue was never God. The issue was whether I was allowed to think without being sent somewhere else first. When that became clear, something hardened.

I wanted the scaffold down. Not because I had a problem with Jesus. I loved the man who ate with sinners and touched lepers and drove out the money-changers. I hated the sorting, the hierarchy, the leverage, the threat, the blade hidden in the text.

I saw myself as the anti-Christ who loves Jesus. That sentence sat in my chest for over twenty years. It felt right and wrong at the same time.

Then the word arrived. Not as a thought. As a recitation, repeating in the background of my brain until it was heard.

Not anti-Christ. Antichristos. Not the enemy. The replacement. Not against the man. In place of the anointed one.

There is a phrase in the Greek that will matter later. Two words.

Ἐγώ εἰμι. Ego eimi. I AM.

Remember it. It appears seven times in one gospel — the gospel written last, the one furthest from the man on the hillside. Seven times the teacher opens his mouth and begins with those two words. The same words God spoke at the burning bush. The same words the scaffold never heard correctly.

This book makes one claim.

Jesus said: I AM is the way.

The scaffold heard: I, Jesus, am the gatekeeper.

That mishearing is the scaffold’s foundation. Remove it and the sorting machine has no engine.

This book removes it. Not by attacking the text. By reading it as it stands. Not by rejecting Jesus, but by reclaiming what he pointed at. Not by building a new religion, but by showing that what he pointed at is what the structure of reality derives.

Same destination. Different foundation. One can be reinterpreted. The other cannot.