Thoughts on Good Friday
One can only speak personally about the
ultimate realities. I am a bad Catholic, a bad Christian. I know that. Grace –
divine love – gets through, but it’s like trying to get a radio station far
away with a weak and broken antenna. I work on receiving that signal, but often
I just have to do my duty, or fail to do my duty.
I cannot see The Bible as such as sacred
scripture, as almost all other Christians do in one form or the other. It is
too clearly a work of human minds and editing. Except for the first chapter of Genesis,
I can find nothing sacred in the Old Testament. Except that it forms the Matrix
in which Jesus’ teaching took place, I would see it as a collection of myths masquerading
as. I love myths, but the Old Testament myths are not as pleasurable to read as
the stories of Thor and Odin, for example. It kept me far away from Christ’s
teachings for many years since I believed that to accept the latter I had to
embrace the former as scripture. There are a couple of small diamonds in it.
But overall it burdens Christianity for me. Conservative Protestants prefer it,
for they can quote to justify all kinds of nasty things that violate the word
and spirit of Christ’s teaching. (Trump selling patriotic Bibles for 59 dollars
and 99 cents – I want to vomit just thinking of it.)
The Old Testament – the Torah – is the
story of God’s relationship with his Chosen People: not with the rest of us. From
the stories of ethnic cleansing to the ritual contempt for those not included
in the Chosen People – the Samaritans, for example – the character revealed
therein starts good, but then becomes a tyrannical, genocidal, punishing,
Patriarch whose commandments are law and by definition “good.” I don’t like
him. If he were more than a character in that story, he could destroy me with
his power. Perhaps in terror I would submit. But only in fear, not love.
Even the New Testament is not a sacred text
for me. It contains sacred texts – the teachings of Christ, as they come
filtered down through the decades after his death. But these are diamonds in
the rough. Much of the New Testament consists of attempts by Christians still
in the Jewish tradition to understand what of Jesus’ teachings, life, and death
had been passed on; other parts of it consist of attempts by people with little
or no contact with the religion and culture of old Israel to understand. Some
of these attempts to make sense of Jesus are valuable or moving (e.g. the first
chapter of John); others alienate me (Jesus as the sacrificial lamb: the
so-called “ransom theory”). Jesus, like Socrates, left nothing written behind.
Unlike Socrates, he did not have a Plato to pass on to us a living memory of
his teachings, life, and death.
Scripture for me would require culling the
diamonds – the authentic teachings of Christ, his own words (and critical
scholars agree some of the Gospels stem directly from Jesus, and were not added
later). The closest approach to a Scripture for me is Tolstoy’s The Gospel
in Brief, a somewhat idiosyncratic translation of the diamonds contained in
the New Testament, leaving out the rough. It is this translation that brought me
back into contact with Christianity after a long absence in which I couldn’t
take it seriously.
The meaning of
the Cross. if divine love truly reached out to his Creatures ensnared by sin
(as though now part of our DNA) through the incarnation, and died on the cross
as a consequence, then it would be most ungrateful indeed not to honor that
sublime sacrifice. Christians are Christians partly in gratitude for the
sacrifice: they are grateful to the man Jesus, to God who sent and inspired
him. Trusting that Jesus was a window into divine love, my theological problem
‘was Jesus a unique prophet (similar to how Muslims think of Mohammad) or did
God become human in the person of Jesus’ becomes practical when the Christian
wishes to express gratitude, love: how to love Jesus? As God’s special prophet
and the embodiment of unfallen Man? Or as a person of God the Trinity? To whom
are we grateful? How much does it matter? Does everything depend on getting the
answer right? As a Christian one must rely on tradition here, on a trust in the
Church.
These are the salient facts.
Jesus prayed in
fear to be spared the cross, but submitted to God’s will. If Jesus and God
share one mind, then it is not a father willing his son to be crucified, but
God willing himself to be crucified – a kind of suicide. Unless, of course, he
was as the man Jesus powerless to alter the course of events. To be one of us,
God had to submit to our powerless, to torment, fear, and death just like so
many others. No Red Seas were parted to save himself from the worst humanity
has to offer.
