The Passion of Christ (Part 12)

NOTE: This is the last post of this series. To start at the beginning of the Passion of Christ series, click, here.

Jesus Appears to His Friends
By Doug Blanchard

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Not Metaphor, Not Guilty Revision
. . . But Something Else

An excerpt from Paula Fredriksen’s article
“What You See Is What You Get:
Context and Content in Current Research on the Historical Jesus”
(Theology Today, Vol 52, N0. 1, April1995)

I honor [scholar John Dominic Crossan’s] kind of effort [in works such as Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography]. It takes a stand for divine consistency and against “historical malfeasance” (Crossan’s excellent phrase). Treating supernatural claims as historical data is cheating, unless we are willing to honor all supernatural claims as historical. So Crossan translates these claims into more rational terms: metaphor, guilty revision. Whether such translations are persuasive is another issue. Jesus’ healing miracles and exorcisms can, of course, be explained in other ways, such as by an appeal to psychosomatic healing, auto-suggestion, and other such phenomena we are familiar with today. I incline to see Jesus as that kind of healer, rather than as someone who regards disease as a social metaphor but changes nothing. For one thing, I doubt many afflicted peasants would have flocked to him for a cure and returned home satisfied with a hug.

But the resurrection is something else. The movement stands or falls with it, and I cannot imagine so many people in the first generation changing their lives so radically without taking them at their word. They were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead. If they just thought that he had died but his truth/went marching on, they could have said that. But they didn’t; they spoke of resurrection. Please read me correctly: I am not saying that Jesus really rose from the dead because his disciples said that he did. I am saying that they really thought he had.

Crossan’s dogs [consuming the corpse of Jesus] account for the empty tomb. It’s a gripping, horrifying, and powerful image. The resurrection stories as a kind of creative aphasia, however, I find much less compelling. “Those who had originally experienced divine power through his vision and his example continued to do so after his death. . . . They talked eventually not just of continued affection . . . but of resurrection. They tried to express what they meant by telling” stories such as the supper at Emmaus. Its “symbolism is obvious, as is the metaphoric condensation of the first years of Christian thought and practice into one parabolic afternoon.” Incapable, for whatever reasons, of saying simply “Jesus died, but I still believe and live according to what he died for,” the early community constructed narrative metaphors whose import was exclusively existential, not historical. “Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens.” (Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 197).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Triumph of Love: An Easter Reflection
Jesus Lives!
He is Risen! (Easter 2007)
Light of Christ (Easter 2008)
The Passion of Christ (Part 1) - Jesus Enters the City
The Passion of Christ (Part 2) - Jesus Drives Out the Money Changers
The Passion of Christ (Part 3) - Last Supper
The Passion of Christ (Part 4) - Jesus Prays Alone
The Passion of Christ (Part 5) - Jesus Before the People
The Passion of Christ (Part 6) - Jesus Before the Soldiers
The Passion of Christ (Part 7) - Jesus Goes to His Execution
The Passion of Christ (Part 8) - Jesus is Nailed the Cross
The Passion of Christ (Part 9) - Jesus Dies
The Passion of Christ (Part 10) - Jesus Among the Dead
The Passion of Christ (Part 11) - Jesus Appears to Mary

Image 1: “Jesus Appears to His Friends” – Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 2: “Jesus Appears at Emmaus” – Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 11)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus Appears to Mary
By Doug Blanchard

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“You Will See Him”

An excerpt from The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach
About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem
by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan
(Harper San Francisco, 2006, p. 205)

Together, the appearance stories in the gospels make explicit what is promised in Mark: “You will see him.” They underline the parabolic meaning of Mark’s story of the empty tomb: Jesus is not among the dead, but among the living. Indeed, this is one of the central affirmations of Easter: Jesus lives. He is a figure of the present, not simply the past. The presence his followers had known in Jesus before his crucifixion continued to be experienced and to operate after it.

Jesus lives. He continues to be experienced after his death, though in a radically new way. He is no longer . . . confined to time and space, but [is] a reality who can enter locked rooms, journey with followers without being recognized, be experienced in both Galilee and Jerusalem, vanish in the moment of recognition, and abide with his followers always, “to the end of the age.”


