Who would pay attention to that?

You never know when something you think  or hear on the radio you think is sort of trivial but will turn into a key to understanding something profound.  This passage of a conversation between Krista Tippett and the author Mary Karr turned into that kind of thing for me.

DR. KARR: What I liked about the Catholic church that I didn’t find, say, in the Protestant tradition, there’s a body on the cross.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.

DR. KARR: Even just being in mass that you stand up and kneel down, that you move in unison, that I know a lot of cradle Catholics complain about how sheep-like you feel, or they’re like dumb cattle or something like that, but I sort of found it — it’s like being in hip hop class. [laughs] When you move like everybody, you kind of feel like you are like them. And the idea that we’re hunks of meat incarnate — in meat, that it’s not metaphorical, the idea of Jesus and the Eucharist. It’s not a metaphor that you’re going to be renewed. It’s not a metaphor of his body or his “teaching,” quote-unquote, or his love or whatever. It’s his body. It’s so lurid.

And I remember looking at the body on the cross and saying to my son that — I don’t even remember whether I ever wrote about this or not — but I remember looking at it before we were baptized and saying, “I don’t get this whole crucifixion thing. It’s so awful. I mean, the suffering, beaten critter nailed up there is just so gross. Why don’t they just have you say the jump rope rhymes, and then you’re redeemed?” And my kid, who was young, like, maybe, I don’t know, 8 or 9 said, “Who would pay attention to that?”

The insight in that question, "Who would pay attention to that?" turned into an explanation for the Crucifixion that I can understand, more so than the Western theological doctrine of original sin atoned for through the substitution of Jesus as a sacrifice in expiation of the vast sins of humanity.  That the Crucifixion of Jesus, the Son of God or, if you can't believe that, the Son of God by adoption at his baptism,  would suffer one of the most ignominious and excruciating of deaths, not a death by natural means, but execution at the hands of the Roman state, a powerful empire,  suffer as any of us would suffer, is as radical a means of showing people that God identifies with us in a radical act of supreme sympathy and love even as we are made and live in this physical body fraught with problems and which soon must be abandoned for what we don't have any way of knowing with certainty.

I find that understandable in ways that I can't seem to find the old explanation convincing. though it might have been more understandable to someone who grew up in a culture that sacrificed animals as worship, something I don't get at all.  There is no reason that such a profound event and the accounts of it should have only one means of understanding it,  I'd think it's too important to have only one explanation.  Speaking to our condition is intrinsic to the meaning of it.  We don't all live in the same conditions.

I think it's related to the meaning of the Eucharist, in which the act of sharing bread and wine with other people is the very body and blood of Christ, who Jesus embodies in physical form in the physical world, in the physical universe.  I find it makes the agony Jesus as fully human experienced the night before his betrayal and Crucifixion understandable, that the human Jesus feared the pain of what he knew was coming, that he asked that some other way be found to do the same thing but that he was willing to suffer what other people so condemned, as so many creatures suffer without having a knowledge of why it happens the way it does.  I think the most bare humanity of Jesus is expressed in the question of why God has forsaken him, it shows that as fully human, of God made a conscious embodied mind and spirit, sharing the most tragic of human experiences, including our limited understanding and knowledge.

I also find that considering this from the point of view of the witnesses of the Crucifixion, his disciples and apostles, who show they didn't really understand things even as they witnessed wonders and miracles, even those who experienced the Transfiguration, but who couldn't comprehend how that extraordinary person, the person who had abased himself to wash their no doubt filthy feet, who had made so many shocking and disturbing statements, who had given them bread and wine and said it was his body and blood, who said he would be betrayed and denied by them, and whose faith was shattered by the ignominy of the Crucifixion - something which they had no scriptural expectation or preparation to expect.   Even the women who faithfully stayed with him, who didn't deny him or flee and by doing so might have risked being crucified or killed in the casual violence of empire, thought they were witnessing the end of Jesus.

If the Crucifixion is confusing and if it is considered a grotesque spectacle - as display executions, lynchings, beheadings, the whole range of means of executing people as part of state terror intentionally is - it is a means of demonstrating something that we would have an even harder time of understanding without it,  that God, as explained in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel, identifies with us and cares about us in all of our abject misery and fear and ignorance and weakness.  I think that the Crucifixion was made necessary because of how hard it is for us to believe such a thing, of how hard it is for us to understand our obligation to believe we are all more than just "hunks of meat incarnate" or, in the atheist-materialist-scientistic faith, insignificant objects without minds or significance.  It's our weakness, our inability to pay attention that made and makes it necessary. 

At least that's what I think.   And in the Scriptures, that makes the next part of the narrative even more necessary.