It takes a lot of effort for us to realize how extraordinary the accounts of the last days and hours of Jesus before his execution by Rome must have been to those who experienced it and who first heard the accounts. Especially for those who came to believe it. And it can be through making that effort, trying to understand how unlikely it would have been that people at that time, in that place, growing up in those related cultures to have come up with that story to have just made it up out of imagination. The debunking fashion that would turn it into a typical pagan myth doesn't stand up very well when you start with the realization of how unlike classical myths it is and how unlike what those in the Hebrew tradition would have imagined a Messiah would be.
Some of what we through surface familiarity with the accounts take to be details in the story are some of the most surprising features of it. Some of them probably didn't do much to help the acceptance of what the stories claimed, they wouldn't have been an easy route to deciding to believe in them. The utter powerlessness of Jesus in the hands of the Romans, the same man who in some of the accounts just escaped attempts to tone him to death by his fellow Jews by walking through them being powerless to escape crucifixion by the worshipers of idols is probably second only to the Resurrection in that regard.
But lots of the supporting information would have been hard for the people of that time to get past. There is the role of Women in the accounts, especially as the first witnesses to the Resurrection - Womens' testimony was everything from devalued to discounted in the contemporary culture. That was something so ingrained in the habits of thought of the ambient Pagan cultures that we have certainly not given it up, even today. Neither was the fact that all of those in the earliest witnesses were from the very lowest class of society, which is where Jesus was from, as well. The attempts to give Jesus a royal lineage was something that even the Gospel writers couldn't resist doing.
Just about every time I get around to reading the sections of the Gospels leading up to the Crucifixion in the past two decades, I notice things about it that are surprising. This year it was noticing that when Jesus was praying in such a state of turmoil in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he found his Apostles asleep, he woke them and told them that they should be praying, not that he should be excused from what he was about to experience, but that they would escape "being put to the test" is pretty amazing. As is the Gospel account of him turning to the Women who are lamenting his torture and crucifixion, far from fleeing as his male followers did, he says that they should lament for what it coming for them and their children. This is an account of someone entirely outside of the typical transactional habits of thought that are typical of human beings, I doubt anyone but those who had similarly been converted into an inspired way of thought would have put those in a made up story.
RMJ recently commented that one of the things he learned in seminary was that human thinking and habits hadn't changed much since the time of Abraham, something which I've only learned very recently, largely thanks to my reading of Marilynne Robinson's essays, Walter Brueggemann's writing and, of course the Scriptures that point that out. It's certainly not something that was unknown to previous writer on the topic, just that was my route into realizing that. In watching the spectacle of Russia and the other countries caught up in communism continue with the same habits that come from the time of the Czars and the United States still struggling with the same issues of racism and economic degradation of people that the aristocrats who wrangled a Constitution to their advantage has certainly shown me that most of our idea of progress is a PR swindle.
The idea that we, as a society after one of the bigger PR con jobs of all time, the so-called "enlightenment" have made more than a slight amount of progress over the people the Scriptures addressed is absurd. That "enlightenment" light is just a bit of razzle dazzle, the same science that was the alleged substance of that "light" is the same science that produced Novichok, the poison used in Putin's attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, the same science that produced the nuclear weapons that hang over us all, creating a reality that the popular conception of the Revelation of John the Divine presents in allegorical terms.
I could write several paragraphs here about seeing through the traditional secular, really atheist, left and its writers and its institutions and, especially, magazines, but I've written about my disillusionment with those before, especially of them carrying water for Putin and his agents just as their previous staff carried water for Stalin's and Lenin's and Mao's. It's all of a piece. I don't see them as decisively different from those who carry water for our domestic billionaire oligarchs. The Green Party would be named.
In learning to put the nonsense and believed lies of my previous adulthood behind, having seen through it, I've come to believe that in order to try to really escape those habits of thought that will always revert to that, you have to make the choice to believe more than your eyes can see. It comes down to making a choice in what you're going to believe, in what you must though not necessarily want to believe. It took me many years to give up the radical romanticism of my youth. Part of that was seeing and rejecting the typical ex-communist's baby step into the far right, that took seeing that far from being polar opposites, they were never that far apart to begin with.
The real alternative, the actual source of any progress we have and are likely to make will be the view of reality that is found in the Prophetic tradition, whether in the Jewish, Christian, Islamic or other source that demands that human beings, that life, has a higher value than economics can conceive of. The very word "value" is a trap because what it takes to escape the evil inherent to transactional thinking can't think of people, of life in those terms. And there is nothing in human culture but religion that has ever practiced that on the few occasions it has become effective. There is no scientific, logical or legalistic expression of it. It is not embodied in the Constitution of the United States, though it was briefly touched on in the beginning sentence of the Declaration of Independence, before Jefferson and Franklin et al. realized that such a view of life would jeopardize their own wealth, but they had no other language with which to assert freedom. There is none and never will be any other way to think about it. There is certainly no other successful articulation of equality, you have to be able to imagine God saying what Jesus said to his sleepy Apostles and the Women lamenting his crucifixion to understand how radical it really is.
No comments:
Post a Comment