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 12)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Jesus Lives!
The Triumph of Love: An Easter Reflection
Mary of Magdala
He is Risen! (Easter 2007)
Light of Christ (Easter 2008)
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
The Passion of Christ (Part 3)
The Passion of Christ (Part 4)
The Passion of Christ (Part 5)
The Passion of Christ (Part 6)
The Passion of Christ (Part 7)
The Passion of Christ (Part 8)
The Passion of Christ (Part 9)
The Passion of Christ (Part 10)

Image: “Jesus Appears to Mary” – Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 10)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus Among the Dead
By Doug Blanchard

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No Splendor, No Glory

An excerpt from Putting Away Childish Things
by Uta Ranke-Heinemann
(English translation: New York: HarperCollins, 1994)

Jesus was executed with two others, the so-called robbers, who presumably were executed, like Jesus, for political reasons. Hence, we may assume, first, that all three were condemned in one and the same trial, and that, second, all three were buried in the same mass grave.

It is characteristic that according to all four Gospels, Jesus was buried neither by his family nor by his disciples (though in the Synoptics a few women witness his burial: Matt. 27:61; Mark 15:47; Luke 23:55). Instead, he was buried by a third party, a point that the description of the burial still clearly remembers. But it wasn’t two rich and pious men [Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus] who buried him – why should his family and his friends have stayed away from [such a] burial? It was the Romans who buried him in a mass grave. And with the large number of the graves, which were immediately flattened, no one could say anymore where it was.

There was no splendor and glory hovering over Jesus’ burial. There were no hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes. After the most wretched and ignominious of all deaths, it was presumably the most miserable and wretched of all burials.


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 11)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
A Wretched Death, a Wretched Burial
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
The Passion of Christ (Part 3)
The Passion of Christ (Part 4)
The Passion of Christ (Part 5)
The Passion of Christ (Part 6)
The Passion of Christ (Part 7)
The Passion of Christ (Part 8)
The Passion of Christ (Part 9)

Image: “Jesus Among the Dead” – Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 9)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus Dies
By Doug Blanchard

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Jesus’ Passion

An excerpt from The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach
About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem
by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan
(Harper San Francisco, 2006, p. 161)

Was Jesus’ death the will of God? No. It is never the will of God that a righteous man be crucified. Did it have to happen? It might have turned out differently. . . . But it did happen this way. And like the storyteller of Genesis, early Christian storytellers looking back on what did happen ascribe providential meanings to Good Friday. But this does not mean Good Friday had to happen.

But for another reason the execution of Jesus was virtually inevitable. Not because of divine necessity, but because of human inevitability - this is what domination systems [like the Roman empire] did to people who publicly and vigorously challenged them. It happened often in the ancient world. It has happened to countless people throughout history.

. . . But Jesus was not simply an unfortunate victim of a domination system’s brutality. He was also a protagonist filled with passion. His passion, his message, was about the kingdom of God. . . . [H]e challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All of this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the kingdom of God, God and God’s passion for justice.

Jesus’ passion got him killed. To put this meaning of passion and a narrower meaning of passion into a single sentence: Jesus’ passion for the kingdom of God led to what is often called his passion, namely, his suffering and death. But to restrict Jesus’ passion to his suffering and death is to ignore the passion that brought him to Jerusalem. To think of Jesus’ passion as simply what happened on Good Friday is to separate his death from the passion that animated his life.


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 10)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
The Passion of Christ (Part 3)
The Passion of Christ (Part 4)
The Passion of Christ (Part 5)
The Passion of Christ (Part 6)
The Passion of Christ (Part 7)
The Passion of Christ (Part 8)

Image: “Jesus Dies” – Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 8)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus is Nailed to the Cross
By Doug Blanchard

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Heart of Darkness

An excerpt from Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
by John Dominic Crossan
(Harper San Francisco, 1994, pp. 126-127)

What exactly made crucifixion so terrible? The three supreme Roman penalties were the cross, fire, and the beasts. What made them supreme was not just their inhuman cruelty or their public dishonor, but the fact that there might be nothing left to bury at the end. That bodily destruction was involved in being cast into the fire or thrown to the beasts is obvious enough. But what we often forget about crucifixion is the carrion crow and scavenger dog who respectively croak above and growl below the dead or dying body.

Martin Hengel . . . reminds us of that terrible reality. His book [Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross], which is a catalog of the writings of Greco-Roman authors on the subject of crucifixion, quotes, for example, “fastened [and] nailed . . . [as] evil food for birds of prey and grim pickings for dogs” . . .

