His Marred Visage

No end of speculation has taken place over two thousand years about the nature of the crucified and risen Jesus.  Did he really exist?  Was he really crucified?  Was he really dead?  Did he really rise?  Was he wishful thought, hallucination, fraud, ghost, or really a risen, living man?

In this post I will wonder what the purported witnesses might have seen, and what they might have thought about what they saw.  This might be a more fundamental matter than it has been considered over the ages, since so much of the matter has been clouded by contentions about the nature of the Jesus who (supposedly) appeared, when it is the idea of his appearing--in certain ways he ostensibly chose--that is central to the matter of the propagation of his teaching.  What exactly the witnesses saw is less important than why they were seeing it.

And what did they see?  In the monumental scene from John 19, Pilate has Jesus brought out in the crown of thorns and the purple robe, and Pilate announces, "Behold the man!" (KJV).  This, of course, is after "Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him.  And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put on him a purple robe.  And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands" (19:1-3).  By Jew and by Gentile, Jesus was beaten even before he was condemned, and special, hideous attention seems to have been paid to injuring his face and head.

And Pilate has a sign affixed to the cross, as attested in one form or another in all four gospels.  Matthew and Mark take it as the accusation against Jesus, that the sign calls him King of the Jews.  John is slightly more discerning, and depicts the Jewish authorities protesting that "King of the Jews" is something other than the real accusation--that Jesus presented himself falsely as "King of the Jews."  Additionally, Matthew and John have Jesus called "Jesus" on the sign--John even adding "of Nazareth"--though even "Jesus of Nazareth" would not have meant exclusively that "Joshua from the town of Nazareth who was called King."

It is difficult to escape the notion that Pilate, saying both of Jesus, "Behold the man!" and, later, "Behold your King!" was engaged in some measure in merely identifying the victim brought to him.  It is sad enough that Christianity has spent two thousand years worshipping a beautiful, Caucasian Jesus; it is doubly regrettable that this fancied beauty is--against all logic--imagined to have survived the tortures.  The Jesus of Christianity's messianic contentions, even the messiah of Isaiah 53:14 ("his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men") is bizarrely imagined to be recognizable after all that had been done to him.

Jesus after the crucifixion would have been torn, bloodied, bruised, dirtied with ground-in matter, twisted, swollen, and possibly toothless.  And he would have appeared so in an age of great violence and--as so often recounted--myriad disfiguring and medically untreatable diseases.  Jesus would neither have been so remarkable for his disfigurement, nor as identifiable as our remote imaginations would have him be.  Moreover--and this is absolutely essential to the present argument--in John's account of Doubting Thomas, it is the actual evidence of actual injury that identifies Jesus.  Jesus is wounded, not wondrously pristine.

And so our recounting of the gospels post-Resurrection can send us stumbling through stories of encounters with a messiah who could have been unrecognizable--perhaps grotesquely so--in a manner every bit as unsettling as the (truncated?) end of Mark, which presents us with an account of Jesus' triumph--and no Jesus appearances--and perhaps should leave us asking why we would require more.

In John, Mary Magdalene takes Jesus at first to be a gardener, until he speaks to her.  That evening his appearance to the disciples commences with proof that his particular injuries were consistent with the crucifixion.  The fact that Thomas needed such evidence eight days later does not mean that the same evidence was superfluous for the other disciples.  And then of course John tells of still another halting identification of Jesus by the Sea of Tiberias.

Luke tells of the road to Emmaus that very Resurrection Day, and of how two disciples walked and talked at length with the post-trauma Jesus before recognizing him.  Only with forewarning from the two--by now probably exhausted--disciples who hastened back to Jerusalem, are the main body of the disciples confronted by Jesus.  Curiously (as it would seem) Jesus says to them, "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see" (24:39).  The inspection of his feet does not seem so curious if it were possible that they had been spared the worst of the disfigurement.

And then there is Matthew, and Jesus' appearance to "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary" (28:1), who were hurrying from the tomb "in fear and great joy," having just seen a magnificent angel.  "Jesus met them, saying, All hail.  And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him" (28:9).  Straining at their steps, in the dim light of a first-century Middle Eastern morning, and confronted suddenly by a male figure, it would be no small wonder that the women would see mostly his feet, feet that they had tended and placed themselves before.

