#there's a reason the christological allegory is such an important and widely used trope

[gerdy-sertorius]

For They Know Not What They Do

The Story that is Christianity

Many have written pages on pages on pages of how to understand Christianity. Two of my favorite books of all time, “Mere Christianity” and “Orthodoxy”, both approach the issue of what the core of Christianity is for the layman. The intellectual (or perhaps a more accurate term would be “armchair theologian”) has even more access to works ascertaining precisely what Christianity is. I would say that is a fantastic way of getting to know our place within the world and our relationship with the God that ensures every atom moves properly. I also tend to view these works, seminal as they may be, as incomplete. But I suppose they aren’t trying to be complete, really. That’s because they are only building upon a completed text, of course, one they can hardly re-establish while remaining true to it and simultaneously expanding. They aren’t going to have the spark of the original.

But that’s not my problem with the modern discourse around Christianity. I understand that they lack the spark of the original. When dealing with direct divine inspiration, I would imagine that tends to happen. My problem is that, beyond lacking the spark of the original, it doesn’t even try to come close, it doesn’t *search* for that spark. There is nothing ventured back to the original composition except as intellectual evidence for a broader thesis. That is, the Gospel, the single most important piece of literature in history, is no longer a piece of literature but a manuscript. Because the core of Christianity is not praxis or hermeneutics or any other ten dollar word. It was passed from carpenter to fishermen. Christianity is, with all else stripped away like chaff in the wind, a Story. 

It is a Story of love and betrayal. It is a Story about good vanquishing evil. It is a Story of a Bridegroom united with His Bride, finally redeemed after constant failure and everlasting patience. It is a Story of a Father and Son, and how they, despite the pervasiveness of wickedness, would save the world from itself. It is a Story of love and the sacrifice that would naturally pour out from that love. It is a Story of undeserved grace by one party and an undeserved outburst of fury on the part of the other. It is, as odd as it is to say it, a grand Romance, one that spans across the entire history of man and especially the history of one Man in particular. It is a Story.

And like all stories, this one has a beginning. In fact, it has something before the beginning, before the very concept of time. It has a God, triune in nature, omnipotent and wholly benevolent. Now, this God is a creative God, and as such shapes the world. He forms what would become reality, all the laws of nature and mathematics, the ideas of time, of space, of matter itself, ex nihilo. He makes light and life, seas and earth and celestial bodies, animals and plants in an explosion of what can only be described as art. And He makes man, defined to be with a soul, in the imago Dei, His very image, capable of creation, capable of love, capable of making a sincere decision. The crown of what exists.

And with that, the very next day He rests, surveying His creation. He has done a good work, shrouding the world in the radiant light that He is. He has made something that continues on its own in a way, yet in another way is still eternally dependent upon Him for every action, every movement, every moment in time. Something has been created and with that beauty arises where there was none before. There is a completion to what was to be done, man being what was finally needed for the world to be properly finished. He loves the world, and He loves man. And so He rests. 

After that, He graces us with something magical. You want to know what was the first thing He gave man beyond the very life we hold so closely? The concept of romance, of marriage. Of giving one’s life over to another, of being able to truly understand another individual in a way that nobody else can. Of living your life for someone other than yourself, of being, in a way, one with another individual, fully free and without fear or reservation, only sheer, insurmountable love. It is the closest thing that we have to a relationship with Him with another individual. It is the epitome of a relationship among us, one that if we are lucky enough to have it, is the most beautiful thing we can have within the confines of this world. And He gave it to us because He loves man. 

And man loves Him, the only creature able to love establishing their love first and foremost. God created a garden, one in which it is declared that He walked with man. At every point man was covered by who God was, engaging with Him and with each other in the beauty of merely being able to speak, to talk, to be in conversation with the being behind everything that happens at any point in time, to talk to someone unimaginably beyond the world yet still willing to interact with it, with His greatest creation. And He offers but one demand – do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

And, of course, they do so anyway and as such are blemished by sin and therefore must be driven out of the garden, out of the sight of the God that loves them so much. With the knowledge of what evil is, evil becomes an everyday occurrence rather than the quite literally unthinkable action that it was within the garden. Their love for God is tarnished like silver being exposed to oxygen. It is still silver, no doubt, but it is difficult to tell that it was the same thing as the genuine article, and while the value inherent within it will still be present (the silver atoms aren’t leaving anytime soon), it would require the level of atomic precision to return it to its original form, something we are entirely incapable of doing. 