Roman crucifixion was state terrorism . . . its function was to deter resistance or revolt, especially among the lower classes; and . . . the body was usually left on the cross to be consumed eventually by the wild beasts. No wonder we have found only one body [the Giv’at ha-Mivtar skeleton of Yehochanan*] from all those thousands crucified around Jerusalem in that single century. Remember the dogs. And if you seek the heart of darkness, follow the dogs.


* In Excavating Jesus, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed note the following about the only physical evidence of crucifixion ever discovered:

In June 1968 Vassilios Tzaferis of the Israel Antiquities Authority excavated some burial caves northeast of Jerusalem, at a place called Givat Hamivtar. Within the necropolis, a first-century C.E. rock-hewn family tomb with five ossuaries was discovered, one of which contained the bones of two men and a young child. The right heel bone of one of the men, 5 feet, 5 inches tall and in his mid-twenties, had been pierced by a 4 ½-inch nail. A small wooden board had been nailed to the outside of his heel to prevent him from tearing his leg off the nail's small head. But the nail had bent as it was hammered into the hard olive-wood upright of the cross and could not be easily removed after his death, so it and wooden board were still attached to his body when taken off the cross. His arms had been tied, not nailed, to the crossbar and his legs were not broken. Contrary to common practice, his body was allowed off the cross for proper family burial. The ossuary contained the name of the deceased, Yehochanan (Hebrew and Aramaic for John), the Crucified Man.

NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 9)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
The Passion of Christ (Part 3)
The Passion of Christ (Part 4)
The Passion of Christ (Part 5)
The Passion of Christ (Part 6)
The Passion of Christ (Part 7)

Image 1: “Jesus is Nailed to the Cross” – Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 2: The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology.

The Passion of Christ (Part 7)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus Goes to His Execution
By Doug Blanchard

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The Economic Way of the Cross
Washington, DC – April 10, 2000

In April 2000 I traveled from the Twin Cities to Washington, D.C. to participate in a range of rallies, demonstrations, and teach-ins aimed at protesting the structure and policies of both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – two organizations that, along with the World Trade Organization (WTO), are the key architects of the corporate global economy.

Collectively, the various events in Washington, D.C. of April 2000 were termed A16 – a reference to April 16, the main day of protest. A16 brought 15,000 people onto the streets of the capital and, like the protests in Seattle against the WTO in November 1999, united a range of people – environmentalists, union members, students, religious people, peace activists, and individuals representing organizations from those countries most devastated by the unjust policies of the World Bank and IMF.

By far the most powerful event I was part of was the “Economic Way of the Cross” on Monday, April 10, 2000. Organized by the Religious Working Group on the World Bank and IMF, a coalition of over forty religious organizations, the Economic Way of the Cross was a prayerful procession through the streets of downtown Washington, D.C. The event sought to draw attention to the policies and practices of various corporate and governmental institutions that devastate the lives of millions of people throughout the world. The Christian underpinnings of the event reflect the theological understanding of Christ being continually crucified while ever people and other aspects of creation experience suffering and death as a result of oppressive structures of power.

“The Economic Way of the Cross invites people of faith to relate prayerfully the Passion of Jesus Christ to the suffering of women, men and children throughout the world today,” noted key organizer Anne Pettifor. “Often, this suffering is the result of unjust economic relationships, what we call social, or structural sin.”









NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 8)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
• The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
• The Passion of Christ (Part 3)
• The Passion of Christ (Part 4)
• The Passion of Christ (Part 5)
• The Passion of Christ (Part 6)
• Fasting, Praying, and Walking for Immigration Reform

Image 1: “Jesus Goes to His Execution” – Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Images 2-5: Michael Bayly. (From Part 3 of Gallery 3 of the online photographic exhibit Faces of Resistance: Images and Stories of Progressive Activism at the Turn of the Millennium - 1997-2006.)

The Passion of Christ (Part 6)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus Before the Soldiers
By Doug Blanchard

Writes biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan:

My best historical reconstruction of what actually happened is that Jesus was arrested during the Passover festival and those closet to him fled for their own safety. I do not presume at all any high-level consultations between Caiaphas or Pilate about or with Jesus. They would no doubt have agreed before such a festival that fast and immediate action was to be taken against any disturbance and that some examples by crucifixion might be especially useful at the start. I doubt very much if Jewish police and Roman soldiery needed to go too far up the chain of command in handling a Galilean peasant like Jesus. It is hard for us to bring our imagination down low enough to see the casual brutality with which he was probably taken and executed.

