· Jeremiah 31:31-34
· Psalm 51:1-12 (10)
· Hebrews 5:5-10
· John 12:20-33
The word that caught my attention in these readings is "obedience." First of all, it brings up some existential questions. Did God know that Jesus would obey? If so, did Jesus have a choice? If he didn't, is obedience meaningful? If he did, and he really could have opted out, what would have happened if he had opted out? Would God have picked someone else? Would we be now worshipping God's second begotten son?
That doesn't seem like a constructive line of reasoning. So then I thought, if thinking about the meaning of Jesus's obedience is not a constructive line of reasoning, does that mean that obedience is not really the important thing?
I started thinking about that. And it occurred to me that Jesus's obedience is not superhuman. It does not require any divine powers. It doesn't even require any extraordinary qualities by human standards. People, ordinary people, obey orders unto death quite routinely. In fact, the more ordinary, the less exalted, the less superior, the more likely they are to let themselves die by order from an authority. Consider the common soldier, often known as "cannon fodder." Consider also the bottom-of-the-ladder industrial worker. In most companies, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution through today, industrial workers have consistently done very dangerous things, knowing they were very dangerous, simply because the guy who signs the cheques wants it done. In Canada, five workers a day die of unsafe conditions in the workplace. Routine, inglorious, uninspiring, self-sacrificial obedience. And we're supposed to be a civilised country, where people have rights.
In contrast, people who die for an idea make a much greater fuss of it than those who die for a paycheque. People with ideas might not enjoy the actual process of getting killed, but they're by and large quite happy to be dying for their idea, as opposed to, say, of a fall in the shower. Mohandas Gandhi, in particular, always wanted to get assassinated. Martin Luther King probably didn't, but wasn't afraid of it either. Che Guevara spent his life putting himself in the line of fire for his ideas, and his last words, famously, were "shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man". In other words, he knew that his ideas would go on. Mohamed Bouazizi would have lived and died in complete obscurity, had he not set himself on fire for an idea. The list of people who have been willing to die for an idea runs probably to hundreds of thousands at the very least, including heretics, political activists, freedom fighters, guerilleros, rebels, terrorists, soldiers, students.
So is Jesus's obedience really that special? If it's easy enough to die for an idea, how much easier is it to die with the knowledge that God has your back?
Is it because of the particular method of his death? I've always heard that "crucifixion is one of the most painful ways to die." Then one day I asked myself: is it, really? How do we know? Because we came up with the word "excruciating"?
I decided to look into it. Everywhere I look, it's just the same canned phrase that I've heard since childhood. "Crucifixion is one of the most painful ways to die." No data to back it up, no evidence, nothing. Then I found an article that says every wound in crucifixion is designed to produce maximum suffering; but as I read the article, what emerged is that the wounds are really incidental to the political process, rather than "designed" for anything, and that they don't in fact produce [SQG] "maximum suffering". In fact they don't really seem to produce very much suffering at all, by the standards of capital punishment.
The nails cut off the main nerves to the hands and feet. Right. Well, I work with amputees and people with spinal cord injuries, who have similar injuries to major nerves. Yes, they're in pain. No, it's not "maximum suffering."
Then, the naked back, all cut up from flogging, rubs against the rough wood of the cross. True; but then, they'd get numb from being in that position. I work in construction; you always have cuts and bruises and various aches and pains that hurt every time you move. You get on with it. Is it on par with having your back flogged? No. But you can live with open cuts and bruises. Flagellants did exactly that. It's not "maximum suffering" either.
The main feature of crucifixion is actually that you can't breathe, and slowly asphyxiate; unless you've been flogged enough that you bleed out, go into shock, and die of heart failure before you can asphyxiate. This is apparently what happened to Jesus. It's consistent with his being suddenly thirsty, altered consciousness, sudden and early death, and pooling of blood and fluid around the heart. And the good thing with asphyxia is, it reduces oxygen to the brain, which reduces consciousness, which reduces suffering.
But the main reason I really doubt crucifixion ranks very high in the "painful ways to execute a guy" list is that when you read world history, nobody uses crucifixion as a form of torture. There are all sorts of really grisly things people have done to each other for the specific purpose of inflicting pain, and you never see crucifixion listed as one of them. It's not used to extract confessions, or for terror. It's just a slow and labour-intensive way to kill someone. It's a useful political display, not an effective form of torture. By the way the Nazis did some research into what "the most painful way to die" would actually be, and while it's pointless to discuss it here, crucifixion wasn't it.
So where am I going with this? Well, we've always been taught to make a big deal of Jesus's acceptance of his death because it was such a horrible, horrible death, and he was so utterly innocent, poor darling, etc. But that's not true. Crucifixion was a slow death, rather painful but not inordinately so by the standards of what humans do to each other. The more relevant factor is that it was political. It was a deterrent, because it made a good billboard, and people could crowd around and taunt the condemned for a few hours. Hence it was used for thieves and runaway slaves, yes – because protecting property rights was important to the Roman social order. But it was also used extensively for rebels. Again, so they could be put on display and taunted, to impress on the public that rebels are objects of ridicule. It was very political. And in that respect, Jesus was not at all innocent. He was a political activist and a considerable threat to the Jewish political order. To the Romans, not at all, which is why Pilate acquitted him; but to the Jews, he was a dangerous radical. He was not at all innocent of that, and he knew it very well. As for his innocence from sin etc, I don't believe it either, but that's less relevant to his state of mind.
What I'm saying is, Jesus is not the Victorian-age doe-eyed blonde helpless victim of [SQG] "one of the most painful ways to die", as we're told to believe. He was an early Che Guevara. In fact, his appearance would have been much more like Che than as the Renaissance depicted him. And he knew he was going to get executed for political reasons, just as Che did. Che faced execution without begging for mercy, and he was only human, and an atheist at that. Certainly the son of God could die as well as Che. When we hear that Jesus asked not to go through with it, then submitted, it may be a good story, but there is one problem: he was allegedly alone in the garden at Gethsemane, and the disciples were allegedly asleep, when this prayer allegedly happened. And he never had a chance to talk to his disciples afterwards to tell them what happened.
So... Is that even true? Did Jesus really ask not to go through with it? Or was the whole thing added on after to teach us obedience to the Church?
Ultimately, my point is this: too many people spend too much time focused on Jesus's birth and death, and especially on the details most likely to be apocryphal. In reality the important parts are Jesus's life, and what he taught, and the reason, not the manner, of his death. That's what we ought to focus on.
Praise be to God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
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