God doesn’t want angry worshipers.

Matthew 5.23-24.

No doubt you’re familiar with angry Christians. There sure are a lot of them. Too many of them. So many of them, certain pagans are pretty sure we’re all that way; it’s the only kind of Christian they’ve ever met. They grew up around angry Christians, and as far as they can tell, it’s our default setting.

Since anger is a pretty obvious work of the flesh—whether you call it wrath, ill temper, fury, rage, or “a brutal temper” as The Message puts it Ga 5.20 —why is this? In my experience angry Christians go out of their way to justify their anger as best they can. It’s “righteous anger,” directed against sin or injustice. Of course, in practice it’s never just directed towards those abstract concepts; it’s directed towards the people who commit ’em. And since everybody sins, and most people are unjust, it’s directed towards a lot of people. Particularly political opponents.

And in practice, it’s never all that righteous. Jesus forgives sinners, and orders us to forgive sinners, and love our enemies. Do angry Christians do this? Nope! At best, they’ll shun their enemies, and be apathetic towards them, but too often they do this passive-aggressive, “I’m fighting you because your defeat is ultimately what’s best for you, and ultimately that’s love,” only it’s not.

Not only does Jesus not want his followers to live in anger, he orders us to be rid of it, and make peace with our enemies, before we worship. Yep, that’s in the Sermon on the Mount too.

Matthew 5.23-24 KWL

23“So when you offer your gift on the altar,

if you remember, right there,

your sibling has something against you,

24leave your gift there before the altar

and first go be reconciled with your sibling.

Then come back and offer your gift.”

Christians tend to skim over this teaching because we don’t do the same sort of ritual offerings as the ancient Hebrews. Usually we do good deeds, or contribute to our churches, and figure we’re doing ’em for Jesus, and that’s our offering. This “gift on the altar” thingy—lots of us don’t even know what that is.

What it is, is an act of love. The Law commanded the Hebrews to perform certain ritual sacrifices throughout the year, which represented their continual formal relationship with the LORD, and his forgiveness of their sins. But gift offerings weren’t required at all. You didn’t have to do them. They were spelled out in the bible because people wanted to do them—they loved the LORD and wanted to do more for him. So the LORD spelled out to Moses what acts he considered appropriate and appreciated, and these are the gift offerings. They’re not done for show; God’ll ignore those. They’re not done so God will owe us a favor; he’s not a petty pagan god who does that sort of thing. They’re purely done out of people’s love of God.

Now, that’s something Christians can relate to: There are plenty of things we do for God that are done purely out of love for him. We’ll sing to him more. We’ll do more good works for him. We’ll put extra money in the offering plate. We’ll create art for him—good art, not those kitschy paintings of Jesus hugging people. We’ll write music for him—good music, not pop songs that are actually meant to give us a music career. We’ll ask him what more we can do, and the Holy Spirit will give us some ideas.

But before we do anything extra for God—before we go above and beyond our usual Christian obligations—Jesus instructs us to go be reconciled with your sibling. And lest you think Jesus only means our Christian sisters and brothers, remember the Sermon on the Mount was originally preached to an audience of Jews, not Christians, and their “siblings” were their fellow Jews—religious or not. Go restore your relationship with your neighbor—and then come back and give your love-gift.

Otherwise God doesn’t want our love-gifts. Because if we refuse to love others like Jesus tells us to, we clearly don’t love him enough to obey him.

Mary the Magdalene discovers Jesus’s empty sepulcher.

John 20.1-11.

The gospels manage to give slightly different accounts of Jesus’s resurrection. Even the synoptic gospels, which are usually in sync, aren’t. Thus creating “bible difficulties” which many Christians kinda drive themselves bonkers trying to unjumble. I don’t, because as any cops can tell you: Sometimes eyewitnesses, who were there and totally saw everything, won’t all say the exact same thing. If they do, it means they got together to get their story straight—which now means their testimonies are compromised. Whereas what we have in the gospels are uncompromised testimonies. So don’t worry about ’em!