With that, God can no longer speak with them, walk with them, be with them in the same way He used to. For sin cannot exist within the sight of God, the idea is a logical impossibility. Just as matter and antimatter cannot coexist within any one location, neither can the absence of God and the presence of God. There’s one theory that the reason God was no longer able to be in the physical presence of humanity is because the sinful nature of ourselves would quite literally destroy our very personages if exposed to the sheer holiness that is Him. I don’t know if it’s true or not, and it is impossible to know, but it sure does preach well. 

Most of the remainder of the Old Testament squarely places a focus on the Jews. For his devotion to God, Abraham was given an assurance that his descendants would be specially protected by God as long as they remained faithful, and as such the Jews became the “Chosen People”. This assurance is referred to as the Abrahamic Covenant. They were gifted with the Law, which essentially was a document of divine nature that established what they could and could not do as a nation. One of the most important parts both for their society and Christianity wholesale was that of animal sacrifice, something both commonplace and unique among the Jews. Rather than in other societies, where an animal sacrifice was there to satisfy the gods and not much more, the Jews symbolically placed their sins upon the blood of a pure white lamb and then killed it as a symbol of repentance (where we get the term ‘scapegoat’ from). And if they continued to abide by that Abrahamic Covenant and showed a dedication to faithfulness, then God would accept that symbol.

Throughout the Old Testament, an intriguing turn of events would begin to rear its head – they did not remain faithful. Throughout the history of Israel, the Jews would remain stubbornly in a constant flux between faithfulness and the complete denial of basic morality. Many times they would clean up their act, so to speak, and less than a decade later fall into depravity. The majority of the Old Testament is them doing terrible stuff, getting punished, getting better, and then returning to exactly what they were doing before. As it can be understood, for a society solely existing due to God’s special favor, this was less than heartening. I want to take what may seem like a sharp turn into one of the more overlooked books of the Bible, one of the (very many) stories about a prophet attempting to bring Israel back to God and one of my favorites. 

The Book of Hosea, at least the beginning of it, is a love story between a man and his wife. Throughout the section you find this book in, it is filled with books that essentially amount to a whole bunch of sermons being combined. This is not that. This is a genuinely beautiful story, this is something that I would want to read, this is *real*. And it may well be the best summation of the Old Testament in the entire Bible. This is exactly what I was searching for with the rest of my readings, something that so perfectly encapsulates the relationship between God and those who He loves. 

Hosea was a prophet, someone who was given direction from God to return Israel to its worship of Him. Many had come before him, many would come after him. One could even say that his actions were entirely futile. But he had a calling, despite the truly unrepentant nature of Israel, and he was not exactly going to tell God of all people “no” – that was the very thing he hated so much about the society he found himself in. So he decided to follow that calling, becoming the newest prophet of Israel. 

With that came instruction from God. He was to take a certain individual as his wife, one by the name of Gomer. She was a prostitute, and more or less written off when it came to marital prospects, perhaps understandably so. But Hosea was commanded to do so, and as such took her as his wife. And Hosea took care of her, fully and totally, as a husband should, providing for her economically, emotionally, generally being an all around good husband. Why? Simply because he loved her. He loved Gomer more than anyone else within the world. Certainly more than anyone else would within the nation, what with all of the social devastation from her peers of both sexes. 

And as I’m sure you can tell, the infidelity continued throughout the marriage. Constant heartbreak on the part of Hosea, who loved his wife, with the constant rejection of the wife incapable of loving him. Yet Hosea did not cease loving her. Even when the provisions he offered to her went to those she would cheat with him on, Hosea did not cease providing for her, something that was well outside of the norm within society, when at the very least divorce was the status quo. Hosea was continuously loving his wife, and he was continuously being emotionally destroyed by her. One day, Gomer disappeared for longer than she usually did. Hosea went looking for her, and found that she was being sold into what amounted to sex slavery. And once again, against *all of the* standards of the time, he went and gathered together a small fortune to purchase her and free her. And why was that? *Because he loved her.* And the absolute kicker is, there is no record of her ever stopping her activities. Despite all of his love for her, despite everything he gave up emotionally and physically for their marriage, she would always let him down. It was her nature. To fail and hurt in the process but to always be able to return to one who would always love her, it’s heartbreaking in its tragedy. 

