Clean-Shaven

Every power in the world asks for something. A vote. A purchase. A signature. A loyalty. An interest. Even love, once it enters organizations, sooner or later presents the bill.

Then there exists an anomalous force that escapes the logic of exchange. Giving freely. It is the oldest power in the world, and at the same time the least understood.

Jesus was not the beginning, but he was the first to use the language of the word and turn it into a narrative able to walk on its own. He built no armies. He founded no banks. He opened no temples. He conquered no territories. He created a story.

And when a story becomes strong enough to survive its narrator, something is born that power recognizes immediately: influence. That is when interest was born. Not the interest of loving him. Not the interest of understanding him. The interest of steering him without having to fight him.

As a narrator, this is the vision I imagine. A man in robes. Tall. Handsome. Long hair. Clean-shaven. He walks through a noisy crowd and, without raising his voice, still manages to speak.

He does not speak to everyone. He speaks to each one.

Few words. The right ones. Words that do not command. Words that open. Words that carry further than silence.

This is how the prophet is born. Not when someone proclaims him. When people begin to tell others about him.

But the men of the temple noticed that something was changing. Attendance numbers were dropping. Curiosity was shifting. So was attention. And whoever controls attention controls power.

So they summoned him to the palace. Officially to understand who he was. In reality to understand how to stop him.

He did not wear the tunic of the Pharisees. He did not wear the turban. He did not carry the insignia of authority. Nor did he wear the long beard that identified the dominant format of the age.

In their interrogations they tried to bring him back inside the perimeter. To assign him a category. To find him a label. To turn him into a lesser version of what they already knew. But he kept slipping away.

And one answer above all seems to cross time like an arrow: Why do you look at the speck in my eye, and not concern yourself with the beam in your own?

The reference was to the beard. Because every power examines the details of the other when it can no longer defend its own contradictions.

With his system he had taught people a new possibility: to live outside the format. Not against the system. Outside it.

Which is far more dangerous. Because systems know how to defend themselves against opponents. They struggle, instead, to understand someone who simply stops playing by their rules.

Politics then ran its course. It always has. When it could not defeat him fighting on equal terms, it used the oldest weapon in the world: subtraction. To take away. To reduce. To simplify. To put the public in front of a choice already made.

The deal in the square arrived the way every well-constructed operation arrives. Disguised as democracy. Clean-shaven Jesus, or bearded Barabbas. Freedom or format. Unpredictability or belonging.

The game was easy. The format won. As it almost always does.

But right at the moment of defeat, giving freely showed its true nature. Because traditional power reacts. Giving freely understands. And he answered with a sentence that no organization, no government, and no algorithm can yet fully explain: Forgive them, for they do not yet know what they are doing.

It was not a justification. It was a diagnosis.

His disciples did the rest. They wrote a book.

Or perhaps something even rarer. They wrote a narrative able to survive for millennia. Translated into every language. Crossed by every culture. Interpreted by every religion. Contested, loved, distorted, rewritten, defended, and attacked. And yet still here.

No corporate department has ever managed to match its distribution. No advertising layout, its duration. No logo, its recognizability. Because products travel through markets. Narratives travel through people.

There is no blasphemy in this vision. There is only the absolute right to tell. A right that moves outside their markets, independent and unbothered. And whoever disagrees is free to look for other books, where they can read whatever format suits them better.

This, after all, is the power of Jesus. Not the power of force. Not the power of money. Not the power of government. The power of giving freely. The only power that keeps circulating after its narrator is gone.