Christ our King, you became an outcast among us, a worm and no manMy personal experience of Catholic spirituality is that the church has focused almost obsessively on Jesus's physical suffering: his being beaten and scourged, the blood running down his face as the crown of thorns is pushed onto his head, being forced to bear his own cross, the agony of the nails piercing his hands and feet.
Yet it seems that, every bit as much, perhaps even more so, is the humiliation of the whole business. The mocking, the spitting upon, the stripping him of his clothes, the enrobing him in purple, the sarcastic "Hail, King of the Jews", the sign posted on the cross "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" - all part of what Luke, in this year's Palm Sunday Passion reading, referred to as the "spectacle". It was not only an exercise in physical torture, it was an exercise in public humiliation. It seems one of the goals of crucifixion was not just to inflict pain but to, quite literally, unman the man. Make him less than a man.
The futility, of course, is that killing him neither took away his humanity nor made him less than human. They (we) may have wished to make him a worm, but all we succeeded in doing was revealing him as the Son of God.
Jim, I agree with you. And I think the distinction is important. In one church program we start the day with Catholic music videos, some of which are illustrated with scenes from Mel Gibson's effort to raise movie violence levels with "The Passion of The Christ." Pretty gory stuff. But I remember it lasted three hours. Our country waterboarded, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad 183 times in several sessions over a period of days. Our allies kept prisoners in "tiger cages" in Vietnam for weeks. And, of course, the Nazis, calling their prisoners "stucke," or sticks, starved and beat Jews for days, weeks and months, making the Gibson version at least "mercifully short" in comparison.
ReplyDeleteCrucifixion as a Roman punishment was a miserable way to die. That is why the Romans didn't do it to each other. But the human mind was even more inventive and eventually became more efficient in rounding up people for inhuman treatment and stretching it out. The real shocker in the Passion, when you get right down to it, is Who it was done to.
I think the agony in the garden was among the worst of his suffering. Because he knew what was going to happen, and felt the rejection and betrayal. And the weight of the sins of the world, which were still going to happen, in spite of everything he did. All of us have experienced anguish and dread, but I'm pretty sure not to the extent that we sweat drops of blood.
ReplyDeleteIf Jesus was a mere mortal, he might have run away, or the humiliation might have crushed him.
ReplyDeleteBut if he shares the god-ness of the Father and the Holy Spirit, his divine knowledge that must have sustained him, even if it was all painful and ugly.
Unlike Jesus, we cannot see through to whatever pain and humiliations await us (though as we age, they are certainly easier to imagine). Neither can we see beyond this life and into what joys, pains, humiliations--or nothing at all await us there.
I suppose my faith boils down to this: Jesus helped God the Father understand the joys, pains, and disappointments of being human by becoming one. Somehow, this expanded God's love to all his creatures, not just a few chosen people. Jesus's death and resurrection assures me that God is with me whatever happens.