It’s not difficult to see the allegory between this and Israel’s repeated falls from the graces of God. A nation chosen by God in particular, one that is provided for and taken care of more than any else in the world, one he frees from backbreaking slavery, one he offers bountiful land to despite everything. A nation that is truly blessed among all others. It of all countries should be one not to turn away from the path that has been consistently positively reinforced and consistently negatively punished. Yet it still does. Because men loved darkness rather than light. Because the love offered towards us is something they took for granted. Because it is our nature to spurn that love. 

Yet there would be one moment to establish that love forever in the eyes of God, and it began with one man, by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. The humiliation of the Incarnation is something that deserves to be talked more about. God becoming man and all the wonder inherent in that is highlighted in various Christmas events and the like, but it rarely goes anywhere beyond the surface level. Another way to say it would be that the substance is highlighted, but oddly enough not the sacrifice of the thing that would eventually become Calvary. For in the Incarnation was the stripping down of Christ long before His arrest. Taken from the omnipotence of Godhood to the inability of a child, forced to flee to Egypt just so He wouldn’t be killed before He turned three years old. Losing omniscience for the insight of an infant, losing omnipotence for the physical ability of a baby. The Incarnation was the deliberate elimination of anything especially divine He had, with the sole exception of his relationship with his Father. It is hard to overstate exactly how drastic a change like this was. Imagine losing any and all sensation, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, all at once, and then entering into the world and being told to go out and live, get stuff done, have a proper life. The thought is quite frankly absurd. 

Yet all of this and more was suffered for love. For the chance to live as a person to save all people. For the beauty in finally freeing mankind from our nature of destruction to all we come in contact with. For love. Love for us, broken and fallen as we may be, entirely covered in the ink that obscures what we could be from what we are. The entrance of Christ alone into the world is a sacrifice for our sin, and it would not be the last, as I’m sure you are aware. Everything, absolutely everything orchestrated throughout the Old Testament lines up towards this moment. Everything evil and redeemed and evil and redeemed and evil and redeemed, fluctuating back and forth and forth and back for a purpose, for the ultimate evil and the ultimate redemption. All that was needed was for that very redemption to enter the world. And so He did, incapable of speaking, incapable of walking, incapable of bending the entire cosmos to Himself with one thought. The birth of Christ to Mary was, in essence, His first death. 

Jesus Christ had lived life as a man among men, with one exception. He had never sinned, not once. The evil that had plagued humanity as a whole was absent from Him, not a speckle on His fleece, for the entirety of His life. All of the absurd wickedness, every disgusting thing mankind suffers from, it was all gone from His personage. He was, morally speaking, perfection. And with that perfection comes something important. With that truly pure fleece, He was able to be a sacrifice that was more than symbolic. No longer would man slaughter a lamb, a symbol of sin, and obtain a symbol of repentance. Instead, man would commit the ultimate sin and slaughter The Lamb, The Son sent among them, and with The Son's sacrifice gain the possibility of True Repentance.

Eventually, He would begin to teach. A message of adhering to the spirit rather than the letter of the Law, which Israel was just beginning to follow. He taught forgiveness beyond what the Law said, commitment to marriage beyond what the Law said, being willing to help the fellow man beyond what the Law said. He did not supersede the Law, but He was the completion of it. Everything the Law said, He went beyond, not because He added to it, but because He fulfilled it. Everything He said was the intention of that Law, the meaning of it that had been lost to tradition for centuries. Israel had finally established a dedication to the Law and Jesus swept that rug from underneath their feet. It was the acceptance of the thought that went behind the Law rather than exactly what it said. 

And yet the position was unpopular with the people whose opinions on the subject mattered. The local Jewish ruling classes were quite comfortable with the acceptance of established law and tradition, leaving the more learned and established classes at the top. The local Roman ruling classes were quite comfortable without more religious zealotry breaking out in an area known for it. The idea of expanding upon existing Law and riling up support for and against it in an endless cycle of polarization was not in either of their interests. Yet the movement continued to grow, and it increasingly became an elephant in the room when it came to politics within the area. With that, quite reasonably, the decision was made to kill Jesus on charges of sacrilege. 

