Better Late Than Never
These days, everyone seems to have something fresh and exciting to write about. For hungry bloggers throughout the world, every sunrise appears to bring with it a free buffet of new events and topics, about which they may rant or comment on websites nobody even bothers to visit. And though ertandberni is indeed a hungry blogger, since he had no time for breakfast today, in keeping with its never ending quest to break all norms of timeliness and redefine the meaning of beating a dead horse, Tremendous Trifles has decided to revisit the controversial subject of Mel Gibson's "The Passion." Specifically, ertandberni wishes to expose a fallacy that was tremendously prevalent in debate about the movie and which needs to be put to rest once and for all.Before beginning, however, ertandberni would like to notify the reader that he believes referring to himself in the third person is a little weird, and that concequently, he has decided to stop doing it immediately.
Now, this fallacy that I consider needs to be exposed does not exactly concern the movie itself. Rather, my post concerns a theological mistake that arose from popular critics and (regrettably) seemed to be widely accepted by the public. Please do not worry, although I did use a scary word like "theological," this post should actually be rather straight forward.
The mistake I'm talking about is simply this idea that was getting drilled into our heads by critics, throughout the whole controversy, about how the movie was flawed because what was really important about Jesus was what he came to teach and not that he had suffered and died. Now, I realize this sounds fair-minded and sensible at first, but that is actually not the case. In fact, by saying such a thing, these critics are actually missing the whole point, and turning the mission of Jesus on its head.
It is true that Jesus had a lot of good, challenging and even startling things to say; but it should be clear to anyone who has spent more than two minutes thinking about it that if indeed he was who he claimed, this could not possibly be the core of his mission. After all, Socrates, Aristotle, Confusious, Lao Tzu, Buddha, and who knows how many others, had also a lot of good, challenging, startling and even similar things to say. No, this simply can not be the reason why God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, would choose to become flesh and live among men. If he merely wanted to deliver a message, he would have sent another profet. The "Philosopher-Christ" persceptive just doesn't cut it. God would not become human without a purpose; and that purpose, simply stated, was to die.
However, to realize the correctness of this position, it is not even necessary to believe in the divinity of Christ. It is clear from the whole story of his life, even if seen as simply human, that mere teaching was not the goal towards which his actions were driving at. But I won't bother wasting words with what others have said better than I ever could. Here is some of what Chesterton had to say about this point in The Everlasting Man:
We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher, and there is a vital truth in that view in so far as it emphasises an attitude towards luxury and convention which most respectable people would still regard as that of a vagabond. (...) It is assuredly well to remember that he would quite certainly have been moved on by the police and almost certainly arrested by the police for having no visible means of subsistence. For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think of, that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.
But in another sense the word 'wandering' as applied to his life is a little misleading. As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan sages and not a few of the pagan sophists might truly be described as wandering teachers. In some of them their rambling journeys were not altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks. Apollonius of Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults as a sort of ideal philosopher, is represented as rambling as far as the Ganges and Ethiopia, more or less talking all the time. There was actually a school of philosophers called the Peripatetics; and most even of the great philosophers give us a vague impression of having very little to do except to walk and talk. The great conversations which give us our glimpses of the great minds of Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and especially, which is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his execution. But it is the whole point and the whole particular merit, of the position of Socrates that death was only an interruption and an incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great philosopher if we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent surprise, and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding anyone so unreasonable as to cut short a little conversation for the elucidation of truth. He is looking for truth and not looking for death. Death is but a stone in the road which can trip him up. His work in life is to wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever. Buddha, on the other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture; it was the gesture of renunciation, and therefore in a sense of denial. But by one dramatic negation he passed into a world of negation that was not dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist was not dramatic. Here again we miss the particular moral importance of the great mystic if we do not see the distinction; that it was his whole point that he had done with drama, which consists of desire and struggle and generally of defeat and disappointment. He passes into peace and lives to instruct others how to pass into it. Henceforth his life is that of the ideal philosopher; certainly a far more really ideal philosopher than Apollonius of Tyana; but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not his business to do anything but rather to explain everything (...).
Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.
Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, (...)and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with vulgarity. That is the meaning the stirring and startling incident at the gates of the Temple, when the tables were hurled like lumber down the steps, and the rich merchants driven forth with bodily blows; the incident that must be at least as much of a puzzle to the pacifists as any paradox about non resistance can be to any of the militarists. I have compared the quest to the journey of Jason, but we must never forget that in a deeper sense it is rather to be compared to the journey of Ulysses. It was not only a romance of travel but a romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation. (...) The point, here however, is that all these incidents have in them a character of mounting crisis. In other words. these incidents are not incidental. When Apollonius the ideal philosopher is brought before the judgement-seat of Domitian and vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental. It might have occurred at any time in the wandering life of the Tyanean; indeed, I believe it is doubtful in date as well as in substance. The ideal philosopher merely vanished, and resumed his ideal existence somewhere else for an indefinite period. It is characteristic of the contrast perhaps that Apollonius was supposed to have lived to an almost miraculous old age. Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles. When Jesus was brought before the judgement-seat of Pontius Pilate, he did not vanish. It was the crisis and the goal; it was the hour and the power of darkness. It was the supremely supernatural act, of all his miraculous life, that he did not vanish.
posted by ertandberni @ 9:40 AM
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