A Holy Week…waxing theologically, again, beware!

This is indeed a Holy Week…Two Paschal mysteries, two traditions, meld almost to present us with salvific metaphors for all people…In the Hebrew scriptures and celebrated ever since as Passover, the people of God are asked to sacrifice a whole lamb, an intact, unblemished male under a year old (is this “Greek” for a virgin?  Certainly my ram lambs are kept separate from the ewes once they are capable of breeding them…but we don’t speak of virginity as holy for males, only for females, right?  Give me a break!), and to spread the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and lintels, so that the people will be spared, will be passed over, as a plague comes and wipes out all firstborns in the land…and then, those saved people flee slavery and subjugation and journey to a new land, are “re-born” so to speak as a free people in a new place.  And in the Christian tradition, the Jewish scholarly system of midrash, repeating the old metaphors to give them more power,  the Lamb of God is sacrificed, and by his blood, the people are saved.  Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, to Christians way of thinking, though not to Jewish, is the Paschal victim,we even say, each week, in the Mass, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.”  And the people are saved, re-born, as it was, into a new life, a life in Christ…Same metaphor, different, but very much the same, anyway, application.  The metaphor is expanded: in the Hebrew scriptures, the people of the book, the people of God, the Apiru, are saved.  In the Christian application, Christ dies and ALL of CREATION is saved, is new, not just the people of the book, not just believers (though there are some who would say you are only saved if you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour…but that defies the entire tradition of salvation being a community event, not a personal one.  It is, in a way, anti-scriptural…for if, for example, you are deaf and blind and in the road, looking west, and a truck comes from the east at a very fast clip and doesn’t see you, and I jump out in the road, unbeknownst to you, and signal the truck to stop, and it does…you are saved, whether you assent to that salvation or not.)  This, I think, is the message of Easter: that it is done, it is finished, as Jesus said on the cross: Creation is born anew, and we celebrate it in the Spring, when creation shouts it out: the peepers peep, the grass greens, the bulbs come up, the snow melts, the cold goes (though it’s hard to tell that today!  Not what I’d call a really pretty morning!  Cold and windy, for sure!), and we know that life is good, that life goes on.

There was an article in the paper this week about some guy who read the bible, and wrote about it: about how cruel and nasty God is.  What he failed to acknowledge is that the bible is some people’s interpretation of the events of their lives, PEOPLE’s interpretation of who God is, and like people everywhere, they are prone to assuming that if something bad happens to their enemies, it is God doing it.  God gets to be the heavy every time.  And if something good happens to them, it is God doing it…despite assurances in the bible that “the rain falls on the good and the bad equally,” which I take to mean that God gives people credit for dealing with their own difficulties and celebrating their own joys, and it is this INDEPENDENCE, and not slavery to a God, that we celebrate.  God has set us free: and we read of that metaphor in the Passover story and in the Easter story…It is the same story…We are free, no longer slaves…we are re-born.  The bears tell the same story: each spring they awake from a deep sleep, and come alive again.  They enact the Passover story and the Easter story…now, comes the real challenge: as Mary Oliver, the poet,  says, “What are you going to do with this one life you have to live.?”  This new, born again, life of freedom?  There’s the real question: how will we all respond to the freedom we have been given? How will we live out our joy, deal with our sorrows, sing and dance in celebration of the new life we have, reflected each year in the seasons, in the stories our ancestors told around campfires, and then wrote down…AND, how does this all play out in the southern hemisphere where it isn’t getting warmer, but colder?  Clearly, these stories originated in the northern hemisphere!  They, like all primitive, cosmological myths, originate in nature’s rhythms, and follow them…hmm…okay, southern hemisphere folks: what say you?