Thoughts for Good Friday: No Wonder People Laugh at Jesus
April 19, 2011

This week, Catholics at the hard core of their faith will dwell on the horrible, tortured death of Jesus of Nazareth with a series of Thursday, Friday and Saturday services that are collectively known as The Triduum.

Catholics are the only Christians who meditate much on a Jesus who should have been dead from having gobs of flesh ripped from his bones, yet who stumbled with an unbearable log past mobs who laughed at him. Following that, his body was pierced with crude nails and he was raised in the air under a merciless sun where the only thing he had to drink was his own blood. After a few hours he died when his lungs burst.

In other Christian faiths, the Nazarene rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and then pops up the following week as the Risen Lord. Sin is cleansed in the blood of the lamb -- There's pahr in the blood! -- but the ablution is as unseen as the soak, wash, rinse and spin-dry cycles of a Maytag top-loader.

Leonardo DaVinci's Last Supper is such a powerful work of Catholic iconography that it's not only allowed in Christian homes but cherished in them as well, especially if it has a quartz timepiece in the lower right corner. You've seen the velvet rug with the semi-profile of Jesus looking like a blue-collar Fabio who lives in Nokesville and drives a Chevy truck with a top-mount tool box in the bed.

In the hands of those who are separated from the one true church, Christ has been turned into a cartoon or cast as the high-school Sociology teacher who tells his students that they can call him by his first name.

No wonder people laugh at the Son of God. People laugh at cartoons. I was convulsed once myself when about fifteen years ago, I saw a rendering of a crucifixion scene wherein all the figures were canines modelled after C.M. Coolidge's Dogs Playing Poker series. It was brilliant! The artist, whoever he was and whatever his beliefs, understood that if Christians make Jesus the subject of a starving-artist oil-painting or a wristwatch face, or even an injection-molded crucifix, it only follows that the heathen will turn him into a bath toy or cover him with ants.

While there are those -- likely savage brutes, the lower orders, "the slaves" as visionary Sr. Anna Catherine Emmerich described those who did the scourging at the pillar and the jeering along the way to Calvary -- who would howl like hyenas at his body whipped to one giant wound, the Jesus of the Catholic Passion is hard to laugh at. Most civilized people, even the decadent ones, I believe, regardless of their views of ultimate realities, would not.

This whole and authentic Jesus was a long time in being discovered. Our understanding, which still deepening, was hard won. Discovery was made possible by continuous tradition, scholarship, war, suffering, including sufferng at the hands of other Christians.

In the early centuries of Christianity, there were no crucifixes, those distinctly Catholic crosses with the figure of Christ nailed to them. Statues, like other arts associated with the pagan Romans, were disdained by the faithful. The plain cross, an abstraction, was their symbol.

As a few hundred years removed the church from persecution, the faith itself became as abstract as the cross. Some Christians--perhaps at times, most Christians -- disbelieved in Jesus’ divinity and downplayed his suffering. Occasionally, as such "Christians" sometimes do today, they gave the true believers a rough time.

Between the A.D. 700s when Iconoclasts griped that religious images were idolatrous and the 1500s when Calvinist heretics made the same complaint, the church reasoned and ruled that if God was willing to assume weak human flesh, he could, without sin, be represented in art.

The crucifix appeared in The Middle Ages. On most crucifixes fashioned since, Jesus does not appear to be suffering or even in very much discomfort -- the one beset by Formicidae was a piece of cheap, plastic junk -- but the original installation of the corpus on the cross reminded Catholics of the extent to which the Lord had suffered a long- forgotten Roman torture.

Meditation on The Passion was further augmented by The Crusades and by a millennial renewal in the church undertaken by the likes of St. Francis of Assisi. The crusaders walked the streets of Jerusalem along which Christ had been whipped and had fallen three times and where Veronica had wiped his face. To these warriors far from home, the Passion became very real and they brought back to Europe The Stations of The Cross. Francis himself bore the Stigmata.

For centuries, devotion to Jesus' Five Wounds was widely popular. One of the rebellions launched against Tudor religious repression symbolized itself with these nail holes in Jesus' hands and feet and the spear puncture in his side. St. Alphonsus Liguori authored a devotion to them.

Mel Gibson's powerful movie The Passion of The Christ was inspired by the dictations of the aftermentioned Bl. Anna Catherine Emmerich. Whether or not they are authentic visions or the output of a vivid imagination, Emmerich's accounts as told to bookmaker Clemens Brentano are worth a read.(1)

All of the above are part of the tradition, that habit of faith that keeps Catholicism, societies and individuals from going too far astray.

God knows that in the Catholic Church there are clodhoppers aplenty, with no taste or sense of decorum. Enabled by gift shops (of which the Catholic faith surely has more of than any other), they would prefer a Jesus planter over a print of Gabriel Max's Veronica's Veil.

However, for the most part, the official image of Christ is managed by men of education who have been acquainted with the greatest of Catholic expression. Jesus is depicted and cast according to scripture and an iconography of taste and reverence. The leaders, at least, recognize that The Sacred Heart is no place for a thermometer.

Perhaps in time other Christians will come to understand that the Jesus of clip-art is a disservice to Him, to themselves and to the world. Perhaps they will also come to appreciate The Passion fully. Both The Way of The Cross and Rome are on the same road.

(1) The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is available on-line.