- John Dominic Crossan
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
(Harper San Francisco, 1994, p.152.)

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Jesus, Our Tortured Brother Today
By Sr. Dianna Ortiz, OSU

Jesus, our Tortured Brother,
In this world, so many are
forced to walk your path today —
the suffering and pain, the
humiliation, sense of betrayal
and abandonment,
for those with power, the
Romans of today, continue to
condemn others to modern crosses.

You said that what was done to the least of these
was done to you and so each day,
You are tortured anew.

Jesus, our Guardian of the Wounded and Tortured,
Bid us to look into the secret prisons — the unmarked
graves — the hearts and minds of the torture survivors,
Bid us to wipe the tears of the families of those whose
decapitated bodies were cast into the open sea,
Bid us to embrace the open wounds of the tortured.

Jesus, Guiding Spirit,
Teach us to be in solidarity with those who hang
from these crosses,
Call out to those who torture,
“Know the evil you have done and repent.”
Call out to the rest of us, “What meaning does love have
if you allow torture to continue unopposed?”

In the name of all the tortured of the world,
give us the strength, give us the courage,
give us the will to bring this horror to an end,
in the name of love, justice,
and the God of us all.

Amen.

Sister Dianna Ortiz is a U.S Roman Catholic nun of the Ursuline order. While serving as a missionary in Guatemala in 1989, she was abducted by U.S.-backed right-wing forces and brutally tortured. Sister Ortiz chronicled her experience and recovery in her book (co-written with Patricia Davis) The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. (For Salon.com's review, click here.)

In early 1995 Sister Ortiz won $5 million in a U.S. civil court case against the former Minister of Defense of Guatemala — General Héctor Gramajo. In its ruling, the judiciary stated that “[Gramajo-Morales]...was aware of and supported widespread acts of brutality committed under his command resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. . . .” and further noted that Gramajo-Morales “devised . . . [and] directed . . . [an] indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians.” Five years after bringing her U.S. Civil Suit against Gramajo-Morales, Sister Ortiz won a judgment against the State of Guatemala through the Inter American Court of Human Rights where she specified that Gen. Gramajo “made several [official] statements to the effect that Sister Ortiz’s injuries did not occur or were self-inflicted.”

Sister Ortiz is founder of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), the only organization in the United States founded by and for survivors of torture. TASSC’s current policy campaign is dedicated to repealing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, what the survivors of torture at TASSC call the US Torture Law.


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 7)


Recommended Off-site Link:
The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means - Mark Danner (New York Times, April 30, 2009).

Image 1: “Jesus Before the Soldiers” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 2: “Jesus is Beaten” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 5)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus Before the People
By Doug Blanchard

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Homosexual
By Francis Webb

To watch may be deadly. There is no judgment, compulsion,
and the object becomes ourselves. That is the terror:
we have simply ceased, are not dead, and have been
and are; only movement – our movement – is relegated,
only thought, being – our thought, being – are given
over; and pray God it be simply given.
So, at this man’s ending, which is all a watching,
let us disentangle the disgust and indifference,
be all a thin hurried magnanimity:
for that is movement, our movement. Let us study
popular magazines, digests, psychoanalysts:
for that is thought, being, our thought, our being.

I shall only watch. He is born, seized by joy,
I shall not speak of that joy, seeing it only
as the lighted house, the security, the Beginning.
Unselfconscious as the loveliest of flowers
he grows – and here we enter: the house stands yet,
but the joists whinge under our footsteps. Now the God,
the Beginning, the joy, give way to boots and footmarks.
Pale glass faces contorted in hate or merriment
embody him; and words and arbitrary laws.
He is embodied, he weeps – and all mankind,
which is the face, the glass even, weeps with him.

The first window broken. Something nameless as yet
resists embodiment. Something, the perennial rebel.
Will not rest. And this, his greatest element,
becomes his terror, because of the footsteps, us.
I shall not consider sin beginning, our sin,
the images, furtive actions. All is a secret
but to us all is known as on the day of our birth.
He will differ, must differ among all the pale glass faces,
the single face contorted in hate or merriment.

