Jesus and the Law - A Jolting Message

The following contemplation under the heading ‘A Jolting Message’ by Richard Rohr, OFM  July 22, 2012 says it all! It should be shouted from every mountain top until its full significance or truth is understood by all.

I am doing a short study of the Letter to the Ephesians on this lovely Sunday morning, and have had time to absorb some of its amazing insights. Paul, or whoever wrote it, says that the exact meaning of the cross is that "Jesus destroyed in his own person the hostility" between groups (In fact, he repeats it twice in both 2:14 and 2:16) Jesus did not take sides with his Jewish religion against the pagans, but instead he did a most amazing thing, which we have yet to comprehend. The author says that he destroyed the hostility "THAT WAS CAUSED BY THE RULES AND DECREES OF THE LAW". In other words, the very identification of his group (or any group) with its own customs and practices is what justifies their hostility toward another group, and maintains their own superiority system--which is always violent in maintaining itself. Is this not the core historical problem that continues to justify most hostility to this day? My group versus your group thinking? We do it this way and you do it the wrong way? Think of the genocides of the last century, which were usually in Christian based cultures, to realize how we have missed the message. Ephesians says that Jesus "killed" or "destroyed" the very ground of this hostility by himself being killed "under the law" (with the blessing of both religion and state), and thus revealing the limitations, blindness, and often complicity in evil of what are usually nothing more than cultural customs passing for divine law. Our "sacred order" is usually maintained at someone else's expense. This is so much of a surprise that most of us still refuse to be surprised--and also disappointed in our capacity for missing the profound revelation from the cross of Jesus. Ephesians goes on to say that Jesus is trying to "create one single New Humanity" (2:15). We are still waiting for this new single humanity. It could still change history, and it eventually will, but probably we have to hit bottom first--and see how our sacralized beliefs and customs are themselves much of the problem.

Taking Jesus off the Cross

During the spring of 1992 a business trip brought me to Italy including the island of Sardinia. While in its capital Cagliari, I attended Mass, one Sunday morning in one of its ancient Churches. Entering the church l encountered an enormous glass case holding the life size wax figure of Jesus moments after he was taken down from the cross. The life like representation of the corpse revealed all the victim’s terrible bloodied wounds.  For me it represented the gruesome display of the evil some men continue to bring upon human beings.

This troubled focus was again highlighted this Holy Week by a national Catholic Newspaper.  Describing Christ’s horrible sacrifice its author reveals in step by step detail the torture and pain endured by Jesus. By the time one finishes the article the reader will be convinced that the writer took a certain sadistic delight in describing the horrible scene. It reminded me of a gawking spectator who has just come across a terrible car accident. To describe the death of Jesus in this way, without the more important focus on his resurrection can only be described as dark pornography. Perhaps the author was just trying to outdo Mel Gibson.

But there now appears to be a better and new explanation why the Church has remained so focussed on the death rather than then resurrection of Christ. And it has been only recently revealed by two extraordinary authors by the names of Brock and Parker. Here follows a brief excerpt and explanation of their research.

During their first millennium, Christians filled their sanctuaries with images of Christ as a living presence in a vibrant world. He appears as a shepherd, a teacher, a healer, an enthroned god; he is an infant, a youth, and a bearded elder. But he is never dead. When he appears with the cross, he stands in front of it, serene, resurrected. The world around him is ablaze with beauty. These are images of paradise – paradise of this world, permeated and blessed by the presence of God.

But once Jesus perished, dying was virtually all he seemed able to do.

When Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker began travelling the Mediterranean world in search of art depicting the dead, crucified Jesus, they discovered something that traditional histories of Christianity and Christian art had underplayed or sought to explain away; it took Jesus Christ a thousand years to die.

In their book Saving Paradise – ‘How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire’ (2008) authors Brock and Parker reconstruct the idea that salvation is paradise in this world and in this life, and the offer a bold new theology for saving paradise. They ground justice and peace for humanity in love for the earth and open a new future for Christianity through a theology of redemptive beauty.

Saving Paradise offers a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, from its first centuries to the present day, and asks how its early vision of beauty evolved into one of torture. In tracing the changes in society and theology that marked the medieval emergence of images of Christ crucified,’Saving Paradise’ exposes the imperial strategies embedded in theologies of redemptive violence and sheds new light on Christianity’s turn to holy war. It reveals how the New World, established through Christian conquest and colonization, is haunted by the loss of a spiritual understanding of paradise here and now. According to the authors the subversion of the Christian message began with the ninth-century Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne, who instituted the death penalty for conquered people who refused to convert. After Charlemagne, killing, suffering and dying in the name of Christ began to represent the highest honour for Christians, the book maintains, adding that the attitude remains an undercurrent in some countries’ foreign policy.

Is it not time, especially during Holy Week, to take Jesus off the cross and allow him to finally address our and the Church’s many wounds so that we may rediscover a world alive with Christ's wonder and beauty?