While they were taking such an action, Jesus was doing something entirely different. He was preparing Himself. He went over to a garden and began to pray, to beg, to plead for any other option. He did not want to die, He was genuinely scared of the suffering that would await Him. He sweated drops of blood throughout his prayer, such was the fear that took hold of Him. He was in agony. There was nothing He wanted less than to die an excruciatingly painful death. Yet He declares that it is His duty, that He must accept death. And that is what He does. The Romans and Jews arrive to take Him away. He does not resist. 

They brought Him before the Romans, because they, as rulers of the area, were the only ones who could prescribe capital punishment legally. There was an issue, however – nothing within Roman law actually enabled them to kill an individual for blasphemy against a god not recognized by Rome at all. So they simply decided to go with charges of treason. A similar issue arose – there was basically no evidence for a statement like that. So the governor of the region more or less tried to weasel his way out of it. He summoned Jesus, desperate for any sort of denial that would allow him to say there wasn’t enough evidence. Jesus, for his part, was cryptic, of absolutely zero help to the governor, Himself, or anyone, really. 

The governor called for something, anything to assuage the crowd from a death penalty with no evidence, something guaranteed to look bad to his higher-ups. Bargaining – citing a Jewish holiday about to come up, he offered a choice between two prisoners to be freed – Jesus or a murderous thief. Those who were present for the choice, a mob at this point, called for the freedom of the murderer. The crowd did not yield. Humiliation – a beating, fine clothes, a scepter and a crown of thorns. The crowd did not yield. A “lesser” punishment than execution – nine and twenty lashes from a cat o’ nine tails, each tail burying itself in muscle rather than skin and more or less skinning Him alive, with immeasurable pain coursing through every single second of trauma to his rapidly shrinking back. For some point of reference, the standard death penalty within the region was thirty lashes from this very whip. The crowd. did. not. yield. There would be no option other than crucifixion. They would never be content with anything else. And so the order went. 

In the most damning moment in the history of humanity, we determined we would commit Deicide. And the deed was done. Christ, God Himself on the earth, innocent in the truest sense of the word, slowly dragged His own cross through the streets of Jerusalem towards a hill called Calvary, where He would meet death. He stumbled, weak from blood loss and unable to continue to carry anything, let alone a cross. The pinnacle of mankind, brought down to being no more capable of preaching than a corpse like any other; He was thirty-three years old. And behind Him followed the very crowd that put Him to death, some jeering, some disgusted by He who would attempt to destroy Judaism, some even weeping over the demise that they themselves caused, any semblance of righteous fury gone from their eyes. 

Eventually the procession was able to make it to Calvary, at which point the crucifixion began. There are two tangentially important facts about crucifixion as a means of execution. The first is that Jewish Law states that any who die by being hanged on a tree have been cursed by God. It was considered that anyone who goes through that was abandoned by God, and it’s a generally bad omen. The second fact, somewhat more well-known, is that “crucifixion” is the root of the word “excruciating”. Crucifixion was not the means of execution generally used; it was always used in cases where an example was going to be made, due to its incredible cruelty as an execution device and its incredibly public location.

A brief overview of how exactly an individual dies would begin with both arms secured in place to the cross with nails, hammered into the wrist between the radius and ulna and directly through the median nerve. This would leave the body hanging from the overextended arms, which, apart from the immense pain such a position provides, physiologically makes it impossible to inhale. That’s where the legs being kept in place (with rope or nails) would come in, pushing the body up whenever oxygen was needed, and allowing the diaphragm to do its job. This had the added effect of causing even more pain from the scraping of the oft-scourged back against the rough wood of the cross. The process would continue until either the victim would die of asphyxiation due to exhaustion of the legs or until their legs were broken, making them incapable of continuing breathing. In total, time to die was varied but could last up to several days.

As the nails hammer into the flesh of Jesus Christ, He does not resist. As He is hoisted into an upright position as the death knell tolls and His minutes upon the earth begin counting down, He does not resist. As an innocent man being killed for a crime He did not commit, He does not resist. He is simply a Lamb walking quietly to the slaughter. The cross is beyond painful, there is nothing that could have prepared Him for such physical torture. But He does not resist. He shouts out the opening line to a song He knows well: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” He does not believe He has been abandoned by God, but in the moment, it certainly feels that way. It is hard to think of anything outside the pain of the moment. 