Comes the day when his mother realizes all.
Few questions, and a chaos of silence. Her thin eyes
are emptied. Doors rattle in the house,
foundations stagger. The Beginning becomes us;
and he is mulcted of words, remain to him only
the words of sin, escape, which is becoming all of life.
Easier the talk with his father, rowdy, brief
thank God, and only the language of the gutter,
he watches the moth pondering the gaslight, love-death,
offers a wager as to her love or death or both.
His father stops speaking, fingers some papers on the desk.

And now he is here. We had him conveyed to this place
because our pale glass faces contorted in hate or merriment
left only sin as flesh, the concrete, the demanded:
he does not speak or hear – perhaps the pox.
But all his compatriots in sin or in other illness
are flesh, the demanded, silent, watching, not hearing:
it is all he ever sought. Again I am tempted, with the Great,
to see in ugliness and agony a way to God:
worse, I am tempted to say he has found God
because we cannot contort our faces in merriment,
and we are one of the Twelve Tribes – he is our king.
He has dictated silence, a kind of peace
to all within these four unambiguous walls,
almost I can say with no answering scuffle of rejection,
he is loving us now, he is loving all.

In his 2000 book Who Is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in Restoring Hope to the Church, the late Fr. Ted Kennedy declared Francis Webb’s poem “Homosexual” a classic work of Australian literature.

It’s a poem, says Kennedy, that “carries the pain and the poignancy” of a Catholic Australian boy becoming aware of his homosexuality and thus confronting not only gibes and jests but the prospect of violence and death. Yet he chooses to respond to such “ugliness and agony” in a way that serves as a path to God. The ugly ignorance and hatefulness heaped upon him by those who scorn and reject him does not make him hateful – but rather loving of all.

It was a path chosen and modeled by the Spirit-infused Jesus when he stood “before the people” - before those individuals and groups whose interests were challenged and threatened by his life and message of radical inclusion, and who, as a result, wanted to see Jesus dead. It doesn’t end there, of course, as it is clear to all who are open to the Spirit present and active in our world, that this path continues to be chosen and modeled today whenever, for example, gay people stand in awareness and conviction of their loving lives and relationships in the face of the myriad forms of discrimination, hostility, and abuse that are meted out by both church and society.


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 6)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
The Passion of Christ (Part 3)
The Passion of Christ (Part 4)
Why Jesus is My Man
Blaming the Jews, Canonizing Pilate

Image: “Jesus Before the People” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 4)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Jesus Prayers Alone
By Doug Blanchard

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Fear and Fragility

An excerpt from Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ
by Andrew Harvey (Tarcher/Putnam, 1998, pp. 82-83)

The time had come [for Jesus] to risk everything and sacrifice everything for [his vision of] the Kingdom; to demonstrate in his own being and action the total fearlessness and boundless courage that divine love demanded of anyone who wanted to be an instrument of justice and mercy, to reveal the full majesty of that divine identity that could suffer and triumph over even the most terrible of ordeals

And so, I believe, Jesus willingly and consciously precipitated the events that led to his capture, trial, and crucifixion. Whether or not he knew, in any human sense of “knowing,” that his descent into the ultimate depths of humiliation and torment would utterly remake his being and the whole future of humanity we can never be sure; the account of the Gospels of the crucifixion and resurrection were written after the fact, and with certain clarities projected backwards.

I believe that Jesus did not know; that he risked his entire being in a final terrible adventure whose end was not certain. This better explains, I believe, his fear and fragility in the Garden of Gethsemane and the moments of doubt on the cross. He did not “know”; he loved and trusted and surrendered and went on loving and trusting and surrendering, more and more deeply, more and more abandonedly, as the storms of suffering that buffeted him became more and more atrocious. Everything that he had discovered and lived, every truth that he had taught, every passion for a new world that had awoken in him now had to coalesce into one overwhelming fire of love, which would test death itself and beat against the doors of that law of nature that had up to then kept heaven and earth separate, the living and the dead in their separate rooms.


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 5)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
The Passion of Christ (Part 3)
Why Jesus is My Man

Image 1: “Jesus Prays Alone” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 2: “Jesus is Arrested” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 3: Jesus Before the Priests - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 3)

To start at the beginning of this series, click, here.