Additionally, Matthew gives us perhaps the most puzzling passage of all: "Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them.  And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted" (28:16-17).  Of course, the most reasonable explanation for the doubts among "the eleven" would be if--as would be the general thrust of the collective gospels--the disciples' first encounter with the risen Jesus was on the mountain in Galilee.  In that case, a nice handful of "post-Resurrection" gospel appearances would have to be deemed apocryphal.

I would prefer to address the matter in the vein I presented above.  As I said of the post-resurrection Jesus, "it is the idea of his appearing--in certain ways he ostensibly chose--that is central to the matter of the propagation of his teaching.  What exactly the witnesses saw is less important than why they were seeing it."  If, as has been a theme of this blog, the gospels are meant as a winding-up of the Genesis account, then it is possible that the thrust of the gospels is the idealization of humanity as a recapitulation of Adam.  I know this is far from a novel idea, but it has been explored far too much as a stepping-stone to organized Christianity, and far too little as an idea in itself.

Jesus said he would be present where two or three were gathered in his name, and Christianity has labored long over arguing about his name and about twos and threes and more.  The common humanity involved in our mutual interactions--which I and others have postulated as the true "image of God"--has been less well explored.  If Jesus were indeed concerned about the quality of our gatherings large and small--a concern I am not about to deny him--then the particulars of his personality and identification might be less important than his representation of common humanity.

Indeed, that is what we see in his post-resurrection appearances, which I have just attempted to describe.  Looming in that description is the notion that the barely-recognizable Jesus was a representation of his barely-recognizable presence in all of humanity.  In a terrifying dawn, Mary Magdalene beseeches an unidentified gardener--as she imagines--to act upon a decent urge to help her.  It is perhaps the most poignant of the post-resurrection exchanges, but it is not unique in possessing great humanity.

The disciples, in their gladness with or without Thomas, were nonetheless burdened with their fears and doubts, which Jesus set about allaying.  None of that meant that Peter--and, by necessary extension, all of us--were to be spared the agony of the interrogation by the Sea of Tiberias--the thrust of which is the duties we owe to all of humanity.

The disciples' positive response to the as-yet-unidentified stranger on the shore of the sea, the two disciples' embrace of the stranger on the road to Emmaus, the mixture of joy and fear and hope and doubt in the male and female followers of Jesus--all of this bespeaks a concern for the welfare of others, typified in light of the gospels by our identification of our collective neighbors with the personality of Jesus.

As horrible as it is to contemplate, all of this comports with a tortured and disfigured Jesus walking among his brother and sister human beings--as indeed, in every prudent implication, we must think of him doing even now.

Trying Out Links Again

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Here.

https://rousedreadiedreaped.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-shape-of-our-beliefs.html

And here.

://rousedreadiedreaped.blogspot.com/2021/08/what-is-thahttpst-to-us.html

Trying Out Links

aaadrTrying Out Links

Here.

https://rousedreadiedreaped.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-shape-of-our-beliefs.html

And here.

https://rousedreadiedreaped.blogspot.com/2021/08/what-is-that-to-us.html

The Shape of Our Beliefs

There is an extremely important linkage between the end of John (from which, as I have said, we must read backwards to understand its connection to Genesis) and the beginning of John (with its language of cosmic timelessness and omnipotence.)  This linkage has to do with the very nature of belief.  The belief that Jesus describes and holds to be worthwhile is not an intellectual thing--nor even an intellectual thing that the believer admits is hard for him or her to keep in view.  Belief that matters is that which is organic to the person--that which inhabits the person's life-arc of being roused, readied, and reaped.

This crucial aspect of that which truly constitutes belief rests upon what should not be a very controversial contention--the contention that we are not gods.  And yet how--when we are engaged in theological conjecturing--can we be said to be not gods?  When we theologize we stand apart from our existence and imagine that we can understand our existence.  We can project humility, and we can humble ourselves, if we wish, before whatever ineffable deity we credit with ruling the existence we inhabit, but none of that changes the fact that we have arrogated to ourselves the role of appraising ourselves in terms that we cannot claim to grasp.  We are acting as godlings.  When we say that God exists, we are godlings.  When we say that God does not exist, we are godlings.

