Friday, April 2, 2010

Virtue (Good) Friday: Ite missa est (9)

Related to the last Lenten reflection, there is "heresy" I call proportionality. I say heresy in scare quotes because I have no authority to declare what is or is not heretical. Although, for all I know, this one may already be on the books somewhere.

You can see hints of proportionality peeking through the cracks in Mel Gibson's Crucifixion movie. It's the notion that Jesus dies not just a horrible, shameful death, that He had to die the most horrible death ever because His suffering had to be proportional to all the sins of humanity. And thus we hear these occasional horror stories of children being told that they are adding to Christ's sufferings every time they sin.

Other people have died deaths as horrid as Christ's. Other people are dying that way even as you read this, and may He comfort them. What makes the Crucifixion the most important event in history is who died that death and why He chose to die it even though He was innocent. That it was a shameful death is important but the degree of horribleness is not the point.

Thinking it has to be is a lot like wanting to be at mass all the time. If I do either, I don't really believe in Jesus so much as have a superstition about Him.

To put another way, suppose we ask if someone else could die that death and have the same result. Could someone else suffer in a way that is proportionate to all the sins committed and thus redeem humanity? This sounds heretical and it is. But Jesus became man, is it any less heretical to imagine that his human body had to endure more pain and suffering than any other human in order to redeem us? He was fully human, therefore it follows that his body did not do things that other human bodies are potentially capable of.

And where does Jesus's life fit into this? If the degree of suffering matches the degree of sin and thereby redeems, did He have to do anything at all in his life other than die? (Again, watching the Mel Gibson movie, you might suspect that Gibson thinks that this death is the only part of Jesus's life that matters.) That would be to make him a scapegoat. A scapegoat exists solely to die—everything else it's persecutors believe about it is a projection of their guilt onto it.

But Jesus lived for the truth.

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