Last Supper
By Doug Blanchard

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Open Commensality

In his book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan discusses the “open commensality” of Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God. The starting point for this discussion is a key parable that Jesus tells. As Crossan notes, this particular parable is “found in the Q Gospel, but with widely divergent versions in Matthew 22:1-13 and Luke 14:15-24. It is also found in the Gospel of Thomas 64.”

Crossan explains how this parable “tells the story of a person who gives a presumably unannounced feast, sends a servant to invite friends, but finds by late day that each has a quite valid reason and very politely expressed excuse. The result is a dinner ready and a room empty. The host replaces the absent guests with anyone off the streets.”

The end result of such a gathering? Well, as Crossan observes:

If one actually brought in anyone off the street, one could, in such a situation, have classes, sexes, and ranks all mixed up together. Anyone could be reclining next to anyone else, female next to male, free next to slave, socially high next to socially low, and ritually pure next to ritually impure. And a short detour through the cross-cultural anthropology of food and eating underlines what a societal nightmare that would be. . . . [And remember, meals in Jesus’ time were] not just [events] of eating together, of simple table fellowship, but what anthropologists call “commensality” – from “mensa,” the Latin word for “table.” It means the rules of tabling and eating as miniature models for the rules of association and socialization. It means table fellowship as a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and political differentiation.

What Jesus’ parable advocates, therefore, is an open commensality, an eating together without using table as a miniature map of society’s vertical discriminations and lateral separations. The social challenge of such equal and egalitarian commensality is the parable’s most fundamental danger and most radical threat. It is only a story, of course, but it is one that focuses its egalitarian challenge on society’s miniature mirror, the table, as the place where bodies meet to eat.

Since, moreover, Jesus lived out his own parable, the almost predictable counter-accusation to such open commensality would be immediate: Jesus is a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners. He makes, in other words, no appropriate distinctions and discriminations. And since women were present, especially unmarried women, the accusation would be that Jesus eats with whores, the standard epithet of denigration for any female outside appropriate male control. All of those terms – tax collectors, sinners, whores – are in this case derogatory terms for those with whom, in the opinion of the name callers, open and free association should be avoided.

And what of the “Last Supper”? Was this too an embodiment of Jesus’ radical open commensality? Here’s what Crossen says:

Did Jesus, before his death, institute a new Passover meal in which his martyrdom with its separation of body and blood was symbolized by the meal with its separation of bread and wine? On the one hand, Paul certainly knows about such an institution in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25. But, on the hand, John 13-17 has a last supper with Jesus and his disciples that is neither the Passover meal nor any type of institutionalized symbolic commemoration of his death. Neither the Gospel of Thomas nor the Q Gospel exhibits any awareness of a Last Supper tradition. Finally, the case of Didache 9-10 is especially significant. It describes a communal and ritual eating together, from the second half of the first century, with absolutely no hint of Passover meal, Last Supper, or passion symbolism built into its origins or development. I cannot believe that those specific Christians knew all about those elements and yet studiously avoided them. I can only presume that those elements were not there for everyone from the beginning – that is, from solemn, formal, and final institution by Jesus himself.

What Jesus created and left behind was the tradition of open commensality seen so often earlier, and what happened was that, after his death, certain Christian groups created the Last Supper as a ritual that combined that commensality from his life with a commemoration of his death. It spread to other Christian groups only slowly. It cannot be used as a historical event to explain anything about Jesus’ own death.

NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 4)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The Passion of Christ (Part 2)
Trusting God’s Generous Invitation
Compassion, Christian Community, and Homosexuality

Image: “Last Supper” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 2)

For The Passion of Christ (Part 1), click here.

This week is all about passion, about caring so much for something or someone you will do anything for it or them. The joys of passion are powerful, the depths of passion endless. It is intense, it is emotional, it will involve sacrifice, it will include suffering. It will hurt to love this much, to care this much, to believe this much. We remember this holy week that our God is a passionate God, a God who loves us so much that Jesus was sent to show us the ways of passion and compassion.

- Mary Carter Waren and James Crafton
Living in the Mystery of God: Reflections for Lent

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Jesus Drives Out the Money Changers

By Doug Blanchard

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The Eros of Anger

Excerpts from Holy Eros: Pathways to a Passionate God
by James and Evelyn Whitehead (Orbis Books, 2009)

The eros* of anger is the energy of social transformation. Anger arises in the service of life; it is the passion – painful but crucial – that energizes our commitments and sustains our resolve in the face of injustice.