Voices resound around the crowd watching Him. Cries taunting Him to save Himself if He could supposedly save so many others. The apparent desecration of God is unthinkable within Jewish culture, no god of theirs could die like that. And so, in their denial of such a concept, they desecrated the only God they could ever have laid their eyes upon, the only God they ever could have spoken to, the only God who lived among them, who ate and talked and laughed among them. The Human God and the Divine Man, being scourged, crucified, abused with all manner of insults. He does not resist. The only thing He offers up out of His battered, gasping chest is a plea, not even to them: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

While I may have offered the Book of Hosea as the clearest summation of the Old Testament, those ten words are the clearest summation of the New. For despite everything, all of the suffering that we placed upon each other, for all of our sins, for everything. For the very execution of the only perfect man to ever live, for the very execution of the God who knows and loves every single individual, we are forgiven. Yes, it is in our nature to betray that love constantly, it is in our nature to harm everyone we come in contact with, it is in our nature to hate and kill and lie. But we are forgiven regardless. 

Jesus Christ makes one final shout to His Father, a proclamation that He is coming, if you will, and dies, the last breath of oxygen leaving His lungs long before the expected time of death. And in that moment, everything changes. The scapegoat is slaughtered. All the sins of mankind, past, present, and future, are placed upon His shoulders in a horrific mask of wickedness. Mankind has had their own sins cleansed in the greatest show of love possible, the brutal self-sacrifice required to keep all of us away from the fruits of our own actions. With Jesus shrouded in the infinite sins of humanity, God is unable to even look at His own dying Son, forced to turn His face away from the evil that has subsumed Him. Even the fury that would have been leveled at the crucifixion is placed on no other shoulders than the victim of it. We as a collective have, through the most heinous act in history, been redeemed of our heinous acts.

The eternal salvation of mankind is not the only thing that happens. The sky goes black instantly. Tremors begin to shake the earth and thunder shakes the skies. Dead men stand up and begin to walk, reunited with their family in a way that the Christ who just died could not be, carrying the sins of man and unable to stand within the presence of God. And within the temple, something curious happens. The veil that blocked the room to where the Jews believed the physical presence of God resided was torn asunder. No longer is man forced to use a proxy to commune with God, no longer is man separated from the One who loves them so much. Mankind, it could be said, is back in Eden, back before everything started. 

Jesus died quickly, so unlike those beside Him who had their legs broken, there was yea, a spear piercing His heart also. He was taken down from the cross and buried in an actual tomb, courtesy of a rich follower. Several days passed, and on Easter, the tomb was found by a contingent of women to be empty with the exception of burial wrappings, much to their eternal surprise. Despite the remainder of Jesus’s followers remaining in a combination of shock and depression, they too eventually made their way to the tomb and found it empty as described. It was empty.

At the crucifixion, at the condemnation of God to death and His willingness to do that for humanity, the devil rejoiced. In God’s love for us, He did exactly what the devil wanted. To remove Himself from the picture, to call for the death of Himself. But there was something that a created being like the devil could never understand. For death was artificial. It was not in the original world, it was not inherent to life, as much as it might seem otherwise. Death was a consequence of man’s sin, and while that sin was upon Christ, His death had washed it away. In one glorious, triumphant moment, the enemy of man for so long, death itself, was defeated by Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God. 

For God was not constrained by institutions that only exist as a consequence of evil. He was the one who established those institutions, and in the death of Christ, He could overthrow those institutions while simultaneously ending mankind’s eternal culpability for sin. And so Christ erupted out of the grave, and with it the grave ended. Death, the bitter rival of humanity from the beginning of time, was never going to have an impact again. For love, God died an excruciating death. For love, God refused to die. For love, we have been saved by Him. 

The most common analogy offered by Jesus between Him and those who follow Him is that of the Bridegroom and the Bride, each desperately in love with the other, each willing to give everything for the sake of the other. We can never be the perfect Bride, that much has been made clear. But in the eyes of the perfect Bridegroom, we’ve already been made perfect. No matter how much evil we purvey, no matter how broken of an individual we are, we are made perfect in the cleansing blood spilled from the sacrifice of the Lamb. All the grime that is us, every evil action we take, it has all been scrubbed clean off. For love.