Holy Saturday Reflection

Holy Saturday is a day of mourning and reflection. In the aftermath of Jesus' crucifixion we are shocked and confounded by the brutality of Friday. Who could do such a barbarous thing to another human being? We miss the point, however, if we think we are incapable of doing the same or similar kinds of evil for the same reasons they put Jesus onto the cross.

Reflecting on another horrific event, the Holocaust, philosopher Arne Vetlesen, has written that separating those who commit crimes against humanity and marking them as abnormal actually in the end helps "perpetuate the very conditions which made its occurrence a historical fact in the first place."

And as history has taught us, one condition often present when genocide happens is the condition of war. Genocide is justified as a matter of course, unfortunate or otherwise, simply because it is seen to be necessary. As genocide scholar and social psychologist James Waller has written, [T]he greatest catastrophes occur when the distinctions between war and crime fade; when there is dissolution of the boundaries between military and criminal conduct . . ."

The distinction between war and criminality dissolved at the very center of Christ's cross. It is tradition that the two men who were crucified beside him were "thieves". But in fact, a better translation of the Greek word is "insurrectionists".  This is the same word Josephus used to describe Jewish enemies of the Roman state. And we know the charge against Jesus was treason.  He was crucified as a matter of course in a time of war -- and two beside him, and how many hundreds of thousands, nay millions, others?

We are in jeopardy of missing the point if we fail to see just how possible it would have been for us to put Jesus to death, if we had been told to do so, because it was said to be necessary. We would have just been following orders.

"We're you there when they crucified my Lord?" the old spiritual asks. And the answer is: we could have been; and we could be again if we're not careful.

Art:

Flagellation of Jesus, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55447[retrieved March 26, 2016]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hallstatt_5928.JPG.