easter musings

This was written last year. Thought it belongs here more than on the pink blog, which is where it was originally posted.

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In the past few months, I've been thinking, or trying to think, about justice. This is partly thanks to Tania Roy, whose Monday evening classes on post-traumatic writing have been the inspiring focus of much angsty yet enriching intellectual labour in this last semester; partly also thanks to a much-put-upon Jewish prophet by the name of Ezekiel; and last but not least, to the New Testament accounts of Jesus' last hours before and during the crucifixion.

Familiarity breeds contempt, we are told - which is why once in a while we need new eyes to see the world afresh. And what worse than to grow so familiar with the old stories from the Bible - after all, they've made their way even into secular language, they structure so much of the way we see the world - that we fail to see the wonder in them, the sheer preposterousness of what they propose. The Monday evening classes have helped to defamiliarise the Passion narrative for me, and because of them, I've been thinking anew about legal systems, claims to justice, truth claims, perjury, testimony and witness. And that is why I've suddenly seen, as if for the first time, just what a travesty of justice took place on Good Friday.

Rewind to a cold stone courtyard almost two thousand years ago. It is early spring. Just after midnight. There is a feeling of expectancy in the air - something is about to happen. One of the great superstar religious teachers of the day has just been arrested. Look, there He is, next to that pillar, being taken to speak to the governor. Everyone wonders what will come of all this; no one dares to ask.

So we see Jesus being shunted about from one tribunal to the next, all of which fail to find any real reason for convicting Him of any crime.

In John's Gospel, we read:

'Then they led Jesus from Caiaphas to the Praetorium, and it was early morning. But they themselves did not go into the Praetorium, lest they should be defiled, but that they might eat the Passover. Pilate then went out to them and said, "What accusation do you bring against this man?"They answered and said to him, "If He were not an evildoer, we would not have delivered Him up to you."Then Pilate said to them, "You take Him and judge Him according to your law."Therefore the Jews said to him, "It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death," that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled which He spoke, signifying by what death He would die.'

(NKJV, John 18:28 - 32)

In other words, what took place in Jerusalem that day was a blatant case of human rights abuse. Firstly, His accusers were unable to give any account of the crimes He had committed, resorting instead to the tautologous equivocation of claiming that they would not have brought him to trial if he had not been a criminal in the first place. I'd like to see someone try that one in any legitimate court of law today. (Perhaps a contemporary equivalent might be the invasion of Iraq on the basis of its possession of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.)

And then, instead of being given a fair trial within his own ethnic and religious tradition, as was the custom, Jesus was brought before a foreign tribunal for no other reason than the fact that this foreign tribunal had the authority to put people to death. Basically, what was happening was this: his enemies wanted him dead; they knew they had no case; they had to figure out how to kill him while still appearing to have the law on their side; so they handed him over to some foreigners who conveniently happened to have the legal right to execute prisoners.

And He acceded to all this, allowed all this, indeed, made all this happen.

We sometimes miss the powerful human drama pulsing through the story of Good Friday. It is a story of how greed, ambition and cowardice combined with the existing power structures of the day to put to death the only person who has ever deserved not to die. Yet by missing the human drama we miss the larger divine message as well. So much for all our meliorist optimism about human potential, our trust in the systems of law and governance we have set up through the exercise of our reason. What happened on Good Friday is a humbling reminder of human fallibility, of our tremendous potential for messing up even the best of what God gives to us.

And yet we call this Friday 'Good'.

Because God subjected himself to all our screwed-up Machiavellian manoeuvrings, just so that His greater purposes could be accomplished. And accomplished they were, on the Easter after Good Friday. Because what that empty tomb tells us is that all this crap, all our crap - the petty politics, the power struggles, the loyalties betrayed, the imaginative tortures, the institutionalised corruption: all of these things that we despair of precisely because, when we really look at them, we see our own smudgy fingerprints, our complicity in their lies and evasions - all our crap which makes life so much less than what it could be, is not the final story. Because, for some unfathomable reason called love, we know that there is a God whom all these things cannot keep down, who has somehow lived through all of this - no, died through all of this for us; and over whom even death had no ultimate power.

And for this reason we have hope.
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