Anyway one of the facts they do get straight is Mary the Magdalene was there. In Mark and John, she was the only one there—and the first to see Jesus. In Matthew she’s with “the other Mary,” Mt 28.1 who’s probably Jesus’s aunt Mary, or “Mary of James,” Lk 24.10 meaning James’s mom; the wife of Zebedee. In Luke she’s with Joanna as well. Lk 24.10 But in Mark and John she appears to be alone. The long ending of Mark has her see Jesus right away; John has her see nothing yet.

John 20.1-2 KWL

1On the first day of the week,

in the dark part of the morning,

Mary the Magdalene comes to the sepulcher,

and sees the stone was taken away from the sepulcher.

2So Mary runs away.

She comes to Simon Peter,

and to the other student whom Jesus loves,

and tell them, “They took the Master out of the sepulcher!

We couldn’t figure out where they put him!”

The “we” in verse 2 reveals other people were with Mary at that time, and no doubt these women speculated where Jesus’s corpse might be. I translated οὐκ οἴδαμεν/uk ídamen, “we haven’t known” as “we couldn’t figure out,” because it’s better English.

Yeah, Matthew and Luke depict the women going to wherever the Eleven were staying, and telling them what the angel(s) had told them. John—written by John, who’s this “student whom Jesus loves” in verse 2—recalls it differently. He and Peter were together in some other place. Neither bothers to go inform the other nine what’s going on; they run to the sepulcher themselves… as if they can figure out what happened where the women couldn’t. Men, I tell ya.

Easter.

On 5 April 33, before the sun rose at 5:23 a.m. in Jerusalem, Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. Executed less than 48 hours before, he became the first human on earth to be resurrected.

Jesus died the day before Passover. This was deliberate. This way his death fulfilled many of the Passover rituals. Because of this relationship to Passover, many Christians actually call this day some variation of the Hebrew פֶּסַח/Pesákh, “Passover.” In Greek and Latin (and Russian), it’s Pascha; in Danish Påske, Dutch Pasen, French Pâques, Italian Pasqua, Spanish Pascua, Swedish Påsk.

But in many Germanic-speaking countries, including English, we use the ancient pagan word for April, Eostur. In German this becomes Ostern; in English Easter. Because of the pagan origins of this word, certain Christians avoid it and just call the day “Resurrection Sunday.” Which is fine, but confuses non-Christians who don’t realize why we’re acting like a bunch of snowflakes.

Easter is our most important holiday. Christmas tends to get the world’s focus (and certainly that of merchants), but it’s only because Christmas doesn’t stretch their beliefs too far. Everybody agrees Jesus was born; we only differ on details. But Easter is about how Jesus rose from the dead, and that’s a sticking point for a whole lot of pagans. They don’t buy it.

They don’t even like it: When they die, they wanna go to heaven and stay there. Resurrection? Coming back? In a body? No no no. And we’ll even find Christians who agree with them: They’ll claim Jesus didn’t literally return from death, but exists in some super-spiritual ghostly form which returned to heaven. And that’s where we’ll go too: Heaven. No resurrection; not necessary. Yes it’s a heretic idea, but a popular one.

So to pagans, Easter’s a myth. It’s a nice story about how we Christians think Jesus came back from the dead, but they insist it comes from ancient times, back when people believed anyone could come back from the dead if they knew the right magic spell. Really it’s just a metaphor for spring, new life, rebirth; just like eggs and baby chicks and bunnies. They’ll celebrate that. With chocolate, fancy hats, brunch, and maybe an egg hunt.

But to us Christians, Easter happened. It validates Jesus; without his resurrection we’d have no clue whether he was just one of many great moral teachers, or someone to seriously bet our lives upon. It proves he’s everything he said he is. Proved it for the first Christians, who risked (and suffered) fearful deaths for him. Proves it for today’s Christians, some of whom do likewise.

Jesus dies. And takes our sin with him.

Mark 15.33-39, Matthew 27.45-54, Luke 23.44-48, John 19.28-37.

Around noon on 3 April 33, it got dark, and stayed that way till Jesus died. Obviously God was behind it, but we don’t know how. No solar eclipses in that part of the world, that time of year, so that’s out. Volcanoes have been known to darken the sky. So has weather. Regardless of how he pulled it off, God decided he wanted his Son’s death to happen in the dark.

