And, as an added bonus, I have some related thoughts I wish to share with Gentle Reader --
These thoughts are something I've been thinking about for a while. I've expressed the basic idea somewhere or other, but not yet as fleshed-out as below.
In the comments section of Mr Feser's 'The meaning of the Passion' thread, 'Horatio' said:
The Res, whatever it is, is nothing like the Death of Socrates--indeed Feser suggests as much, by insisting on the miraculous nature.
Yet--if Christ is God (and capable of supernatural acts his entire life--as scripture makes clear--ie feeding 5000 with a few loaves, walking on water, etc), then He must be sort of...acting. He could at any time stop the proceedings. And He knows how it will turn out! He predicts the betrayal. In effect, He produced and starred in his own movie, and is playing ...everyone.
So He must be a bit of a masochist.
However the traditional catholic narrative insists on the pain, misery, suffering, etc.; the trad. catholics are the ones who humanize Christ (as the docetists realized--their messiah was no mere human....but the Word made flesh).....so who are the real blasphemers??
Responding to Horatio's post seemed to me an appropriate place to express these ideas:
Horatio: "Yet--if Christ is God ..., then He must be sort of...acting. He could at any time stop the proceedings. And He knows how it will turn out! He predicts the betrayal. In effect, He produced and starred in his own movie, and is playing ...everyone."
Horatio,
The Christ was not play-acting when he lived among us and allowed us to murder him.
And, as he was not play-acting, and as he really was tempted in all ways as other men are tempted, then he really might have sinned. For, if it were impossible that Jesus the Christ might have sinned, then it is meaningless to assert that he was tempted.
But, had he sinned, what would that mean? Why, it would mean the non-existence of all created things ... and of the Creator; for if “the ground of all being” is self-contradictory, then all being contradicts itself, denies itself, refutes itself. Christ was not play-acting; and there were real things at stake in the Incarnation.
Christ was not play-acting when he lived among us and allowed us to murder him. And, in fact, Christ has *always* -- and not merely when we murdered him -- made himself vulnerable to his creation. For Christ, by whom, and through whom, and for whom all that is created is created, continuously upholds the creation. All that exists exists because Christ participates in its existence (*). In creating/upholding the creation, Christ has always given himself into the hands of that creation; Christ has “always* placed himself at our (ahem) mercy -- we, who do not even have the standing to pass judgment, nor therefore to grant mercy, have *always* been given the ability to wound the Creator. And we have always done so; he has always been wounded for us, and by us.
(*) For, Christ is not "up there" ... watching our lives as though we were entertainment. He is, always, right here, living it with us. He lives it with us when we are betrayed ... and when we betray. Our sinfulness is so vile precisely because we drag The Holy One into the mud with us.
Horatio: "So He must be a bit of a masochist."
He has *always* loved you. He has always *known* you, and still he loves you. So, I guess, he must be a bit of a masochist.
9 comments:
"For Christ, by whom, and through whom, and for whom all that is created is created, continuously upholds the creation. All that exists exists because Christ participates in its existence.
...
He is, always, right here, living it with us."
Ilion, I love this, this is so clear, so perfect. It is so easy to forget, whether occupied in my own little self-world, or overwhelmed by the enormity of the real world, that Christ is ever-present. And ever-present for us, never farther away than our remembering.
...living it with us.
Do you know, even though I grew up hearing "God knows everything you do," (and, as I got older, "everything you are thinking"), I never before thought of Him also being always aware of what we are experiencing.
It's a realization that came to me from a bit of reflection on what it means to say that God is "the ground of all being" and that God "upholds the existence of all things."
The reflection was sparked by reading the words of a Rabbi (I don't recall his name, or where), who said much the same thing as I've said in the post. The Rabbi was discussing the perennial question -- excuse for denying/hating God -- "Where was God in the Holocaust?" and he said something like, "God was right there, living it all along with the Jew being murdered ... and with the Nazi murdering him."
To say that God "created/creates all things," or to say that God is "the ground of all being," is to say that there is *nothing* which exists apart from God. It is to say that God is involved in all things.
To say that God "upholds to existence of all things" (as the Bible asserts) is to say something much stronger than the common Deistic conception of the creation as a complex mechanical device that God put together and wound up, and which is now but running the course determined by its initial condition(s). AND, it is to say something much stronger than merely that God allows wickedness and evil to be brought into the creation by his creatures.
To say these things is to say that God participates in all things, both the good and the wicked. But, God is not wicked, so how can it be that he participates in wickedness? It is that he has, from all eternity, constrained himself by his creation; it is that the Creator has always been "at the mercy" of his creation, and not just when he allowed his creatures to torture and murder him; it is that he has *always* been giving his life for his creation.
I don't see him as a masochist. Christ knew the punishment for sin and he knew that it must be paid. But he loved us so much, he didn't want us to bear that pain, so he took it for us.
That was mild sarcasm.
... I mean, my seeming agreement with Horatio that Christ is a masochist was meant as mild sarcasm.
""Where was God in the Holocaust?" and he said something like, "God was right there, living it all along with the Jew being murdered ... and with the Nazi murdering him.""
Don't think he's a rabbi, but the Jew in question you're thinking of is Elie Wiesel - quoted by Ravi Zacharias - in discussing an execution he witnessed in Auschwitz; although he limited the aspect of God's presence to the one being executed ("Right there on the gallows, where else?"), not to the executioner interestingly enough.
...Which is understandable, given the circumstances - not many would disregard the pain done to them by their torturers and admit that these chayot are indeed the same ones made in the image of God.
No, this was a Rabbi, and his meaning was deeper than that we all are made in the image of God.
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