Jesus was hoisted up on a cross. He was not killed with fire or sword. I do not intend to make too much of any theory I would have about the manner of his death, but here I intend merely to relate how the imagery of the Crucifixion has impressed itself upon me and my other notions.
If any notion of Jesus as a shaker-up of humanity's conceits is pursued with vigor, that notion can scarcely escape an imagery of Jesus as incorporating both fire and sword within himself. "Sword" is the most familiar of these conceits, evoking thoughts of how Jesus' unyielding criticism of our self-satisfactions confronts us with unsettling realizations. Among the most poignant of those realizations is the fact that family (along with other conceits of emotional proximity) is a hindrance to our pursuit of proper orientation. Our forcing upon Genesis the notion that Christianity ought to be a "family-centered" faith is manifestly unwarranted, but as if to seal that realization Jesus tears apart our notions of family as foundational to proper Jesus-following.
Jesus is the sword, the knife, the conceptual edge that sunders every preconceived connection (indeed, in the final analysis, every notion of necessary connection) between anything that exists in the universe and anything else that exists in the universe. The universe is an ever-refreshed, incomprehensible, un-creaturely-encompassed congeries--a well of potentialities that we view as consisting of limited potentialities (the "laws" of nature or of physics) even as Jesus ascribes to us (or to the posited "us" that had at least a mustard-seed of faith) the power to transmute without limit at will.
And then there is "fire." Everything in the universe is describable as "in the universe," and by that very inescapable definition all is connected to all. Just as anything that we call a "thing" is separate from any other thing--at least upon the level of definition in question--so also is every "thing" connected to all others. Nothing has any existence that is not encompassed within the realm--however attenuated--of the effect of every other thing, and as long as the universe endures every thing in it will be possessed of an energy imprint, a "fire" of itself.
Jesus is the fire, the searing energy, the vital fusion that binds all together, and this fact must perfuse any notion we have of our existence as a constellation of parcelings-out of things ostensibly separate one from another. To recall Jesus' disdain for our preoccupations with "family," there is Jesus' strikingly passive description of Mary as the "mother" of "the disciple standing by, whom he loved"--as though it were more the case that Jesus was describing a pre-existing effectual reality, rather than assigning some adoptive familial relationship.
We are all of us of a family of all of us, and simultaneously we are none of us members of any family that can claim any validity other than how this or that "family" is an expression of the will of God. We are all of us separate from all and bound to all, and the will of God as expressed by Jesus cuts everything apart as with a blade and fuses everything together as with a flame.
Indeed, we must reckon always that any scenario, any packaging-within-intellect, is describable and therefore analyzable in innumerable ways. A hawk soaring in search of prey is describable as inhabiting the sky, or perhaps inhabiting the earth that is shrouded in the sky, but that is scarcely to exhaust the possible descriptions of the hawk's habitation. To us the hawk is above us, or is above (in a much smaller relative increment) the earth, but we have decided that reference to the horizontal is what matters. In the immediacy of flight, the hawk's habitation can just as well be understood as being in reference to the vertical.
The hawk can inhabit a column of rising air driven upwards by its heating over a relatively dark--that is, sunlight-absorbing--field or grove. The hawk's world is a relative verticality of the earth's gravity, of its fiery core's contribution to the energy milieu, of the relative local quality of the earth's surface below, of the rising air, of the solar and cosmic radiation playing about the atmosphere's upper reaches. We can imagine our world, or other worlds, or even a universe of worlds, and we can probe such matters in our thoughts or with inventions wrought with our thoughts, but we cannot escape our common creaturely finitude with the hawk--or with the God-numbered sparrows whose worlds are haunted by (and partially defined by) the terror of deadly silhouettes soaring above.
At best we can challenge ourselves with our limited understandings of the universe. Or perhaps better yet, we can challenge ourselves about how we are loathe to give up our conceits once we have formed them, or have inherited them. Genesis tells us that man and woman will become one flesh, yet other than leaving short-lived DNA traces (or, lamentably, rather more long-lived sexually-transmitted diseases, perhaps laced even with incorporated DNA from the previous hapless host), man and woman do not "really" become one flesh. In the conceit espoused by Jesus, we do not even become "one" with the food that we eat--though of course we have learned much about how ingested nutrients can become part of the eater's body.
Inescapably, the process of giving up prior conceits--in our discussion, the testing of prior notions about how things are connected or not, separate or not--is a process to which we must be always open. The "one flesh" that the man and woman become might quite easily be understood as the conceptus, or--to challenge prior notions even further--the "one flesh" can be the gamete-inhabited, nutrient-infused, cell-and-milieu commingling of the involved couple's coupling. That this mostly-fluid "flesh" might be held conventionally to be outside of the couple's "bodies" proper is perhaps an outdated, parochial view of our bodies. As a further consideration, a collection of evidence has been gathered that--for all practical purposes--the individual human's mostly-fluid gut biome is an "organ" as crucial as any other. Add to this a body of emerging evidence that the gut biome can have profound effects on the mental and psychological states of the individual, and it can be considered at least that we have much--perhaps infinitely much--to learn about our very selves.
And into this world of many thousands of years, and many billions of lives, comes Jesus as God incarnate. This is the world, as we cannot deny, in which we think we know things that we do not, and in which we do not even know the scope of things we do not know. As the snake was raised up in the desert, rendered in bronze to be both imposing and impotent, so also was Jesus raised up. Was the snake transported from the dust to an imposing height, or transfixed into powerless rendition for all to see? Does not the same manner of question--whether we see Jesus raised to power or shorn of power, or both--confront us with the Crucifixion?
I have for years wondered about Jesus' declaration, at that final earthly meal, that he would not drink of the fruit of the vine until he did so in the heavenly kingdom. Yet later he takes from a sponge of sour wine. Is this just a matter of confusion, or of conflicting accounts? Or is not Jesus, who is "raised up," deprived thereby of the merest powers to which we lay claim daily with nary a thought? Jesus on the Cross could not eat, he could not--as we would in any decency understand it--drink (though he might try), and then finally he could not lift his frame, or scarcely even breathe. Though a critic might contend that Jesus did indeed "drink," and that he held back enough breath to cry aloud in finality--effecting, so it would seem, a self-euthanasia in his distress--such criticism might be sliding easily and conveniently by without considering how Jesus' death (and, most importantly, his confrontation of his death) is incorporated into his ministry.
Jesus came with an expression of power, and I have tried to present a possible (among, admittedly, many other possibilities) set of pictures of that power. Jesus wields a blade that cuts apart all of our notions about how existence is to be parceled up, and Jesus wields a flame that sears together all of the things that it pleases us to be kept apart. Insofar as our experience of existence--indeed the experiences of us, and of the animals, and of the plants, and of who-knows-what-else--hinge of necessity on having some graspable ideas of conjoined and separated phenomena (as long as we exist on this plane) we--and the Jesus who made us--will endure suffering. Things do not come together as we would wish, and things do not stay apart as we would wish, and in our permeating faithlessness we are powerless to remedy our state. This is not just philosophizing--the "things that do not come together as we would wish" can be jigsaw puzzles, or they can be political federations that might or might not protect us from the most searing of horrors, or they might be things even worse.
And the Jesus who came with an expression of power met his death in humanity's most artfully-devised imposition of powerlessness. Time being as nothing to the divine, we must understand that the Crucifixion is shrunken in our conceits when we think of it as something that happened. As long as things can--as we understand them--"happen," then the Crucifixion is always happening, and will always happen. The Jesus who gave us Creation--who gave us the experience of Creation wrapped in a "very good" world's worth of supportive ministrations--has endured throughout the agony of existence.
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