The Murderous God - Part 4: The Killing of Jesus
Crucifixion by Giotto di Bondone (c.1320-1325)
It Doesn’t Get Bigger Than This
‘Good Friday’—we will come back to that title later—and Easter together are the Super Bowl of the Christian calendar. The act of Jesus’ crucifixion on the cross and subsequent resurrection ‘three days’ later is the centerpiece of Christian beliefs. The Apostle Paul himself described bluntly in 1 Corinthians 15: 14-19 how essential the resurrection (and by necessity the crucifixion) is to the validity of his and every other follower of Jesus’ faith and hope:
And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.
“Vain”, “worthless” and “pitied”! Getting Paul’s point? This is serious shit! If this didn’t happen, game over! Now of course, he is highlighting its importance from a theological standpoint. This substitutionary sacrifice and dirt or cave nap breakout is God’s Plan A with NO Plan B when it comes to you and me getting ‘saved’ and going to a sparkly, happy place called ‘Heaven’ some day. Either way, if this didn’t happen, Paul is basically saying, we’re fucked! And this has been echoed throughout the history of the Christian Church, whether Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic. When it comes to more recent descriptions of core dogma, one of my very first posts on this blog described the evangelical tradition’s quadrilateral of non-negotiables—one of them being ‘crucicentrism’ (they love to make up big ‘ism’ words). Basically that’s their way of saying that if there is no crucifixion of Jesus, there is no faith.
But I am not seeking to give here a repudiation on the historicity of Jesus as an actual person who was sentenced to death, crucified, and then came back to life, though there are plenty of reasonable arguments to seriously doubt if not outright dismiss these biblical texts as yet another religious myth (see, for example, chapters fifteen and sixteen of Dan Barker’s book Godless). But like the other pieces in this series, we are giving the benefit of the doubt to the ‘believer’ and rather exploring what these popular stories of Scripture reveal about the moral character of a supposedly loving and just God. Specifically, we are going to look at the crucifixion.
So let me cut to the chase and just say that among the vast collection of stories in the Bible that reveal a God we are supposed to entrust our entire present life and eternity to, there is no tale as ethically horrific than Jesus’ torture and murder on a Roman cross.
OT v NT God
Before we look more closely at this, I wanted to briefly comment on our transition from the ‘Old Testament’ to the ‘New Testament’ part of the Bible. Conservative and particularly evangelical theologians (professors, pastors, etc.) will go to great lengths to argue the congruity of one timeless and unchanging God of the Bible. The most popular verse cited is probably that of Hebrews 13:8, which reads, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”
There are clearly some differences in what they might call God’s ‘plan of salvation’ as it unfolds. For example, the bulk of the Old Testament focuses on God’s working through the people/nation of Israel, whereas the New Testament transitions to a more diverse and global people of God known as the ‘Church’. Moving away from this kinder way of pointing out what appears to be a fundamental difference, God in the Old Testament seems to be pretty comfortable with spilling infinite buckets of blood (see the previous parts of this series) in comparison to the body count of the New Testament…at least until the book of Revelation (which will be the focus of the next and final installment in this series).
Liberal theologians, who are not tied to the more rigid fundamentalist view of the Bible as the inerrant ‘Word of God’, embrace a more sociological and evolutionary perspective of the Scriptures. Put simply, they have no problems throwing the Old Testament under the wheels of the New Testament. The former is just more primitive and has, therefore, less real God in it than the New Testament God (this logic falls apart in so many ways, but that might be the subject for another time).
My proposition is pretty simple: the God portrayed in both Testaments is fucked up.
Proportionate Justice
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, this basic concept of justice is that, “those who commit certain kinds of wrongful acts, paradigmatically serious crimes, morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment.” In more popular language, ‘the punishment fits the crime’. Hell, even the Bible seems to teach some concept of proportionality with its famous “eye for an eye” command (Exodus 21:24).
But here is where the Bible get’s wildly inconsistent and blatantly violates common sense and decency. This is especially true when it comes to the most extreme form of any punishment, the death penalty. The Israelites were instructed to stone to death disobedient children who ate and drank too much (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) or anyone who dared to embrace their homosexual identity (Leviticus 20:13). These are just a few of far too many examples of God’s ease with ending human life for reasons ranging from what might be recklessness or immaturity in the former to someone’s natural expression of who they are in the latter. These are indefensible. And while I never advocated for these extreme actions during my time in the cult of evangelicalism (because these commands were only under the ‘Old Covenant’), I still defended a god who would see this preposterous barbarism as consistent with any sense of goodness or holiness. For those who in any way sat under my leadership, I was wrong and I am so sorry for the damage I caused you. Worst of all, this includes my own children.