This realization is important if we are to understand John's gospel, and particularly the progressions of thought in John's gospel.  We cannot understand the belief we are to possess unless we understand ourselves who are to possess it.  This brings us to Chapter Ten and its references to humans as "gods".  Jesus says to "the Jews," "Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?" (10:34, KJV).

What must not be missed is what Jesus says next: "If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came. . . ."(10:35).  Jesus (referencing surely Psalm 82) is referring to people who were provided (God only knows why) with instructions from God.  They were instructed to provide judgments among people, in accordance with the will of God.  Poor godlings as we all are, they were miserable failures.

Those "gods" would have done better to have just tried to be good people, good people who had the jobs of being judges.  If their failings had resembled those of the first-century officials who Jesus decried, they would have been the failings of those who put themselves in the place of God.

Yet is not Jesus merely leveraging his claim to be "Son of God" on the fulcrum of the psalmist's long-ago judges' god-ness, against his accusers' claims of blasphemy?  That would be difficult to sell to Jesus or to his accusers, since Jesus links his claim to the judges' god-ness with his own claim to have been divinely "sanctified, and sent into the world"--which latter claim would have been enough in itself to condemn him.

No, the whole business of Jesus quoting, "Ye are gods" is not the searing argument that the apologists would like it to be, nor is it some sort of New-Age sentiment.  Jesus is talking about what belief ought to be.  As regarding Jesus' immediate circumstances, it would be worth noting that belief that "ought to be" would not involve nailing living bodies to wooden crossbars.

As regarding a broader view, Jesus then goes on to say, "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.  But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him" (10:37-38).

Belief is life, not theology.  Belief is not what we think, or worse yet, what we rally ourselves to think.  Belief is what we are, in all our aspects, and we are simultaneously molded by our circumstances and  beaten by our wills into the shape of our real beliefs.

What is That to Us

There is a certain strange irony to much of the thematic analysis of John's gospel.  That is, there are many interpretations that note prominently the echoes in John of the themes of Genesis, yet there are few interpretations of John that will question the gospel as a springboard to the development of the standard Christian theology.

And yet we must ask (as would seem only reasonable): Can it be assumed that a gospel that echoes Genesis is meant chiefly to usher in new developments, and not to provide, rather, a conclusion of a story-arc?  It seems to me that Genesis is spoken of by the interpreters when the introduction to John ("In the beginning was the Word....") is dealt with, and then later in John when the parallels between the two gardens can be drawn, but Genesis is forgotten by the time Peter is being interrogated at the Sea of Tiberias.

Can we be so sure that the story of John is not a deconstruction of the history of humanity, as littered as that history is with elements--some time-honored and understandably cherished by Jesus' contemporaries--that Jesus is intent on discarding?  If there is Genesis in John, might we not see it temporally reversed?  Should we not at least try to read John backwards, as it were?

And so we might think of poor Peter by the Sea of Tiberias, which is the last episode of John.  I have written before of a conceptualization of Adam as a flawed being from the first, unsatisfied with mere communion with God.  Neither was Adam satisfied with the care of the garden, nor even--later--with lordship over the animal world.  Adam was not satisfied until another human being was created for him, although that act of creation would not alter the substance of Adam's necessary communion with God.

And then there is the episode of the forbidden fruit, brought first--presumably--to Adam's attention when Eve, who has already partaken, offers him some.  A pair of reasonable conjectures might be made about what God would have said if Adam had been prudent enough to seek God's advice at that moment.  First, God would have probably told Adam that Adam would be all the more responsible in future for Eve's welfare (regardless of whether or not she deserved it), and second, well, if Eve were to have enjoyed some special--illicit--experience and--apparently--escaped punishment for it, what was that to Adam?  Adam was to follow God's directives.

So we have Jesus, at the end of John's gospel, saying to Peter, "Feed my lambs, Feed my sheep, Feed my sheep."  And then a few moments later, "Peter seeing him [the disciple whom Jesus loved] saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do?  Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me" (21:21-22, KJV).

John's gospel ends where Genesis begins, and John's gospel flips the Genesis narrative.  Peter, the latter-day Adam, is to correct his ancestor's faults.  The master--as ever and always--must be the servant of all.  No matter how asymmetric it might seem, we--on the one hand--are to be one with humanity (flesh of flesh and bone of bone) in humanity's weaknesses, and we--on the other hand--are to stand alone before the God who can expect us to empty ourselves of ourselves before the blast of his judgment.

