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| Easter: Execute and humiliate. The gospel story is happening right now in Ukraine |
| 2023-04-14 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. [REGNUM] The gospel story of a Savior who was slandered, arrested, and falsely convicted is repeated in the lives of His faithful. There is also a crowd that shouts "crucify" and a procurator who passes a false sentence. The history of the world in its spiritual dimension is the history of how the darkness tries to extinguish the light. In the Orthodox world, Passion Week is underway. The story that we remember these days - about how the Son of God was betrayed, slandered, subjected to torture and painful execution - looks too familiar to us. The words of the holy Apostle Paul " but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews, but folly to the Greeks " (1 Corinthians 1:23) may seem incomprehensible to us. What else is Christ, if not the Crucified? This is known to everyone, even completely unbelieving people. Even as a child, in the deep Soviet years, when I knew nothing about Christianity, I nevertheless knew that Christ was the Crucified. His images on the Cross could be seen in classical art broadcasts or in anti-religious cartoons. The cross has been in our world for a very long time - a religious symbol, revered by some and rejected by others. Some wear his image around their neck as a sign of confession of faith, others just as a decoration, others watch films where the Crucifix is used to fight evil spirits. But in the time of the holy Apostle Paul, the cross was not a revered religious sign. He was an unbearably terrible instrument of torture and execution. The caustic atheists who compare it to a gallows and ask if we would wear small underwear gallows around our necks remind us of something important that we often lose sight of. The cross is not a gallows, the cross is much more terrible. Once I saw an old photograph: in the Wild West at the end of the 19th century, some famous bandit was hanged in public. The bandit, whose neck vertebrae will crack in a loop in a minute, looks into the crowd with an impudent defiant smile. Like, he can be executed, but not humiliated. In the ancient world, they knew not only how to execute, but also how to humiliate. The executed man was to remain in people's memory not as a hero boldly challenging his enemies. His courageous death was not to be legendary. On the contrary, she had to be so pathetic, shameful and disgusting that people would try to forget her as soon as possible. Ancient empires - Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians - knew how to make a clear message out of execution: whoever defies us dies not only painfully, but also in extreme humiliation, writhing and writhing in front of everyone. The Romans brought this dark art to perfection. The man was first beaten with scourges that tore out pieces of flesh from the body, then they were forced to drag the horizontal bar of the cross to the place of execution, then they nailed the man by the wrists and legs so that the chest was stretched, and the man could exhale only by rising on his pierced limbs. Because of this, the crucified, already turned into a piece of bloodied meat, twitched all the time on the cross. The blood attracted swarms of flies, and often birds, which pecked out the eyes of the executed while still alive. It is not surprising that in Rome this type of execution was reserved for slaves. A Roman, even a criminal, could be executed in some other way, but not like that. A Roman citizen could not be subjected to the monstrous humiliation of the cross; this cast a shadow of shame on the whole of Rome. Against this background, the preaching of the apostles that the Crucified One had risen from the dead, and moreover, He is the Lord, Savior and Judge of the world, sounded incredibly scandalous. It was not a big problem for the pagans to deify a person. There were many gods, and the border between people and gods was not impenetrable. But glorious, powerful people, winners and arbiters of the destinies of millions, were subject to deification (“apotheosis”). This is a bit like a tendency to glorify the darkest tyrants of the twentieth century, which some people are subject to in our time. In the pagan world, such glorification was a matter of course. Strength, power, mysterious power to subdue people and events, which manifested itself in the ability to crush their enemies, fill up their fields with corpses, crucify them by the thousands along the roads, was considered something supernatural and godlike. But to regard as God a man who not only did not deal with His enemies, but died at their hands the most humiliating death reserved for slaves - this seemed to the pagans something completely absurd. The Jews, on the contrary, believed in the One God, who was “holy,” that is, absolutely different, separate, alien to the world He created. The sermon that God not only incarnated in the face of man, but also suffered torture and death at the hands of His creatures, seemed to them completely wild. The words "Christ", "Messiah", literally "The Anointed One" were supposed to mean the righteous King, who was destined with the help of God to throw out the hated Romans and establish a kingdom of justice, peace and prosperity. The Messiah was supposed to put the enemies of His people to a cruel death, and not die at their hands. Nevertheless, the preaching of the apostles first swept the Roman Empire, and then all the continents. God came into this world and wanted to take the very last place in it. He was embodied in the simplest family of an artisan, in a politically weak people, who for almost all of their history passed under one conqueror, then under another. He lived a life full of labors and hardships, and, finally, he took the very last place that can only be and which everyone would like to avoid - on the Cross. God identifies himself with the weak, the outcast, the slaves, the trampled. And gradually the idea began to penetrate into the consciousness of people that in the person of the poor, the beggar, the prisoner, the sick, they meet God himself. Their true relationship to Him is shown in their relationship to them. It happened slowly and with great difficulty, but we now live in a world that is shaped by the gospel. Even people who are fiercely hostile to the Christian faith live and think in a world that was created precisely by the preaching of the apostles. In the course of the current struggle for "minority rights", it is customary, in particular, to slander the Christian missionaries who "destroyed" the culture and way of life of many peoples of Asia, Africa and America, and neo-pagans add "and Europe." But the very idea that the victors owe something to the vanquished, and the strong to the weak, would have seemed very strange to the ancient pagans. Behind her, as behind so much of our world that we are accustomed to and take for granted, stands the same proclamation of God becoming man and dying at the hands of His creatures for their eternal salvation. The history of the world in its spiritual dimension is the history of how the grace of God works in a world afflicted with sin; how the darkness tries to extinguish the light - and cannot. The Church of Christ has faced persecution many times, and we see how this is happening right now in Ukraine. People are expelled from their temples and monasteries, they face slander, insults, beatings and arrests. The gospel story of a Savior who was slandered, arrested, and falsely convicted is repeated in the lives of His faithful. There is also a crowd that shouts "crucify" and a procurator who passes a false sentence. But we already know how this story ends - the Resurrection from the dead. April 13, 2023 Sergey Khudiev |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 While the other two who were crucified with Him died from the effects of the crucification, Christ died from a broken heart. |
| Posted by: Slats Snore5077 2023-04-14 06:53 |