As Jesus was hanging on the cross, various folks were taunting him, and Matthew describes the head priests, scribes, and elders even taunting him with a bit of Psalm 22:

Matthew 27.43 KWL

“He follows God?

God has to rescue him now, if he wants him

—for he said ‘I’m God’s son.’ ”

Psalm 22.8 LXX (KWL)

He hopes for the Lord, who has to release him,

who has to save him because he wants him.

Considering this psalm was so obviously getting fulfilled by Jesus’s death, taunting him with it just showed how far the Judean leaders’ unbelief went. They really didn’t think the psalm applied to Jesus any. It absolutely did.

This is why, round the ninth hour after sunrise (roughly 2:30 PM) Jesus shouted out the first line of that psalm: Elí Elí, lamá azavettáni?/“My God my God, for what reason do you abandon me?” Ps 22.1 I know; it sounds different after the gospels’ authors converted it to Greek characters.

Problem is, by this point the scribes seem to have left, ’cause nobody understood a word he said. Jesus was quoting the original Hebrew, but only scribes knew Hebrew; the Judeans spoke Aramaic, and the Romans spoke Greek. Since Elo’í sounds a little like Eliyáhu, “Elijah,” that’s the conclusion they leapt to: He must be calling for Elijah. So they added that to their mocking. “Wait; let’s see whether Elijah rescues him.”

In our day many Christians have leapt to a different conclusion—a heretic one. They might know Jesus was quoting scripture, but think he quoted it ’cause the Father literally, just then, did abandon him. Seriously.

Here’s the theory. When the lights went out, this was the point when Jesus became the world’s scapegoat: The sins of the entire world were placed upon his head, Lv 16.20-22 so that when he died, our sin died with him. Which is totally possible, ’cause that’s how the scapegoat ritual was meant to work in Leviticus. Thing is, the scriptures never spell out just how Jesus substitutionarily atoned for our sins, nor when the transfer was made. The world going dark just feels like a good, dramatic time for such an event to happen.

Here’s where the theory goes wonky: After this sin-transfer was made to a scapegoat, someone was supposed to turn this goat loose in the wilderness to die. In Jesus’s case, he could hardly wander off; his wrists and ankles were nailed to a cross. He could hardly wander off… so these Christians figure the Father must’ve removed himself. Others insist the Father removed himself because he finds sin so very offensive. He couldn’t bear to watch, so he dimmed the lights (as if God can’t see in the dark) and turned his face away from his beloved, but defiled, Son.

Here’s why it’s all heresy: God is One, and the trinity is indivisible. You can’t separate the Son from the Father. They’re not two seperate beings; they’re One. The rest of us humans are separate beings from the Father, yet Paul stated nothing can separate us from his love. Ro 8.38-39 So if that’s the case, how in creation could anything, even sin, separate God the Son from God the Father? Nope; not gonna work.

The idea of the Father turning his face away is popular—especially since it’s wormed its way into Christian worship music—but there’s no biblical basis for it. Just a lot of Christians who hate sin, who kinda like the idea God hating it so much he’d leave… so don’t you sin, or God’ll quit on you. It’s a great way to scare the dickens out of sinners. But if it were that easy to drive God away, you’d think the devil’s work would’ve driven God entirely off the planet. Ironically I find a lot of Calvinists, folks fond of insisting nothing’s mightier than God, likewise teaching the idea that the Father turned his face away from his innocent Son—instead of meeting the defeated enemy of sin head-on.

I could rant on, but let’s step away from the really bad theology, and quote what the gospels did say happened when the lights went out.

Jesus confuses Herod Antipas.

Luke 23.4-12.

All the gospels tell of Jesus’s suffering, but only in Luke do we find this bit about Jesus being sent to the Roman governor of the Galilee, “King” (but really tetrarch) Herod Antipas. The other gospel authors skipped it ’cause it didn’t add anything to their accounts. Doesn’t add much to Luke either. But it’s interesting.