Beyond these specific examples of acts that God has deemed death-worthy, we know that just in general any sin warrants the ultimate judgment, both in this life and even in eternity. As the ‘Apostle’ Paul states in one of his most quoted teachings, “the wages of sin is death…” (Romans 6:23). And the ‘prophet’ Isaiah, as is taught in many other biblical texts, ensures us that even, “our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). Perhaps it is this wildly arbitrary sense of justice in the mind of the biblical God that allows for the flagrant accounts of Genocide in the Bible that I have previously discussed (with Jericho and the flood). And we aren’t even talking about the history of the church to follow! The same teachings have allowed ‘the bride of Christ’ to go on and kill who knows how many others in their own acts of mass murder, such as with the near extermination of Native American peoples at the hands of white Christian colonizers.
Then we come back to Jesus and we take it to a whole other level! Here we are supposed to have the only perfect human being, sinless in every way. Sure, he’s the incarnated ‘Son of God’ in that cluster-fuck of a doctrine known as the Trinity (we’ll come back to the divine family metaphor in a minute). But let’s just set that aside and think about this. The all-knowing, all-wise, one-and-only Supreme Being of everything cannot figure out any other way to forgive his prize creation of their ‘sins’ against him (some that we have already identified as being either ridiculous or offensive) other than to take all the punishment they supposedly deserve and place it on an innocent person?? In what other relationship would any Christian think that is OK? Someone wrongs me and the best way to ‘clean the slate’ is to find the closest really nice guy and whack him? I’m pretty sure there are other reasonable and moral ways to achieve reconciliation.
More Dysfunctional Fatherhood
But what continues to disturb me the most is the use of a parental relationship in this ‘good news’. In part 2 of this series, we looked at what is essentially, in biblical literary studies, the ultimate example of foreshadowing. If that is indeed what was intended, then what we see in the Crucifixion is God the Father keeping his promise and this time finishing the job by killing his own Son instead of providing a ram in his first sick object lesson. So basically, take all the horrific messages that the story of Abraham’s near murder of Isaac taught and then God-size them.
At least with Isaac we have a hint that he fought back against his dad (Abraham had to “bind” Isaac; see Genesis 22). But in this lovely Father/Son story, dear old Dad has intellectually and emotionally manipulated his Son to willfully do everything in his power to set up his own execution. I know, I know! Apparently some kind of three-way cosmic conversation happened in the past where the Father, Son, and Spirit all got on the same page without any arm twisting. Now I feel much better!
Seriously, the dysfunction at play in this story, if re-framed in any ordinary situation between a parent and his or her child, would cause any outside observer with a shred of decency to call Child Protective Services. But only in the religious mind could such depravity be exalted to the defining moment of the salvation plot-line while being given the title of ‘Good Friday’ as the supreme example of God’s holiness.
Hey Kids, What Time Is It?
It’s time to watch supposedly the only completely innocent human being to have ever walked this earth die via one of the most horrific forms of lethal torture ever created by humanity! YEAH!!
If, for the reasons above and likely many more, we come to realize how appalling this story is, we should be even more repulsed at the idea that we then turn it into a children’s story. So as we have done in previous installments of The Murderous God, let’s enjoy a few cartoon images from the Bible for Kids app’s retelling of Mel Gibson’s wet dream. Take your time looking at each one and just contemplate how a child might take them in.
A meditation assignment
We know how the rest of the story goes. So let’s summarize the obvious in the form of two questions:
For a group of people supposedly so concerned with the effects of media violence on the minds of children, what exactly are they hoping will be the result in these young developing minds by showing them images of an innocent man being beaten, whipped, suspended to wooden beams by nails through the flesh, and then leaving this person there to slowly die in front of a crowd of onlookers?
What kind of mind-fucking is being executed on any child who hears about this story as not only a normal but supremely good example of love?
I would encourage you take some time on this ‘Good Friday’ and Easter weekend or whenever you read this to reflect on these questions and the reality that the defining moment of the Christian religion—a religion that has dominated the world culturally and politically for two thousand years—is in essence the celebration of a an infinitely sadistic God. When you do, you might find like I have that allot of the ills of this world really start to fall into place.
scars that last
Many of us have scars somewhere on our skin that will always be with us until our bodies decompose. You can still faintly see a few on my shin and knee from when I got stitches as a child. Scars last. And according to the biblical account, even Jesus’ glorified, resurrected body bore the scars of the crucifixion. But as we have just barely explored here, this appalling act of cruelty is traumatic in not only the extreme violence it portrays but more so in the abusive relationships if justifies, first between individual human beings and their God and then between human beings as they put into practice the toxic ideology central to Christianity. These scars will last and run far more deeper that any momentary cut or strike to the flesh. I carry them as do far too many people I know and care about. But it does not have to be this way. We can individually and collectively, while we seek to find some modicum of healing from religious trauma, advance as a society the most basic of moral principles which stand in stark contrast to the message of the cross.