The God of the Lapses

There are few things that fill most of us more thoroughly--and rightly--with pity and disgust than the suggestion that religion can correspond to race.  Of course, such an aversion cannot be thought to be universally emblematic of humanity, given so many countervailing examples from our history.

But now we reckon, quite rightly, that "race" is an ideological construct.  This construct requires, of necessity, a system of artificial distinctions.  One might be reminded of the ludicrous nineteenth-century notion of the races of humans springing from separate species of apes.  It is gruesomely fitting that the same era gave rise to the supposedly unanswerable contention from the opponents of Darwin, that ample time had passed, in those few decades, for the godless paleontologists to produce the "missing link" between apes and humans.

Scientists in succeeding generations have not failed to respond that digging up candidates for that and other "gaps" in the fossil record could be thought merely to result in twice as many gaps.  If we as a species want to draw distinctions, we are at liberty to do so.  Certainly the racists of the nineteenth century would do so, simultaneously consigning black people to the far reaches of the evolutionary tree, and then bemoaning their unaccountable ability to combine with white people and produce a cornucopia of worthy offspring.

We see gaps and distinctions when they do not exist, and we fixate on them when they do exist.  So it is with religion, and the ludicrous notion that one person believes in God and another does not.  

If our religion were true, it would address people as they are--wavering creatures of flighting attention.  Such are the believers in God, inasmuch as he is believed in, or not believed in.  We continually fail to do either.

The Context of Fear

The world was born in terror, and the world will die in terror.  The world was born together (in the mind of God), and the world will die together (culminating in the final judgment of God.)

All the elements of the world share the context of the world (for thereby our existence is established) and all the creations of God's handiwork in the world will be judged on their interactions within that context (for thereby our degree of faithfulness to the image of God will be established.)

Humanity is in the image of God, and creation is subservient to that image.  Make no mistake--humanity as the lord of creation is the servant of all.  To fail in our appointed task would be the proper source of our terror--a general condition we share with all of creation.

The very rocks beneath our feet quake in fear of God.  We can scoff at this, believing stone to be inanimate and unfeeling, but that line of thinking will lead to our deciding that we ourselves are but collections of elements.  The teachings of Jesus do not lead that way.

This is why I have written of the very beginnings of creation, and of mankind's collective identity as the image of God.  We must adhere to that identity--treating our fellow humans as ourselves, and as Jesus--because that is the only path of courage.  Indeed we truly are frightened, as is the cursed fig tree, and as are the stones of the mountains that would hurry off to the sea if we would so command in faith.

There is no true opposite to fear, as love is to hate.  A feeling of comfort or of security cannot counterbalance fear, but rather can only distance it or minimize it--sometimes imprudently, which can be its own source of fear.  We can marshal courage against fear, but each is greater as the other is greater.

No, fear is not something to be minimized, since it reflects only our cognizance that we are impinged upon by our contexts--that is, by the very reality that defines our existence.  Courage, on the other hand, is our willingness to engage with that context.  For us, that chiefly is our willingness to be persons melded with humankind.

This is the world of Jesus, wherein we are roused, readied, and reaped--as are the grasses of a season or the mountains of eons.  The world of deluded humankind, on the other hand, is a world supposedly understandable in terms of principles--ancient or modern, churchly or profane--by which fear might be allayed.

And so deluded humanity pretends to understand stories that cannot be understood.  Genesis speaks of chaos having no source but the will of God--a cauldron of chaos from which personalized elements arise--and the denominations chart out systems of theology from which they draw serene awe, having decided beforehand that they are going to extract serene awe.

We are supposed to be scared witless.

And then deluded humankind looks to the other end of  their charted expectations--Jesus' story of the "sheep" and "goats" voicing bewilderment about why they are being saved or damned--when the very story itself (the ultimate "spoiler") has been at Jesus' command disseminated across the globe.  Of course the story is not supposed to be "understood"--it's supposed to scare us witless.

We are supposed to be stumbling witlessly from one attempt to the next to create the person of Jesus in the substance of our interactions with others and the world.  It is a fearsome enterprise that elicits fear.