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Sunday, March 16, 2008
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Crossings
We have an innate desire to see the great events of our world in discrete terms, cleanly separated from what lies around them and before them. We like demarcations and boundaries, both in space and in time, because it's so simple to say what's on one side and what's on the other. So when Caesar mutters "Alea iacta est," crosses the Rubicon with his legions, and marches for Rome, we feel that the great event of that time and place -- the Caesarian transition of Rome from a republic to an empire -- is only then truly under way, even though Caesar's march on his own country was at that point already inevitable due to historical forces and developments centuries in the preparation.
We like to see the events of our own lives as the crossings of distinct boundaries as well. Our most cherished ceremonies reinforce that perception. Birthdays. Graduations. The first job. The first kiss. Promotions. Weddings. Childbirths. Retirements. Funerals.
Yet it is not so. There are no true boundaries in time. Every moment in every life, however uncelebrated, is the resultant of all the moments that came before it. What you are at this instant is the sum of all that you've seen, heard, learned, and done back to the instant of your birth, plus contributions great and small from many others of whom you'll never know.
Identity is continuity. There are no severances in a human life, no points at which that truly ends and this truly begins. Indeed, there are none in the life of Man on Earth.
Still, we cherish our crossings. We tell time by them. It's the way we're made. An old joke is very much to the point:
Long ago, in a land much like this one, a young man named Muza Dai Boo was strolling through the town marketplace, perusing the goods for sale, when he felt a great surge of pressure within him. Try as he might, he could not contain it. What sounded forth was a fart of such majesty that hundreds of passers-by turned toward him in shock and astonishment. Horrified at what he'd done in so public a place, Muza Dai Boo pulled his hood and cloak tightly around him and hurried home, there to pack his few belongings and emigrate to a new land.In his new city, Muza Dai Boo mastered a trade, married, grew prosperous, fathered sons, and was known to everyone in his community as one of its true pillars, a gentleman of accomplishment, dignity, and refinement. But as the years passed, his children slipped away, his wife died, and his trade palled upon him, he came to miss the land of his birth with an intensity he'd never expected. Knowing that his own time on Earth was drawing near to a close, he resolved to return to his birthplace, there to reacquaint himself with its beauties and see what his countrymen had achieved in his absence. Surely he, and the gaffe that had caused him to emigrate, would have been forgotten long ago.
When he arrived there, he was astonished by what he saw. What had once been a humble town was now a bustling city. Great buildings stood on every corner. The citizenry bustled about with energy and pride. The streets, formerly mere beaten dirt paths, were paved with a marvelous black substance that gleamed in the noon sun. But most wondrous of all was the city's enormous cathedral. It was built all of marble. Its oaken doors were twenty feet high. Its windows were rich vistas of color and narrative. Its spire seemed to pierce the heavens themselves. It stood at the edge of what Muza recalled as the market square of old.
Helpless before his curiosity, he stopped a passing pedestrian and asked about the cathedral. "Yes," the man said, smiling, "it's the accomplishment of which we're most proud. Indeed, many persons come here to see it, and to worship in it, and for no other reason."
Muza nodded. "It is indeed most impressive," he said. "But I am originally from here, and no hint of it stood there when I was a lad. When were its foundations laid?"
The passer-by squinted off into the distance for a moment. "Let me see, now. The foundations? If memory serves, the digging commenced twenty-three years, six months, and seventeen days after Muza Dai Boo farted in the marketplace."
I have many memories of my own crossings, as no doubt you, Gentle Reader, have of yours. They stand out as bright lights in the memory, discrete events worthy of celebration...or regret, for not every memorable event is one we can take pleasure in remembering. But not one of them was truly separate from what came before it; nothing that came later could truly be divorced from its impact on our lives.
Choice entails consequence. Nearly everything we do is to some degree the product of our choices, and nearly every choice we make afterward will be to some degree affected by the consequences of our past choices.
Men who steep themselves in a single indulgence invariably report later that they regret having foreshortened their vision and narrowed their lives in such a fashion. It doesn't matter what the subject is: work, sex, play, sport, drink, drugs, commerce, politics, or anything else. For we are made to be multiply engaged, both with our own talents and with the world around us. There's hardly a man, alive or dead, good for just one thing, no matter how good that thing might seem.
From those multifarious involvements are formed our connections to one another. Good men form good connections that give and sustain life, build communities, and promote peace and good will. Bad men, of course, do not -- but herein lies one of the open, unstudied secrets of human evil: bad men are almost always monomaniacs, obsessed with the attainment of a single goal regardless of what it might cost in other areas. There are no polymathic Hannibal Lecters to speak of in real life.
Monomaniacs are hoarders. They gather what obsesses them unto themselves, crowding out all other loves, until they can hold no more, and then they die. Whether they burst from gluttony or wither from solitude, the end is always the same.
One of the duties of a good man is to attempt to dispel obsessions when he senses them developing in those he loves. It's not easy -- indeed, the attempt is often resented as an unwarranted intrusion on matters not his business -- but the duty is there nevertheless.
