Approaching Good Friday 2015

shared by a friend of St. Paul's

As I move through Lent, I try to remind myself of Jesus’s suffering, to make it real, despite the distance of some two thousand years.   I found this reading effective:

“The procedure of the crucifixion – how the victim was hanged – was left completely up to the executioner.   Some were nailed with their heads downward.  Some had their private parts impaled.  Most were stripped naked. . . . With his crime recorded in Pilate’s logbook, Jesus would have been led out of the Antonia fortress and taken to the courtyard, where he would be stripped naked, tied to a stake, and savagely scourged, as was the custom for all those sentenced to the cross.  The Romans would then have placed a crossbeam behind the nape of his neck and hooked his arms over it – again, as was the custom – so that the messiah . . .would himself be yoked like an animal and led to slaughter.

“As with all those condemned to crucifixion, Jesus would have been forced to carry the crossbeam himself to a hill situated outside the walls of Jerusalem, directly on the road leading into the city gates. . . .The crossbeam would be attached to a scaffold or post, and Jesus’ wrists and ankles would be nailed to the structure with three iron spikes.  A heave, and the cross would be lifted to the vertical.  Death would not have taken long.  In a few short hours, Jesus’ lungs would have tired, and breathing became impossible to sustain.”

This account was not written by a Christian – not quite, anyway.    I’ve been reading about Jesus with an Iranian writer.    Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth, was born in Iran and as a teenager fled the country with his family after the Iranian revolution in 1979.   He describes his family as lukewarm Muslims and atheists and who, having lost everything to the Ayatollah, made religion in general and Islam in particular a taboo subject after arriving in California. 

At 15, young Reza converted to evangelical Christianity at summer camp, and fell in love with a Jesus with whom “I could have a deep and personal relationship.”    However, as he plunged into biblical studies to strengthen his new faith,   he discovered the many contradictions in the Bible, even among the books of the New Testament..   “Confused and spiritually unmoored,” he angrily abandoned his new faith and began to rethink his relationship with Islam.

However, he continued his academic religious studies, “delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar.”   He became drawn to Jesus again, not Jesus the Christ, the divine being, but the very human Jesus of Nazareth whom Aslan came to admire as a political revolutionary.

So what am I doing trying to learn about Jesus’ death and passion from a not-too-zealous Muslim writer who is very comfortable as an academic skeptic who now teaches creative writing at the University of California-Riverside?    For one thing, he is a fine storyteller, and his brief account of the Crucifixion brings a new perspective to an old story.   Aslan goes on to describe  a time of seething opposition to the Roman occupation and its toadies in the Jerusalem temple, the countryside haunted by false messiahs who often resorted to violence, and the Romans’ brutal violence in kind.   Many messiahs were killed by the Romans, until the final upheavals of 70 A.D and after, which provoked Rome to destroy the temple and drive the surviving Jews out of Palestine.

But what drew me to this book is that it is a story of Jesus, well-written, by someone who is not a believing Christian but an admirer of  Jesus nonetheless.  Most important, here is someone who tries (and fails, it seems to me) to deny Jesus’ resurrection.   “One could stop the argument. . . dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen Jesus to be the product of a deludable mind.”   Here is struggle.  Aslan wants to remain a skeptic, but can’t quite do it:

“However, there is this nagging fact to consider:  one after another of those who claimed to have witnessed the risen Jesus went to their own gruesome deaths refusing to recant their testimony. . . they were being asked to deny something they themselves personally, directly encountered.”   Moreover, “perhaps the most obvious reason not to dismiss the disciples’ resurrection experiences out of hand is that, among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus alone is still called messiah.   It was precisely the fervor with which the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection that transformed this tiny Jewish sect into the largest religion in the world.”

What the Gospels invite us to believe is overwhelming.  It defies what many would call common sense.  Yet faith persists after two thousand years, and keeps nagging at skeptics like Aslan, who want to deny it, but can’t quite seem to shake the Resurrection off.