Lunch with Bill

I had lunch with Bill this week. We have lunch every so often to solve the world’s problems. How are we doing? This week we circled around the problem presented by a new book we’re reading together. It’s “Inventing the Passion” by Arthur J. Dewey. Dewey explores the Passion narratives in the five (sic) Gospels. Are they eye witness accounts? Memories? History? Imaginative constructions from remembered stories? Or? We didn’t spend much time delving into the book. Instead we told each other stories from our lives about coping with pain: small, local Passions. Bill mentioned a woman who lost four family members within a very short time. She had questions. Why had this calamity happened? Why had God let it happen? How to cope? How to go on? He gave her Rabbi Kushner’s book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” May it help her. What helped the followers of Jesus to cope with his arrest, trial, and crucifixion? Interestingly, Dewey writes that no early depictions of the crucifixion have been found; while depictions of Jesus, the Good Shepard, have been. Why one and not the other? Was the crucifixion too painful to remember? Who hasn’t been told after a painful event: “Just put it out of your mind.” Forget about it. Don’t let it get to you. Maybe the followers tried to do that. Jesus had been murdered, so that he would be forgotten. Crucifixion was the way the Roman rulers tried to erase dangerous low-life scum. They were dead and, the Romans hoped, forgotten; never to be remembered. That’s what they wanted from crucifixions. Did Jesus’s followers think he was low life scum, after all? Even though once, they had hoped he was the Anointed One? After a while, after the crying, after the anger, the followers did something unexpected. They had dinner together; they had memorial dinners in the Roman tradition of eulogizing heroes at parties. But how could someone crucified be a hero? To his followers, Jesus even crucified was a hero, and they ignored what the Roman authorities wanted and remembered him. The dinners were political acts; being remembered, Jesus was not erased. In fact, as Luke 24 has it, he was not only viewed as the host, but he fed his followers, as he had the night before he was handed over. Jesus is still remembered at table; he hasn’t been erased. However, erasure continues to be the favored method for disposing of pesky people. For example, one church I know called the police on the homeless people congregating there. The vans came, the low life scum were put in, away they went, problem eliminated, and the people forgotten. And yet, some of us still remember.