Ugliness on Display
The artificial construct of the ladder of putting simpler creatures at the bottom and the animal with the complex brain at the top. If you follow the medieval model, you might even add beings such as angels higher still. C.S. Lewis writes of the range of goodness and evil widening as one moves up the ladder.
One can hardly think of a bad earthworm, but one might think of a dog as being either well-behaved or naughty. As a rational function, the capacity for trainable responses, and the application of the will increase, and the range between good and evil choices widens. If we affirm the existence of angels, we might imagine how gloriously good or frighteningly evil they might choose to be. We don’t have to imagine how wide the distinctions are in human choices, we live them and witness them.
On The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday we encounter again, in sacred drama, human ugliness on display. We absorb the confusing unfolding of human cruelty. Power structures cling to power, using deception, persuasion, and force. The innocent Teacher, is vilified, dehumanized, and dismissed. His message of love and peace is ignored, and the Son of God is crucified.
The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward.
I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.
The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced;
therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
he who vindicates me is near. (Isaiah 50:5-8a)
This passage from Isaiah is the prophet’s poetic depiction of his own mistreatment and rejection. It conveys his resolution that he would look not to what people think of him, but only to his own role in what God was accomplishing. His courage came from what God has asked of him. They are verses that Christians from the beginning have associated with what God was accomplishing in Christ through the Passion. When a group completely dismisses the value and humanity of someone, they stoop to a horrific level of cruelty, it is quite ugly, indeed, the picture of human sinfulness.
The term “sin” in use in the common Greek of the first century, hamartion, is connected with the experience of the archer when the archer “misses the mark”. The Roman authorities, and the Jewish rulers and priests, were indeed missing the mark. We should say, all of humanity misses it. God, sent the Word, the Son of God into the world to redeem the world. Those in power saw Jesus not as Redeemer, but as a threat: they beat and executed him.
The more ancient use of the term hamartion, the use in Greek philosophy centuries earlier, carried the meaning, “monstrous”. When someone or something had its intended form, but was then twisted unrecognizably, it looked grotesque. Another passage from Isaiah, called one of the Suffering Servant Songs, seems to match this notion:
See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up and shall be very high.
Just as there were many who were astonished at him—so marred was his appearance,
beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals—so he shall startle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which had not been told them they shall see,
and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. (Isaiah 52:13-15)
This and similar passages from Isaiah describe a servant whose appearance was so marred the onlookers could hardly look upon him. In the older use of the word, the figure seemed the very picture of sin, that is, monstrous to look upon. Consider how St. Paul, speaking of Christ, the Reconciler writes this to the Christians in Corinth:
For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin,
so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:12)
This communicates something of an exchange: Christ who knew no sin, changed places, became sin, that we sinners might become what he is, the righteousness of God. On the cross, Jesus was twisted into an unrecognizable form of himself. In this mystery, he was spiritually taking our twisted sinful nature upon himself. The people’s treatment of Christ was our ugliness on display. It turned the beautiful human and divine person of Christ into a picture profoundly grotesque. It is acutely hard to look upon Jesus in agony on the cross.
On Palm Sunday, in Holy Week, and every time we think deeply about the love of God conveyed in his self-offering, we are pulled within the embrace of his loving arms that are outstretched for us. It is the ugliness of human cruelty that brings about such suffering, but it is the beauty of divine love that calls us back into union with God, the Lover of sinful humanity.
