God-Man takes a beating

The other day I was given the opportunity to have a conversation with someone at work about the breakdown of Roman jurisdiction in (what became) Europe after the 5th century. Is that where I take all my conversations? Yes, yes it is. I break it down Roman style: slow and steady with the occasional mad barbaric rush. From that it turned into a conversation about law and property, and I told him that property is a metaphysical idea. After explaining the meaning of the word metaphysical, I told him (with some intensity) the only thing keeping me from overpowering him right then and there and taking all his stuff was a web of ideas and faith--my own and those of society--that, or it might have simply been he didn't have anything I happened to want at the time. There was no physical barrier of any kind, and I have had my share of triumphs on the Field of Mars. So there.

Belief in God is something that holds me back. It's the primary thing, technically. One can't get behind Him and push Him around. But there are other things as well, like a love of and respect for life and unbroken bones and things. All connected, but distinguishably separate, which is why I can tolerate living in the same society as someone like my friend, who also respects his unbroken bones (still a metaphysical idea) but who has no belief in God. It is so strange that the key thing is left out, and yet all the other stuff matters--which came first, God or the bones of Man? I mean, it ain't a riddle. You can't leave Him out forever, of course. Has anyone ever read Genesis 3 and realized that every single thing the serpent says will happen does? At first, anyway. "You shall not die the death." They don't. "Your eyes shall be opened." They were (v. 7). "You shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil." God agrees (v. 22). Did I just say you couldn't get behind God and push Him around? I did, yes. Yet here He is echoing Satan. Adam and Eve have also left out the key thing, and still they live, still their eyes are opened, still they are as gods. To modify a phrase from C. S. Lewis, this is the horror that cannot be, yet somehow is.

Ultimately, disagreeing with someone on anything of any importance means a fight, as our barbaric forbears in Gaul or Germania or wherever knew. You might avoid the topic or the person, because God has provided us with space; or you might "learn to live together," because God has given us other stuff to believe in and agree about...a mercy, no doubt, even though it makes things complicated. Intellectually, fights are easier, and the world will end in a fight of some kind, all debates settled, regardless of what T. S. Eliot says. It's either us or God taking the beating...but God figured out a way to do both.

The most difficult part of our Lord's Passion for me to imagine is when He is stricken, and His beard is pulled, and He is jeered at to prophesy who hit Him. And again. Prophesy! And again. Prophesy! I've taken a beating before, but not like that, and not from a man I knew I could beat, or from one who jeered at me. The thought rankles. But He has taken the beating, and He had already prophesied. On Monday our Gospel reading was from St. John, where Jesus says, "He that seeth me seeth the Father also." Properly speaking God the Father does not of course suffer, but there is a thread of "taking it" from the devil (again, God echoes him, which is nearly unimaginable to me, but there it is) and from us woven through the time from Adam until now. He doesn't have to allow that for any reason except His own love, but grant that, and it often means He lets us win, which is why Jesus can say to Pilate, "Thou shouldst not have any power against me unless it were given thee from above." Indeed. He should not and would not have power, but he does.

I am often amazed when I get away with things...that is to say, I'm surprised I'm not dead. I really have come out of the confessional and thought, "Another close one! I can't believe I made it!" Such strange things God allows to exist together, such good ideas marred by leaving Him out of the picture, such evil allowed to continue in His creation. But thinking of all this makes it more bearable, somehow, to live in the same world as a person who doesn't believe in God, but who does believe his own bones are sacred.