Scars and Secrets (Part Three)

Those who believed that Jesus was indeed God's messiah could not help but read Torah differently. They saw Jesus all over creation, in the the story of Abraham and Isaac, appearing in the wrestling match between Jacob and God/angel/man. Just to name a few.

Isaiah 53 also becomes an important text for early Christians. "But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed," (53:5).

The word for bruise is chabbuwrah ( khab·bü·rä' ); it can be translated bruise, stripe, wound, blow. It was, for the earliest Christian theologians . . . the means by which the scars and secrets of life were healed. Because God did not do an end-round around suffering--rather he entered into to our suffering, shame, oppression, manipulation and abuse of which we have perpetrated . . . of which we have been the victims of.

When Jesus appears to all of the male disciples at the end of John's Gospel (the female disciples had stayed with Jesus during his honor of pain and shame . . . a lesson for another day), he has an interesting conversation with Thomas.
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When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit."

Healed from the wounds of being marginalized (by Rome and Jews alike), perpetrators of violence, religiosity, competition, indifference, despair, disillusionment and despair . . . the first disciples (both men and women Luke reminds the reader) are sent into the world to do the business of healing the corporate and personal sins of the world because of Jesus' presence among them.

It's the kind of story I have to choose to believe. Every day, before breakfast and before my feet hit the cold bedroom floor I choose to believe because I think it's a story too good to not be true.

The Patsy

I mentioned that I sat on a panel Thursday night at Michigan State University as a part of a program led by some Christian ministers entitled Join the Conversation—a dialogue about faith and spirituality.

Toward the end of a long night (in which we talked about theodicy, creation, evolution, theism, atheism, war, non-violence, ethics) one of the panelists ended the discussion with this story.

This is my recollection of his account.

When I was a boy, I remember responding to the story of Jesus without realizing it. I was watching a dramatic production entitled “The Patsy” starring Sammy Davis Jr. In the film, Davis plays the lone minority in a regiment full of white soldiers. Davis is ridiculed, mocked and despised. The soldiers tell him to go and get striped paint, and Davis goes to get it. When he comes back he’s jeered. The tell Davis to get a left-handed monkey-wrench, Davis goes but has no lock securing one from the commissary. He is, the quintessential “patsy.”

Towards the end of the production, the soldiers decide to play a mean trick on Davis. They take him out to the grenade field and hand him a grenade that is not operable. Davis, however, does not know this. One of the soldiers pulls the pin and all the soldiers, who’ve gathered for the tom-foolery, scatter like birds, leaving the young soldier all by himself.

They look back and see something they had no language for. Davis is lying prostrate on the ground using his body as a human shield while screaming, “Don’t worry guys, I’ll save you. I’ll protect you. Run!”

“And that was my first introduction to the gospel,” said this converted follower of Jesus who was now sitting next to me almost fifty years later.