It begins right after Pontius Pilate, Herod’s counterpart in Judea, was presented with Jesus for crucifixion. Pilate didn’t see any reason to crucify him, ’cause as John related, he figured Jesus’s kingdom wasn’t any political threat to Rome. (It did take over Rome just the same.) So Pilate didn’t feel like crucifying Jesus… and a loose comment the Judeans made, gave him the idea to hand off his inconvenient problem to Herod.

Luke 23.4-7 KWL

4Pilate tells the head priests and the crowd,

“I find nothing of guilt in this person.”

5The crowd prevails over Pilate, saying this:

“He riles up the people, teaching throughout Judea—

having begun such behavior in the Galilee.”

6On hearing this, Pilate asks whether Jesus is Galilean.

7Realizing Jesus is under Herod Antipas’s authority,

Pilate sends him to Herod;

Herod himself being in Jerusalem on that day.

Now let’s be clear. There was no rule in the Roman Empire which said if you had the subject of another province under arrest, you had to extradite him to that province’s governor. No custom either. In fact, knowing Romans, they wouldn’t wanna extradite their prisoners, lest it be considered a sign of weakness. So there were only two possible reasons for Pilate to send Jesus to Herod:

1. Passing the buck.
2. Making nice with Herod.

Because they hated one another, Lk 23.12 and we’re not told why.

Of course we can guess why: Herod Antipas figured he oughta be Judea’s king. His dad Herod 1 had overthrown King Antigonus Mattathias in 36BC, with Roman help, and taken over Israel; he was the eldest, and supposedly next in line to the throne, after his dad had executed his brothers Aristobulus and Alexander. Herod 1’s will had instead made Herod Archelaus king, so Antipas and his brother Philip appealed to Cæsar Augustus as the will’s executor. Cæsar double-crossed them, though: He overturned the will, then divided Israel into fourths, with Antipas as the ruler of one-fourth, and Cæsar himself as the ruler of Judea. Hence Antipas and Philip’s official titles were τετράρχης/tetrárhis, “ruler of a fourth.” Pilate was ruling over two-fourths of what Antipas figured he oughta be ruling.

Or maybe it was some other silly, petty reason. Whatever; they didn’t get along. But Herod had always wanted to meet Jesus, Lk 23.8 and if Pilate knew this, it was a significant gesture on his part. More likely, I’m guessing, Pilate stumbled into this gesture by a combination of dumb luck and procrastination.

Jesus confuses Pontius Pilate.

Mark 15.1-5, Matthew 27.1-2, 11-14, Luke 23.1-4, John 18.28-38.

After the Judean senate held their perfectly legal trial and sentenced Jesus to death, the Law instructed ’em to take Jesus outside the city, hurl him off a cliff, and throw stones down on his body till he was quite dead. But because the Romans had taken over Judea 27 years before, the Romans didn’t permit ’em to execute anyone. Only Romans were permitted the death penalty. So the Romans would have to kill Jesus for them.

This meant the Judean leaders had to convince Pontius Pilate, the Roman prætor—the military governor (Greek ἡγεμών/igemón, “ruler”) of Jerusalem—that it was in Rome’s best interests to execute Jesus. The prætor wasn’t just gonna execute anybody the Judeans recommended. Especially over stuff the Romans didn’t consider capital crimes, like blasphemy against a god the Romans didn’t understand, or honestly, respect. So what’d the Judeans have on Jesus?

Simple: He declared himself Messiah. Did it right in front of everybody.

Mark 14.61-64 NLT

61BThen the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”

62Jesus said, “I AM. And you will see the Son of Man seated in the place of power at God’s right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

63Then the high priest tore his clothing to show his horror and said, “Why do we need other witnesses? 64You have all heard his blasphemy. What is your verdict?”

“Guilty!” they all cried. “He deserves to die!”

Messiah (i.e. Christ) means “the anointed,” and since you only anointed kings, it straight-up means king. Jesus publicly declared himself Israel’s king. That, the Romans would consider treason: The king of Judea was Cæsar Tiberius Divi Augusti, princeps (“first citizen”) of Rome. Cæsar would have a vested interest in putting any antikings to death. So that was the charge the senate brought with them, and Jesus, to the Roman prætor.

