Archive for April, 2011

Miscellaneous Musings: On Crosses

Posted on April 24, 2011. Filed under: Miscellaneous Musings |

Happy Easter, everybody (who celebrates it)! Note how I refrained from saying “hoppy.” See guys? It is possible to well wish your fellow human beings on Easter Sunday without making that pun. I’m sorry. I’m in a bad mood today because somebody apparently wanted me awake so that she could search for Easter eggs or something like that. Now, I’m not a huge fan of being awake at 10:30 in the morning, but even I have to admit that it is not unreasonable to be awake at that time on Easter morning. No, where we get into problem territory is how the eight-year old woke me up. Let me say, for the record: If anyone – ever again – wakes me up by pulling on my ear, I will end you. My response to this situation was to make the pain stop, which resulted in me going from blissful sleep to very nearly clawing my sister’s face in the span of about an eighth of a second. (The very nearly part only happened because my fingernails didn’t make contact. My hand did.) I feel that I could have absolutely ensured that this technique would never be used on me again if I actually had gotten a piece of her, but then we would have spent the morning with recriminations and stuff and I would have been the bad guy, so I guess things worked out as well as they were going to.

But today is the day that Zombie Jesus rose after dying for your sins (Gandalf died for my sins,) so probably by sometime later in the day I will no longer want to throttle the precious flower.

Sacrifice. Right. Just a reminder that this isn’t intended to offend and that this essay assumes a religious view wherein the Easter story of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (or an approximation thereof) is acceptable at face value.

When I was growing up, all of the crosses in my church were plain wooden crosses. Every Sunday I would sit in the red upholstered uncomfortable pews and try to look like I was actually watching the sermon while surreptitiously reading. And when I finished my book I would spend what seemed like hours (but in retrospect was probably only about ten minutes) staring at the gigantic wooden cross behind the pulpit.

I learned much later in life that there is a big debate in Christianity over the appropriateness of using the cross as a religious symbol. The basic argument goes something along the lines of  “Why would we use the instrument of our God’s death as a religious symbol?” And for the Catholics out there, “Why would we put our God’s impaled corpse on our religious symbol?” There is also a faction that argues that the cross is a graven image and therefore sacrilege anyway, so Christians shouldn’t be using crosses for that reason, let alone all the “murdered by Romans” reasons. This message board thread (spelling mistakes aside) succinctly sums it up: “…If my loved one was killed by a gun, would I be wearing a gun to symbolize my loved one’s death?”

I have a couple of problems with these lines of reasoning.

First, let us address graven images. You can look up whichever part of the Bible you want on the subject (there is a convenient list here), but the commands regarding the subject of graven images generally fall into one of three categories: 1) Don’t make any images of God, Heaven, or Hell. 2) Don’t make any images of God, Heaven, Hell, or any other God so you can worship images instead of God. 3) Don’t make any images of Creation. Period.

In response to 1, people imagine God. They may imagine God as an old white guy with a beard and white robes or as a shiny ball of light or as a woman who looks like Alanis Morisette, but they do have a mental image of God. And it is that image that they worship. Graven images help concretize the idea of God. Maybe someday people will be able to abstract like that, but at this point graven images are a necessary sacrilege. I think that the message Exodus was driving for was 2 – don’t worship graven images.

2 is pretty easy to avoid. So long as we recognize that our God is not a tiny cross hanging on our neck and worship that cross, we’re good.

3 is just plain stupid. Good luck communicating.

Moving on from graven images, I can now address stuff that isn’t nitpicking. The big, major problem I have with this line of reasoning is that it shows that the person making the argument is completely missing the whole entire point of the crucifixion. “If my loved one was killed by a gun…” is a completely inappropriate analogy. That idea assumes Christ as a passive victim to his crucifixion. This type of argument is made to show that humans are sinful creatures that killed their own God because of their wickedness. This is not what the Easter story means. The Easter story is about love. It is about a God who so loved his people that he willfully and deliberately sacrificed himself to save them. Jesus was not a victim. He was a martyr. A far more apt analogy would be “If your loved one self-immolated him or herself to make a political statement about religious repression or political freedom, would you use fire as a symbol of their sacrifice?”

