Brief observations
1. The Biblical interpretation of mediocrity.
The Biblical interpretation of mediocrity goes on interpreting and interpreting Christ's words until it gets out of them its own spiritless [trivial] meaning — and then, after having removed all difficulties, it is tranquillized, and appeals confidently to Christ's words!
It quite escapes the attention of mediocrity that hereby it generates a new difficulty, surely the most comical difficulty it is possible to imagine, that God should let himself be born, that the Truth should have come into the world. ..in order to make trivial remarks. And likewise the new difficulty as to how one is to explain that Christ could be crucified. For it is not usual in this world of triviality to apply the penalty of death for making trivial remarks, so that the crucifixion of Christ becomes both inexplicable and comical, since it is comical to be crucified because one has made trivial remarks.
2. The theater / The church.
The difference between the theater and the church is essentially this, that the theater honestly and honorably acknowledges itself to be what it is; on the other hand the church is a theater which dishonestly tries in every way to hide what it is.
For example. On the theater-board is always plainly written: "Money will not be returned." The church, this solemn sanctity, would shudder at the scandal, the offensiveness, of writing this over the church door, or having it printed under the list of preachers for Sundays. But yet the church does not shudder at insisting, perhaps more strictly than the theater, that money will not be returned.
It is lucky therefore that the church has the theater alongside of it; for the theater is a wag, really a sort of witness to the truth, which gives the secret away. What the theater says openly, the church does secretly.
3. God /The world.
If two men were to eat nuts together, and the one liked only the shell, the other only the kernel, one may say that they match one another well. What the world rejects, casts away, despises, namely, the sacrificed man, the kernel — precisely upon that God sets the greatest store, and treasures it with greater zeal than does the world that which it loves with the greatest passion.