A core of Jesus’
teaching can be found in the Old Testament – Isiah 1:11
“The multitude
of your sacrifices— what are they to me?” says the LORD. “I have more than
enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no
pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
Again and again,
Jesus by word and example flaunts the older conception of a God who demands
sacrifices and blind obedience. After all, it is understandable why the
priestly caste found him dangerous, considered him to be a blasphemer: by their
light, according to their conception of God, quite rightly. Thus to introduce
the “ransom theory” to understand his death seems inconsistent with his own
life and teachings, as tempting as the metaphor must have been to Jewish
Christians of the time.
The "ransom theory" dates back
to the early Church Fathers and was particularly popularized by theologians
like Origen and later by St. Augustine. It has some textual support in the New
Testament. The theory suggests that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was
a ransom paid to Satan to liberate humanity from the bondage of sin and death.
No human sacrifice could have been enough to pay this debt, so God had to pay
it himself. According to this theory,
humanity, represented by Adam and Eve, had fallen into sin and thereby came
under the dominion of Satan. Since Satan had a claim over humanity due to sin,
Jesus' death was seen as a payment of ransom to Satan in order to free humanity
from his power. This payment of ransom is often depicted metaphorically, with
Jesus offering his life as a sacrifice to satisfy the demands of justice and
redeem humanity. I don’t wish to take this away from anyone who finds it
essential, but the idea of God owing the devil a sacrifice to free us from his
prison is an idea I can’t reconcile with God as Jesus reveals him, a God of
love and Creation.
[C.S. Lewis’ The
Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe gives the most sympathetic understanding
of the ransom theory I know of, when Aslan sacrificed himself for Edmund’s betrayal:
even Aslan could not per fiat command the debt be paid as that would have
violated the old magic, the law made at the founding of the world. Lewis comes
as close as anyone can come in this fantasy story of making sense of the ransom
theory to me.]
This is my
rather idiosyncratic attempt to understand the insane image of God on the cross.
The world is beautiful but way before Adam and Eve animal life was structured
by the cruel struggle between predator and prey. (Image a lion devouring a zebra
while the poor creature was still alive. Out of this struggle for existence,
Adam and Eve emerged, the first self-conscious human beings. (That is not the
Garden of Eden, but bear with me.) Nature implants in predators cruelty towards
their prey; otherwise, they could not hunt and would die out. The movie
Madagascar portrayed this humorously when the friendly zoo lion Alex, starving
to death, regresses to his primal nature and while running after his zebra friend
Marty no longer sees his friend but a steak. The predator reduces a living
creature to food – which is what we do too. And extend this reduction to “enemies”
and “others” – to threats to the community. People get reduced to orcs – or Samaritans,
or Philistines. The cruelty in nature sprang over to the human world, symbolized
for many Jews by the Romans and their crucifixions.
God as Creator brought this into being.
(The attempt to let God off the hook by claiming the all of nature “fell” with
original sin – that before original sin the lion lay down by the lamb – is a beautiful
myth, but doesn’t make sense of what we know of nature.) And the only picture
of God in a monotheistic religion was Jahve, who often seems very much embedded
in the cruelty of nature. The very idea of the Chosen People with their Promised
Land pit them against enemies, who thus had to be reduced even as the enemies
had to reduce the Chosen People. The entire Creation groans, as St. Paul
put it.
Jesus’ entire life and teaching showed God
as overcoming these dichotomies: starting with friend and enemy/other: the
command to love and pray for your enemies; not to condemn sinners (the
adulteress); to overcome the divisions between ruling classes and the poor; to reject
the hypocrisy of the righteous and unrighteous, subordinating the Law (and the
priests) to love and humanity; to reconcile humanity (not just a Chosen People)
to a God who is the source of their being; to die to your selfish ego and
discover your soul.
Imagine now that Jesus was the translation
of the mind and spirit of God into flesh; that becoming mortal and living among
us was the only way to communicate these truths. Communicating those truths, revealing
God’s true being would be the purpose of the “incarnation” – the unity (in some
mystical sense) of God and man. Not to ransom us from Satan, but to help us, to
save us by giving us a chance to overcome the fearful predator in ourselves and
giving us a less anthropomorphic image of God to guide us.
To do this for us, to give us a chance at “salvation”
(i.e. the overcoming of all the dualisms in us) Christ-God was willing to
suffer the cross. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness
comprehended it not.” Well, some people have been trying to comprehend for 2000
years. I am trying, however unsuccessfully. (The truly Good get killed: seems
to be a law of society. Socrates met a similar fate, even if the Athenians
executed him much more humanely than did the damn Romans Jesus.)
That, with my bad antenna, is the best I can
do.
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