Two millennia ago, a Man crossed into a certain city. Throngs welcomed Him as he entered, cheering and praising Him. They spread palm fronds upon His path, a carpet of welcome for Him and His disciples to tread upon.
But that city was the bastion of the chiefest clerics of the realm. Those clerics saw the Man as the greatest imaginable threat to their hegemony, and were greatly alarmed at His arrival. Being obsessed with their power over their lay brethren, they contrived His downfall, and saw Him executed by crucifixion on a hill called Golgotha, the Place of the Skull.
In so doing, Caiaphas and the other members of the Sanhedrin who collaborated with him in ensuring Jesus's death probably felt they had merely dealt with an isolated threat to their rule: just one more impassioned itinerant preacher, a shade more popular than those before him, but still one who, having been dispatched, would lose his hold over the minds of his followers, his heretical teachings forgotten. Threat spotted; threat assessed; threat countered and destroyed. Let's move to the next item on the agenda.
But it didn't work out that way, did it? For Christ's entry into Jerusalem was part of a Plan whose roots are planted in the origin of the world. He foresaw His arrest, His condemnation, and His execution. He had spoken of it to His disciples, and was there in Jerusalem to follow it out:
Suddenly one of those with Jesus put his hand to his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?” [Matthew 26:51-54]
The moment of Jesus's arrest was implicit in His Incarnation and Ministry. It was why He traveled to Jerusalem...the beginning of what He'd come there to endure.
Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week, commemorates Christ's crossing into Jerusalem. To our mortal eyes, it's a momentous, greatly symbolic event. But that crossing cannot be separated from the rest of Jesus's life, nor from the dense tapestry of His connections, formed by His three years of Ministry, to the people of Judea. In the context of the Incarnation, New Covenant, Crucifixion and Resurrection of the Son of God and Redeemer of Mankind, it's merely one moment among many, inseparable from the rest. Many passages in the Gospel make it plain that He understood that full well.
Do we?
May God bless and keep you all.
Comments
As always, a wonderful and inspiring essay.
Posted by Fausta on 03/16/2008 at 07:54 PMFran, regarding the last part of your essay: the worst miscarriages of justice invariably occur when an elite determines that its political power and status are more important than individual justice. The Dreyfus case of a century ago is a perfect example of this. It’s one of the reasons why cops dislike politically sensitive cases so much; the agendas of everyone involved in the case keep getting in the way of finding out what actually happened.
But before we start pointing fingers at people, let’s take a look at Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. Caiaphas is the leader of a totally powerless people, living in a country occupied by the Romans, and the Romans are a seriously scary set of occupiers. Caiaphas’ country is occupied by people who think that gladiatorial combat and public executions, the more grisly the better, are family entertainment, and whose idea of riot control is to slaughter as many of the rioters as possible and then crucify the survivors along the roads so anyone who might take to disturbing the peace will think twice before trying anything again.
So for Caiaphas there are few palatable political options. Supporting Jesus might work, unless the crowd crowns Jesus King of the Jews, whereupon the Romans will see a threat to their hold on Judea and start massacring people left, right, and center, and possibly destroy the Temple and organized Jewish life as it had been known for centuries (which is exactly what happened forty years later.) Caiaphas can do nothing, but that means allowing events dictate his responses, and if things go wrong then he won’t be able to control what happens next, and that means accepting responsibility for a whole slew of very bad outcomes. Or Jesus can die and things can go on as before until the next crisis occurs, which, while unsatisfactory, is the outcome with the fewest undesirable consequences. Granted, delivering a Jew to the Romans is not a good thing, but the concept that the needs of the many outweigh those of the few, or the one, is familiar to every Star Trek fan.
On top of all of this, Jesus makes as triumphal an entrance as one can make on a donkey into Jerusalem just in time for the Passover holiday, a holiday that celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from bitter bondage. The symbolism from the book of Zechariah could not have been lost on the Jewish elite and from Caiaphas’ point of view Jesus must have been out of his mind to come to Jerusalem at this time; it would seem to Caiaphas and the temple priests a deliberate attempt to set off the highly volatile mix of nationalism and religious fervor that existed in the city at that time. People who think their backs are to the wall do not make the wisest of decisions, and Caiaphas and his backers in the Sanhedrin may well have felt that Jesus was giving them no choice. Faced with a Roman army that would not hesitate to use massive force against anyone perceived as even vaguely rebellious, and with no real way to resist such power, Caiaphas and his backers took what they thought was the lesser of two evils. It is not heroic, to be sure, but sometimes Shakespeare’s Falstaff is right when he says that discretion is the better part of valor; the Jewish Zealots were valorous forty years after the Crucifixion, and the price of their valor was the destruction of Jerusalem. So before people go on about what contemptible wretches the Jewish leadership were, remember what the world looked like to them, remember that no one in history knows how it will all come out, and that in the same situation you might have done the same thing.
