(For recent readers, mainly.)
I refrained from posting anything about my churlish "Easter Problem" during the celebrations - because (apparently) these mean a great deal to many Christians.
But anyone who wants to understand my own reservations about this feast can take a look at some previous posts.
(My own main celebration this year was to re-read the 20th, and I believe final, chapter of the Fourth Gospel. During this reading I was strongly struck by the conversation between the risen Jesus and Mary Magdalene - and I had the conviction that the original meaning of this exchange was that Mary would ascend to Heaven with Jesus, and at the same time as Jesus.)
Yet another Easter irritation I haven't previously mentioned; is the way that I was taught as a child (and this is still, apparently, a frequent theme - even theologically) that Jesus's sufferings during his last days were the greatest any human has experienced; and indeed of a qualitatively greater scale and significance than any other being has experienced.
This idea has often had a strong popular appeal - I think especially among women.
Even as an infant-school-kid, but far more so now; this emphasis on Jesus's extremity of suffering seems to me a spectacular misunderstanding, a gross misplacement of effort and belief.
For a start, the assertion is un-proveable because we can neither know objectively nor measure the degree of suffering. And this is a fact, despite that the geopolitical system of the entire modern world is rooted in "utilitarian" values that assume suffering (and also "happiness") can be quantified.
Secondly; although the degree of Jesus's suffering seemed very bad indeed; even as a child, it seemed easy to imagine worse - especially in duration; and I was also able to imagine that some people (perhaps many people) had actually endured worse suffering.
Thirdly, Jesus's suffering seemed irrelevant to me-here-now.
I am nowadays aware of various theological explanations as to an alleged purpose for the extremity of Jesus's suffering, and its personal and immediate relevance; but as a child nobody seemed to know these explanations, or else they were unwilling or unable to provide a coherent explanation for how Jesus's suffering "worked" as a way of doing something for me. At any rate, the impression I got was of a bizarre insistence on Jesus's sufferings for no apparent reason*.
It is only relatively recently, and especially since my 2018 intensive focus on the Fourth Gospel - that I have begun to see this as more than a mistake of emphasis; and instead evidence of a fundamental error concerning "what Christianity really is" - or, more accurately, "what Jesus did for us" - and how he did it.
*Another such bizarre insistence from early childhood, was related to "rolling away the stone" from the tomb of Jesus. I got the impression the point of this was that moving the stone must have required superhuman strength, therefore proving divine intervention. It was not long before I began to wonder how the stone had been moved to block the tomb in the first place - that this must have been done by ordinary Romans - and this seemed to me to disprove the evidence for resurrection. I just mention this as evidence of how children's minds work, and the problem of counter-productive attempts at Christian teaching in a world where the church does Not have a monopoly, and where not many people get informed beyond a primary school level of "Bible stories".
3 comments:
I think one consideration that has been significant in the past is the injustice of the suffering of an innocent man. For example the scene in That Hideous Strength where Mark Studdock refuses to step on a crucifix because he doesn't want to affiliate with the forces that would cause the death of an innocent man.
Come to think of it, that's a fairly thought-provoking scene 80 years after it was written. Showing how and why a modern and even atheistic man could come to choose not to affiliate with what appears to him to be an all-powerful system.
@NLR - To be clear, I was talking of my response as a child.
I agree that there is a spontaneous sense of outrage at "the injustice of the suffering of an innocent man" - which is often exploited by news media and movies.
On the other hand, this is easily flipped by portraying the man as actually guilty of something that society (at some particular point) considers terrible - and then the suffering may be spitefully/sadistically enjoyed under guise of justice - and self-identified Christians are as prone to this as anyone, it seems.
In other words, all this seems to be at the level of psychology rather than describing an event that changed reality.
Mormon doctrine has it that the extremity of suffering was related to the atonement - (approximately) that Jesus experienced the ill effects of all sins (past, present, future) and thereby atoned for them. But this kind of argument strikes me as a non sequitur. Sin isn't that kind of thing that could be affected thus.
And anyway, to discuss sin as negative transgressions is itself a kind of inversion of the reality that these are simply a way of expressing a lack of complete harmony with God's aims and methods - our inability to live always by love.
These aspects have always been a problem in Christianity, but in the past the fuzzy edged and groupish nature of human consciousness ameliorated them. Nowadays, the simply clarity of our mundane thinking starkly reveals such deficiencies.
We need simple, clear explanations - other kinds simply don't explain.
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