Such a view of anger sits uneasily with a religious tradition that favors the image of Jesus as “meek and humble of heart.” Does not anger rank high in the traditional list of seven deadly sins? Yet in the midst of this enduring prejudice against anger, we recall other biblical testimony. The prophet Jeremiah raged at his community’s unjust behaviors: “I am full of the wrath of the Lord and I am weary of holding it in” (Jer 6:11).

Such holy anger is not restricted to the Hebrew Scriptures. Throughout the gospel we again and again meet an angry Jesus. Not only does he overturn the tables of those trading in front of the temple, he frequently lashes out at the pseudo-righteous: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (Mt 23:13). When Peter counsels him not to risk a return trip to Jerusalem, Jesus’ anger flashes again: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt 16:23). And when confronted by people who would prevent him from healing the sick on the Sabbath, Jesus “looked around at them in anger” (Mt 3:5). In the lives of the Old Testament prophets and in the life of Jesus, anger was an honorable emotion.

The Christian vocation calls us to continue Jesus’ ministry in our own lives. In our works of love, anger is not simply a misadventure or a sign of moral weakness. Anger can be an essential resource for facing injustice. It is the passion that equips us to challenge wrongdoers and to stand up to malice in the world.

. . . Befriended, anger is a valued companion. Anger is always assertive, as it makes its claim and indicts injustice. But anger is not always aggressive. The eros of anger moves us, but the goal of our anger need not include inflicting harm on other people.

. . . Anger flares in the face of genuine grievance. We see people we love treated unfairly; a colleague’s behavior offends our sense of decency or fair play; a politician shows contempt for values that are at the core of our worldview. When we are confronted by injury or injustice, the eros of anger fuels our commitment to right the wrong. All of us can recognize ways in which would-be righteous anger can misfire, aroused by injustice plays an indispensable role in social life. Theologian Beverly Harrison reminds us: “We must never lose touch with the fact that all serious moral activity, especially action for social change, takes its bearing from the rising power of human anger.”

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* James and Evelyn Whitehead begin their exploration of eros by acknowledging the “mysterious Presence at the heart of the world.” They note that this presence “comes as gift, with a power that creates, sustains, reconciles, and heals. It is a presence that engages us personally, leading humanity beyond narrow self-interest into fuller participation in life. It is a presence that defies simple definition, but as theologian Michael Himes reminds us, the ‘least inadequate’ way we have to describe this presence is as radical love.”

According to the Whiteheads, “Christian thinkers today, Pope Benedict XVI and philosopher Charles Taylor among them, are returning to the ancient image of eros as an apt symbol of God’s radical love. This is an eros known through and beyond sexual arousal; its vital energy courses through the world, enlivening and healing hearts. Experienced as affection and also as compassion, in desire and also in hope, eros becomes ever more generous as it folds into that most capacious love described in the Bible as agape.

The Whiteheads’ book, Holy Eros, explores the cultivation of eros, and recovers eros’ potential to “reveal God’s action among us today.” It’s a book well worth investigating.


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 3)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 1)
The “Incident” in the Temple
Pasolini’s “Wrathful Christ”
Why Jesus is My Man

Image: “Jesus Drives Out the Money Changers” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).

The Passion of Christ (Part 1)

As we enter Holy Week 2009, I begin sharing a series of posts highlighting artist Doug Blanchard’s The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision, a series of 24 panels depicting the Passion of Christ painted between 2001 and 2005. (Each original Passion picture is oil on wood panel, 18 inches by 14 inches.)


Says Blanchard of his work:

I am not interested in the literal history of the death of Jesus. As far as I’m concerned, the historical Jesus of Nazareth is an irretrievably alien figure to us, inhabiting a world that no longer exists, speaking a language almost no one speaks anymore.

I am much more interested in the story. What does that story mean to us now? What is it about the death of Jesus that remains so remarkable among the deaths of thousands and thousands of other innocent young men unjustly condemned throughout history? Why should this death be remarkable in light of everyone’s death?