The senators hauled Jesus to Antonia, a fort Herod 1 had built next to the temple (and named for his patron, Marcus Antonius) so soldiers could observe the Judeans in temple… just in case any riots broke out in there. The senators then presented their unrecognized true king to Pilate.

Mark 15.1 KWL

Next, in the morning, the head priests,

consulting with the elders, scribes, and the whole senate,

carry and deliver the bound Jesus

to Pontius Pilate.

Matthew 27.1-2 KWL

1As it became morning, all the head priests and people’s elders

gather in council regarding Jesus,

and how they’d put him to death.

2Binding him, they lead Jesus away

and hand him off to Pontius Pilate, the leader.

Luke 23.1-2 KWL

1Getting up, the crowd leads him to Pontius Pilate.

2They begin to accuse Jesus,

saying, “We find this man twisting our nation,

preventing taxes to be given to Cæsar,

calling himself ‘Christ’—which means king.”

In all the gospels, Pilate questioned Jesus… and came away unconvinced this man was any threat to Rome whatsoever. As Luke and John tell it, he didn’t even believe Jesus was guilty of anything. But the Judean senate wanted Jesus dead, and got plenty of the locals to say so too. In the end, Pontius pragmatically gave ’em what they wanted.

Meditation on the mystery of Christ’s suffering.

First time I heard somebody talk about meditating on divine mysteries, I didn’t understand what she was talking about. “She” was a Roman Catholic who was encouraging her fellow Catholics to do that, and I was a Protestant kid who was raised to believe Catholics were heretic. I don’t believe that anymore, but at the time, I wasn’t inclined to give my Catholic sisters and brothers the benefit of the doubt: I was pretty sure she was talking about some weird spiritual practice that’d lead people astray.

Some of the problem—other than my anti-Catholic bias—is the fact the Protestants I worshiped with, didn’t understand what meditation is. They thought all meditation was the eastern type, practiced by Hindus, Buddhists, Transcendental Meditation, and various pagan religions: You clear your mind as much as possible and think about nothing. Whereas meditation in the scriptures is all about thinking about God, and turning over in our minds the stuff he reveals to us. Usually stuff from the scriptures. And if that’s how you define meditation—and it’s supposed to be how we Christians define meditation—then my fellow Protestants did that a whole bunch; we just didn’t know to call it meditation. We let eastern pagans swipe the term right out from under us.

The other part of the problem is most Protestants didn’t know what mysteries are. To be fair, Catholics use the term way more often than Protestants do. That’s why when Protestants say “mystery,” we think it’s something we don’t know. “Contemplating mysteries” sounds to us like we’re thinking about all the things we don’t know. Contemplating divine mysteries sounds like we’re thinking about all the things about God which we don’t know—and that’s a lot, ’cause he’s an infinite God, and we got finite brains, so there’s an infinite gap between what we know and who God is.

I’ve heard more than one ignorant Protestant actually rebuke the Orthodox and Catholic for thinking about divine mysteries: “Why are they wasting their time meditating about what we don’t know about God? Shouldn’t we think about what we do know?” Yeah, this statement sounds all the more ignorant once you do know what mysteries are.

In the scriptures, mystery refers to something we previously didn’t know—but thanks to Jesus, now we know do. Biblical mysteries are mysteries solved. Mysteries revealed. Nobody who meditates on mysteries is thinking about anything they don’t know; they’re thinking—properly and appropriately!—about the stuff God revealed to us. Again, usually stuff from the scriptures.

But this wrong definition of what mystery means, still kinda permeates Protestant thinking. Look up “sacred mysteries” on the internet and you’ll find plenty of Protestants—and even some Catholics!—claiming mysteries are “profound truths which are beyond human understanding.” Yeah, they used to be beyond human understanding. Not anymore! Jesus revealed ’em. He figures we’re ready to know about them. So we can get to know them. And that is what meditating on them is all about. It’s not some weird intellectual exercise where we’re looking into the void and hoping this somehow makes us deeper people; it’s getting to know God.