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swasdiva2 months ago

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Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God has its symbolic roots in the holocausts offered in the temple by the Jewish priests to cleanse the people's sin, but I'm not here for doctrine.

Here's how I look at the cross. To think it idolizes or worships murder completely misses the point. What have you endured in your life? What pain? What anguish and oppression? The journey of the cross is a condensed version of human life at its most vulnerable. Jesus on the cross represents: the slavery of the old American south, Darfur, the Cambodian Killing Fields, hits put out by drug cartels, child prostitution, i.e. any and every form of debasement and physical/mental/emotional torture a human being has ever endured through the course of history. The cross is grizzly because it's real. Horror happens. But I can look to Jesus, a man of God - the Son of God to me - who endured hell and not only overcame it by his resurrection, but offered the hope of our own personal resurrection, meaning, after all you suffer in life, there is a paradise awaiting you, there is rest, and peace, and relief and true love. Evil is not the end, nor is death. I look to the cross as a symbol of faith; faith to me is hope without doubt, hope that endures struggle, a hope so profound it feels like it's already happened, that it's not something in the distant future but existing eternally. To see the cross only for the murder is to miss the compassion of the struggle, to miss the mirror God is holding up to our own lives. Jesus said (I paraphrase) "Whoever welcomes the least of these welcomes me, and welcomes not only me but the one who sent me." God doesn't just want you to see the gore of the cross, feel disgusted, and stop there. He wants you to take your reaction, your disturbance, and turn your gaze outward to others. We should ask ourselves, "Who else is suffering on a cross?" And we should be moved to care for them. We are all the least of these, and when we help each other we help Jesus, and in turn help God. We are seeing the naked face of God in those whose suffering we alleviate. So to see not just Jesus on the cross, but ourselves and our own suffering, and then how the cross became the promise of an end to our suffering, that grasps its true meaning. Once you get past the gore of the act and find the story of humanity, the meaning becomes clear.

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  ConquerorWyrm2 months ago
  
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  I applaud your response. I still find it distressing to linger even for a second on a method of execution as a means of contemplation, but that is just a personal dislike of mine for representations of murder. What my true question was though, is what if the method of execution most common in that time and period was not crucifixion on the cross, but crucifixion on the stake (impaling) or the wheel? Would the same power of symbology be applied, had the noose been used than had the cross?
  
  It took generations, even centuries, before the use of the cross became the dominant method of identification amongst Christians. Why that over and above other iconography such as the symbol of the fish, that secret code hinting at a "fisher of men" that psuedo-christian idolaters have resurrected and adorned their mini-vans with (minus that very un-Christian version of that symbol showing the fish hatefully devouring the Darwin fish joke-response to such idolatry)? If the method of execution were changed, would the iconography? Would gallows had replaced crosses adorning the steeples of churches for the last 1700 years?
  
  I have always gotten a strange mix of answers whenever I pondered this aloud. Most often I get some dogmatic response such as that by Endoscopy above, expecting me to swallow a camel in a single gulp without a single hint of exploration into the possibilities of alternate methods of execution and the symbolic representations which, following the logic of the cross symbol, would have followed. Yours, I admit, is perhaps the best I've ever encountered but you still focus only on that one method of torture and the symbol which follows. I beg you, take a look again and replace the method of execution with others common throughout the world, both prior or technologically similar yet temporally later and tell me, would that method of murder had resulted in the same representative iconography?
  
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    swasdiva2 months ago
    
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    Thank you, and I do see what you're saying. Honestly, I think if it had been any other method of execution there *would indeed* be alternate symbology. I chuckled a bit when you brought up the wheel, considering the eight-spoke wheel of Buddhism. Wouldn't that have been an interesting coincidence? If Jesus had been hung (wow... that came out wrong...), I don't doubt Christianity would've adopted a stylized noose, perhaps amalgamated to an infinity symbol? Or hell, take the fish and turn it on its side, and there's a noose. Anyway, I ramble.
    
    I can talk about this from out the veil of dogma because I've been religiously curious since I was ten, much to my poor parents' discomfiture, so I don't understand people who get offended when someone thinks critically about faith, any faith. Um, hello, Jesus was the king of making people think critically about dogma vs. faith. As long as respect is involved, it never hurts to gain knowledge or understanding. Wow, rambling again! My point: I agree with you.
    
    That, and you correctly said the cross was a later symbol of Christianity. I know Constantine was said to have that vision of the cross in the sky during battle, which inspired him to institute Christianity as Rome's religion. Maybe the cross as a symbol became popular because of him? Also, maybe it became popular as the ubiquity of crucifixion phased out. Because it was no longer commonplace, its most popular association transformed its meaning. The same could be said, in reverse, sadly, about the swastika. The swastika was a sacred and holy symbol for certain American Indian tribes long before its evil Nazi connotation. Now everyone only sees it as evil, just as now Christians see the cross as redemption instead of strict murder.
    
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