I decided to remake the traditional image of Jesus. I wanted to make him charismatic and attractive; as someone who touches and is touched. I wanted to make him a physical being of flesh and blood; not some semi-abstract Byzantine Pantocrator. I wanted to make the body and flesh of Jesus teach compassion to the spirit through its suffering. I wanted that same flesh to be made radiant by the spirit at the Resurrection.

I hope to present in this series a more humane and radically transformative vision of Christianity. In the story of the death and resurrection of Christ, the whole grim arithmetic of power and powerlessness, by which the world has always worked is pitched out of the window. It is that profoundly egalitarian and anarchist aspect of Christianity that keeps me with it; the idea that love is the great monkey-wrench thrown into the smooth workings of our ambitions and designs for power. It is through love that we transcend history Through love, we transcend death.

That is the religious vision I hope to present in this series.


Blanchard dedicates The Passion of Christ series to Barbara Crafton (pictured at left), former rector of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in New York City. “She has helped me, and numerous other people, through many rough spots,” says Blanchard. “Her generosity in deed and spirit makes her an exemplary Christian.”

NOTE: Each post in this series will be accompanied by one or more reflections related to the scene/s of Jesus’ Passion depicted by Blanchard. Please be aware that these reflections are chosen by me, and are not part of Blanchard’s original series nor necessarily reflect his theological perspective. Rather, they reflect my own. For instance, as you’ll see from some of the writings I have chosen to accompany Blanchard’s art, I am interested in the historical Jesus, and do not consider him an “irretrievably alien figure.” Furthermore I consider perspectives on the “Jesus of history” to compliment (perhaps even enhance) those works – be they academic or artistic – that focus on the “Christ of faith.” For me, they are two sides of the same coin. They are intrinsically related. Both are important; both are needed. Indeed, I question if one can have either a dogmatic and/or visionary sense of Christ without some sense of Jesus’ place and role in history.

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Jesus Enters the City
By Doug Blanchard

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What Can Be Said About the Historical Jesus?

In his 1997 book, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith, Marcus J. Borg reflects on the “pre-Easter Jesus” and addresses the question: “What gestalt of Jesus – what overall sketch – best accounts for what we find in the earliest layers of the developing gospel tradition?”

Borg then shares the following “five-stroke sketch of Jesus,” one that reflects his cross-cultural approach to the study of religion in general and of Jesus and Christian origins in particular. “Each stroke,” he writes, “is a religious personality type known in many religious traditions. . . . This approach, it seems to me, produces a reasonably comprehensive gestalt of the historical Jesus.

1. Jesus was a “Spirit person” – [Borg’s] phrase for a person who has frequent and vivid experiences of the sacred, of God, of the Spirit. He is similar to other Spirit persons in the Jewish tradition, for whom the sacred was an experiential reality: Moses, Elijah, the prophets. This seems to [Borg] the foundation to everything else he was.

2. Jesus was a healer. The evidence that he performed paranormal healings (as some Spirit persons do) is very strong. More healing stories are told about him than about any other figure in the Jewish tradition.

3. Jesus was a wisdom teacher. Using provocative short sayings (aphorisms) and memorable stories (parables), Jesus (like Lao-tzu, the Buddha, and Socrates, though in a very different style) taught enlightenment wisdom flowing out of his experience of the sacred. Jesus spoke differently because he had seen differently.

4. Jesus was a social prophet. Like the God-intoxicated social prophets of the Hebrew Bible (Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, and so on) he challenged the domination system of his day, an oppressive social order with sharp social boundaries ruled over by a small class of urban elites. Moreover, he had an alternative social vision grounded in the compassion of God.

5. Finally, Jesus was a movement initiator. A movement (at least in embryonic form – his public activity was very brief) came into existence around him during his lifetime whose inclusiveness and egalitarian practice embodied his alternative social vision.


NEXT: The Passion of Christ (Part 2)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Why Jesus is My Man
Palm Sunday: “A Planned Political Demonstration”
The “Incident” in the Temple
Pasolini’s “Wrathful Christ”
The Sexuality of Jesus

Image 1: The Passion of Christ series on display at JHS Gallery in Taos, NM, 2007.
Image 2: “The Son of Man with Job and Isaiah” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 3: Rev. Barbara Crafton (photographer unknown).
Image 4: “Jesus Enters the City” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 5: “Jesus Drives Out the Money Changers” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).
Image 6: “Jesus Preaches in the Temple” - Doug Blanchard (The Passion of Christ).