Posted by on 03/19/2008 at 11:31 AM”...in the same situation you might have done the same thing.”
Akaky, I am surprised at you. Contrive for a complete innocent to be tortured to death, for the sake of maintaining control of a religion one of whose Commandments is “Thou shalt not murder?” No, I would not have “done the same thing,” nor would any decent man have allowed the thought to cross his mind.
Do please remember that in the years of the Incarnation, the masters of the Temple at Jerusalem were the most powerful people in Judea after the Roman governor. Their power derived from their ability to deny common Jews the privilege of sacrificing in the Temple, which Judaic belief held to be the only legitimate site for it. Mandatory entrance fees, inverse-sumptuary rules for entry, and arbitrarily set donations for the privilege of sacrificing in the Temple gave the Sanhedrin the ability to exclude anyone they preferred to exclude, no matter how pious.
Jesus was indeed deemed a troublemaker by the Jewish authorities—because He persisted in preaching to the Galileans, the poorest and most marginalized class of Jews of that time. Urban Jews, most particularly the Jews of Jerusalem, considered Galileans beneath contempt, yet they were the people Christ favored. He didn’t lead an army to Jerusalem’s gates, nor did He ever advocate rebellion against Roman rule. (Remember “Render unto Caesar?") He merely threatened the class distinctions of the time, which were well intertwined with religious practices.
We cannot know with full confidence the motives of the men who traduced Jesus to His death. We know only that He foresaw it, and that He did not resist. It was part of God’s Plan for the thread of time we inhabit. In that sense, it had to happen. But His betrayal, torture and execution cannot be justified! There can be no justification for doing such a thing to any innocent, be he the lowest alley-dwelling wino or the Son of God made flesh. The Star Trek nonsense is exactly that: nonsense, and viciously immoral nonsense at that.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 03/19/2008 at 05:03 PMFran, my apologies about the you. When I write these things I usually use the generic you to denote everybody who might be reading the piece. I didnt mean you personally. I should have spotted that when I proofread what I wrote but I use the generic you so often that it just went right by me. Again, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding.
I disagree with you on the other points, though. Yes, the masters of the Temple were the most powerful men in Judea after the Roman governor, but those last four words are a powerful qualifier. Caiaphas held his position as high priest at the pleasure of the Roman governor; he was appointed by one and dismissed by another. Yes, he derived his power among the Jews from his ability to include or exclude people from sacrificing in the Temple, but what was that to the Romans? Nothing at all. For the Romans, as Gibbon put it, “the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” The Romans couldnt care less who did or did not worship in the Temple so long as the imperial taxes were paid on time and no one tried to rebel against Roman authority. Caiaphas may have been all powerful to the Jews, but to the Romans he was simply a tool to be used to collect money and keep the peace and to be discarded when he was no longer effective at managing those two tasks. Caiaphas, like the Judenrat of the Warsaw Ghetto, is all powerful for as long as his masters permit and not a moment longer. He is a big man in a very small place, his every move dictated by and constrained by his need to keep the Romans happy.
Caiaphas understands his political situation vis-a-vis both Jews and Romans. If the crowd crowns Jesus King of the Jews, he and his Sadducee cronies will be out of jobs, first, because there will no longer be any need for them under the Nazarene dispensation, and second, because the Romans will see the crowd crowning Jesus King as a direct threat to their hold on Judea and will crush what they see as rebellion with massive force, leading to the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people. There’s no need to speculate whether or not this might have happened; it’s what did happen a generation later. Yes, turning an innocent over to his death is a horrible act, but sometimes in life you dont get a clear cut choice between good and evil. Sometimes you have to choose between two evils. For Caiaphas, the lesser of two evils was to sacrifice Jesus and thereby spare the rest of the nation from the horrors of war. In the end, he did not succeed, but he did manage to delay the disaster for forty years. A very small and eventually meaningless victory, to be sure, but only God knows the future; the rest of us can only hope and work with what we know now.
Posted by on 03/20/2008 at 12:01 PMAkaky, you’re in a very deep pit. Stop digging. There is no imaginable justification for condemning an innocent to stave off a likely atrocity. There is no imaginable justification for condemning an innocent to stave off a possible atrocity. There is no imaginable justification for condemning an innocent!
If the Gospel According to Matthew can be trusted, the Sanhedrin deliberately whipped a large crowd into a frenzy of bloodlust, demanding that Jesus be crucified, even though Pilate was inclined to spare him and was deeply disturbed by their ferocity. That doesn’t make the Romans look like oppressors; it makes the Sanhedrin and its agents look like men who’d do anything to rid themselves of a challenge to their religious hegemony.
Alongside that, Christ never claimed to be the King of the Jews. You could put the Gospels through a sieve and never find such a claim. He spoke of the Kingdom of God, and nothing else. The Roman occupiers were surely used to that sort of metaphorical language, having been raised on the notion of Jupiter as King of the Gods.
I’m closing this discussion before you get me really incensed.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 03/20/2008 at 04:38 PM
