crucifixion: still a scandal

Lots of hype around that Jesus didn't really DIE on the cross.  Yawn.  Same thing comes back every generation or two as if this is some radical, new discovery.  It's not.  It was there in the first century, second, third, fourth, etc.  The problem of course is that crucifixion is nasty, and a dying divinity problematic - but the problem isn't so much intellectual [though it disguises itself as that] the problem is experiential.  It's Peter's problem [God forbid it, this will never happen to you (me)].  We want to run from the reality of the darkness because we are afraid, on some deep, primal level that the light is too fragile, that it will be extinguished and then we'll be in a sorry state. 

We are walking in the fields of myth and meaning, here, not fact.   Even if we could use positivistic data to prove/deny Jesus death and resurrection, we'd achieve little.  The fundamental issue is not the death and resurrection of Jesus in ancient Judea, but the death and resurrection in our lives today. 

Around here, we get to see it a lot.  Yesterday I was in a conversation with Sally and some other women from Sierra Leone and they told me stories of the horrors.  Young women forced to look upwards while soldiers [often children themselves] poured melted plastic bags on their eyes and burned their eyes out.  Soldiers [again often children] taking a pregnant woman betting money on whether a fetus was male or female and then slitting open the woman's body and settling the bet.  I can't even think about these things, my mind explodes, I want to scream that this isn't so, that such evil cannot exist. . . But they were there, it was their experience.   And yet these women are able to laugh, to dance, to sing, to stand up and move forward, and live with hope and courage - and if that isn't resurrection, what is?   There is Mayren, the young Somalian mother organizing her community and Muuxi, still a teen, transforming his own experience into a film to help other African youth.  They are the evidence.  Who could need more? 

There's nothing glib about this, nothing easy,  nothing nice.  It's raw.  Did Jesus die on the cross?  Of course he did.  He did every time a child had  his/her eyes burned out, every time a woman's belly was torn, every time a child frantically tried/tries unsuccessfully to save his/her mother dying of AIDS.  Did Jesus rise?  How could it be otherwise.  It happens every time one who has experienced something like this raises his/her head and defiantly believes in the future, defiantly believes in community, defiantly believes in life, defiantly believes in God.