Christ could have jumped down off the cross any damn time he wanted. But he didn’t. He walked to the garden knowing what would happen; he suffered the slings and arrows and whips of fortune and Roman soldiers even though he could have destroyed them without a thought.

Why do I use a cross to symbolize my faith? Because to me the cross is not a symbol of murder. It is a symbol of a single, simple great act of love. It is a symbol of sacrifice and faith that we can be better than we think. It is a covenant between Creator and Creation.

I can’t think of a better symbol than that.

Miscellaneous Musings: In Defense of Judas Iscariot

Posted on April 22, 2011. Filed under: Miscellaneous Musings |

Today’s post is kind of on the religious side. For those of you who aren’t Christians, I would like to inform you that what I have faith in changes on a day to day basis and that today, on Good Friday (the day Jesus was crucified), I’m choosing to believe the story told in Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. Or an approximation thereof, since the four of them can’t seem to agree on the details. I guess what I’m saying here is that this post is written under the assumption that God and Jesus are my personal saviors and that I am, underneath it all, at heart basically a good person. It is highly likely that by Tuesday I will believe that God is everything and of everything. Depending on how Tuesday goes I might believe something completely different by Wednesday. The only constant belief I have had for the past two years boils down to something along the lines of “I have faith. Sometimes things just happen. My Creator loves me, and asks only that I love my fellow man.” I tell you this not to apologize if my beliefs offend you, but to let you know what you’re about to read.

Yesterday I was perusing CNN’s website because I like making fun of the banality of the vast majority of the Twitter responses and Facebook posts things they report when I stumbled upon this article entitled “My Take: Is Judas in heaven or hell? God only knows.” The article, written by Craig Gross, is interesting – Gross talks about Judas and how despite traveling with Jesus for three years and witnessing all the miracles that the other eleven apostles witnessed he still betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver. However, two things really annoyed me about this article.

First, at the end of the article Gross shuts down the discussion. His answer to the question is “maybe as we approach Easter, we can be reminded that for Christians, the cross and the grave should silence all of these debates…And I believe that where you end up, God only knows.” His answer is, essentially, “I don’t want to say one way or the other, so I will instead give you the vague impression that you should judge not lest ye be judged.” I feel that if you are going to take the time and space to write a think piece on whether or not Judas is enjoying quality time with the Morningstar, you should not then proceed to waffle on the issue.

What I really, really have a problem with though, is his statement that “without a doubt, Judas, the biblical disciple of Jesus, is considered the greatest sinner of all time because of what he did to Jesus.” Now, it is probably true that a lot of people believe that Judas is the greatest sinner of all time. Gross does say that Judas made a mistake and that the whole thing was preordained, but never does he disabuse his audience of the notion that this statement is basically true.

Let’s put things in perspective. Hitler and the Third Reich systematically tortured and murdered twelve million people in some of the most horrific ways possible. The war they instigated killed about 70 million more. Josef Stalin’s regime killed more people than the Holocaust, again with some horrific torture and violent murder thrown in for kicks. Here is a list of people who murdered those who had done them no harm. Here is a list of genocides. Today, as we speak, a single man has ordered the murder of thousands of his citizens to keep himself in power. Every single day humans murder, torture, rape, pillage, plunder, and blaspheme in the name of God and money and falsehood.

And we think that a man who, in concordance with the laws of the day, turned in a wanted criminal whose death was not only prophesied but necessary in God’s plan, is “the greatest sinner of all time.” Yeah. Question – Judas betrayed Jesus. A bunch of Roman soldiers tortured him. Who is worse – the betrayer of God or the torturer of God? And is Judas any better than Peter? They committed the same crime, but with different consequences. Peter denied Jesus three times; Judas handed Him over to the Romans once.

I’m not going to waffle here. Judas is in Heaven. Because the man that was crucified died for him just as much  as he died for the murderers and soldiers and rapists  and lovers and lepers and little children and kings and beggars and sinners and saints and me.

That is the God that Judas betrayed, and that is the God that teaches forgiveness.

Peace be with you.