THE COMMON WESTERN explanation of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus was never something that sat right with me, God angry because Adam and Eve ate fruit they weren't supposed to buying us all thraldom to death and sin, original sin and all that, demanding a human sacrifice (as if there hadn't been plenty of those over the eons) of GOD'S OWN SON, no less. It's a slander against God grounded in a pretty bad interpretation of the already pretty slanderous polytheistic folk-tale of Genesis 2. A folk-tale that presents God as a deceiver, jealous of the possible powers that the humans might get from eating the fruit of the trees they were told not to eat and gain godly powers, becoming a rival to "us gods."
Instead of that petty view of God I prefer the far more expansive and generous view that by God becoming flesh . . . here's how Michael Sean Winters put it in his Good Friday post:
Today, we see what a dreadful price the Incarnation exacted from the man from Nazareth. The Son of God became man, and not only dwelt among us, he took on the most ignominious form of human suffering imaginable. That price, which is God's price, is priceless.
Today, we see evil winning the day, nailing to the cross the hands and feet of the one who preached mercy and forgiveness, crowning his head, so often bowed in prayer, with thorns, covering in scorn and blood the rabbi who scorned none but the self-righteous.
Today, we see the one who told Pilate his kingdom is not of this world subjected to the injustices of this earthly realm.
Today, we see death, the one evil no human can conquer, declaring victory over this Jesus.
Jesus is exposed as a false prophet. His ministry comes to nothing. His followers flee. He was no Messiah. He had claimed he would rebuild the great temple in three days, but he lasted only three hours on the cross and the temple still stood. He had called on God as his father, but God did not rescue him from the cross. He was abandoned by all, even by God.
When we try to imagine the sufferings of Jesus, we are at a disadvantage because we know that Good Friday is not the end of the story. His followers did not know what we know. His mother might have had an intimation: There is a tradition that Holy Saturday is a Marian day because she alone among his followers kept the faith in her heart. Today, 2,000 years on, we have trouble imagining the horror of Jesus' followers at what had transpired.
The fear of death is the fear of loneliness and nothingness writ large. Our lives find meaning in the relationships that sustain us, but death brings those relationships to a final and complete end, an absolute loneliness. Whatever accomplishments we achieve can only continue beyond the grave if someone else takes them up; our lives can seem meaningless, an abysmal nothingness.
With Jesus, whose ministry embodied the words of the psalmist — "With the Lord there is mercy and the fullness of redemption" — his death confirms the victory of existential loneliness and nothingness.
It is nothing less than God, God's self entering into an entirely human experience including all of the fear of pain and death, the failure of faith, leaving friends and family, maybe not existing at all.
Jesus really did live and die as a human being.
Long time readers of my posts will know I have a special regard for the writing of the Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nyssa and, since just about all we know about her comes through his reports of her, his sister Macrina the Younger. From there I've merely started on the ocean which is Orthodox Christian theology, which includes a far more credible view of the reason the Death and Resurrection of Jesus happened, that in the Risen Christ an entirely new way of being entered the Cosmos, the Risen Christ having and being a physical body but a body which is with God so fully that He surpasses the limits of physical bodies and what humans in the old life can do in a life that never ends and is eternally with God. And it opens the way for the entire Cosmos to enter into that state in which the seeming natural world which we know is knowingly connected intrinsically with what we deem "supernatural." Long time readers will know that I hold to a radical universalist view that all sentient creatures will consciously exist in that state and hope though I can't claim to understand it that the entire Cosmos will have that status in the completion of Creation. That there is no eternal hell (based in no small part on the impossibility of translating a word that doesn't mean that in Greek) that all which God has created will be redeemed through God becoming a part of the Creation in Jesus.
That isn't an idea unique to Orthodoxy, just for example, Karl Rahner held that as part of God's creation nonliving matter was in some undefinable sense spiritual in nature and the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo held that in the end base matter would be in a state similar to what is presented above. Though I certainly don't understand it, it's nothing I could define or describe though I like the idea and think it is far more in line with the first chapter of Genesis in which God bestows the first blessings on the Creation over and over again. It also seems to me that, for another example, it is closer to Isaiah's vision of God's Holy Mountain in which carnivores are herbivores and no one's afraid of each other. Of course we mere humans can't get to the reality of it except by metaphors and images that are understandable in human terms, though we should never forget that what metaphors do is not an actual description of what they are trying to describe. I still like the idea of herbivorous lions that can be friends for animals they'd eat in this life.
Jesus, made as fully human would be expected to share in or at least intimately understand the necessity of telling us what he was getting at in all too human terms. Just as he told his followers they could not go where he was going, we can't really get past the metaphors which are as far as we can go in understanding this. The whole thing rests on our choice to believe it, to be persuaded of it.
Instead of going on, here's Mary McGlone's Easter column which is better than what you just read.
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