Jesus appears to Mary the Magdalene, in 𝘑𝘰𝘩𝘯.

John 20.11-18.

When we last saw Mary the Magdalene—well, in my previous article anyway—she was weeping outside Jesus’s sepulcher because she didn’t know where his body was. Had no idea he was alive. Even though he’d told his students more than once he’d rise again, she probably assumed this was just a metaphor, or figured he’d rise on the last day; certainly not millennia before the last day. (Pretty sure nobody in bible times realized Jesus would wait millennia before his second coming!)

Anyway Peter and John had come to check it out; they found nothing but the linen strips his corpse had been wrapped in. It was reallyunlikely anybody would unwrap the corpse, so that had to make ’em wonder. John said he believed, Jn 20.8 which probably means he believed Jesus is alive; but in the other gospels none of the Eleven appears to have believed it until Jesus himself showed up. In any event they left, and left Mary behind to weep in confusion.

Then she bothered to look into the sepulcher, as Peter and John had… and saw angels.

John 20.11-13 KWL

11…and Mary stood outside the sepulcher, weeping.

So as she’s weeping, she bends down

to look into the sepulcher.

12Mary sees two angels in white,

sitting where Jesus’s corpse had been laid;

one at the head and one at the feet.

13These angels tell her, “Woman, why do you weep?”

She tells them, “Because they took my Master,

and I don’t know where they put him.”

I’ve been in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which has the slab they placed Jesus’s corpse on… hidden beneath another slab. Too many pilgrims kept kissing it, and knowing the way the pilgrims in my tour group behaved, likely they kept trying to chisel souvenirs off it. The erosion would’ve whittled it away entirely, so the churches in charge of the sepulcher decided to cover it with marble. Meh; the slab’s hidden in there somewhere. Anyway it’s a nice long slab. Plenty of room for two human-sized angels to sit at either end, and not look like they were sitting right next to one another.

In the other gospels, the angels tell the women, “He is risen; he is not here,” Mk 16.6 but in John, Mary doesn’t give them a chance to reply. She turns round because she notices someone else is there.

Jewish Christians don’t need to become gentile. And vice versa.

1 Corinthians 7.18-20.

Just after Paul and Sosthenes instruct the Corinthians to not separate from their pagan spouses—unless, obviously, they demand it—they add a few more things which new Christians shouldn’t change about ourselves now that we’re Christian. Namely if they’re circumcised, and if they’re slaves. I’ll discuss the slaves another time. Circumcision first—and if you have any hangups about penises, you probably won’t wanna read any further.

1 Corinthians 7.18-20 KWL

18Were you circumcised when God called?

Don’t get a “pullover.”

Were you one of the “foreskins” when God called?

Don’t get circumcised.

19The circumcision doesn’t matter.

The foreskin doesn’t matter.

But keeping God’s commands does matter.

20In whatever calling you’re called,

remain in this.

I should remind you: Jews had an unfortunate habit of calling gentiles “foreskins,” as we see in verse 18. It was originally meant to be a slur; it still kinda is. But, same as when nonwhites call me a cracker, I’m quite sure the “foreskins” usually laughed it off. When you’re not an oppressed minority, slurs simply aren’t the same implied threat as they are when you are a minority.

Okay. I translated the word ἐπισπάσθω/epispástho in verse 18 as “pullover,” because that’s what ἐπισπάω/epispáo literally means: ἐπι/epi, “over,” and σπάω/spáo, “pull, draw, drag.” If “pullover” makes you think of what Americans call a “sweater,” that’s exactly the idea I was going for.

Nowadays if you go to the gym, people are only gonna see you nude in the locker room. But for ancient Greeks, you were nude the whole time. They exercised nude. Couldn’t get away from the nudity. Guaranteed men were gonna see your penis. And if you were circumcised, in a room full of uncircumcised Greeks, your penis was gonna look weird and wrong to everyone else. It’s not like the United States, where more than two-thirds of us are circumcised, and foreskins stand out: You were gonna stand out.

So someone came up with a procedure to “restore” one’s foreskin: Basically you pull the remaining skin of your penis over the glans as best you can, and get it to stay there. It’ll look enough like a foreskin. And yep, they called it an ἐπίσπασις/epíspasis, a “pullover.” (Although some Greek dictionaries will define epíspasis as “pulling in,” like when you suck into a straw… which is also kind of an apt description of what was going on here.)

Obviously some Pharisees, who already had a problem with Jews going to the gym and hanging out with buck naked gentiles, thought this was awful. Ritual circumcision signifies a formal relationship with God… and you’re hiding your circumcision? Hiding your relationship with God? You may as well be pagan!

I’m actually with the Pharisees on this one. As are, you notice, the apostles: Don’t get a “pullover.” Don’t try to undo the parts of your past which might embarrass you, but don’t actually matter in the long run. Just follow Jesus.

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.

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 Syriac, 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.

What is it with Christians and fascism?

CHRISTOFASCISM 'krɪs.toʊ'fæ.ʃɪz.əm noun. A politically conservative, authoritarian, nationalistic ideology, which claims to be based on Christian principles.

[Christofascist adjective.]

Back in high school history class, we were introduced to the word “fascism,” but as I recall my history teachers had the darnedest time trying to explain what it was. I suspect it’s because they didn’t wanna offend any conservative parents who might lean a little fascist.

Properly, fascism is the movement led by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1930s. It’s not based on any particular political ideas, because Mussolini wasn’t an ideas guy; he was a populist. He just wanted to get elected, claimed he’d make Italy great again, and planned to do it by bypassing democracy and the usual checks and balances used to keep dictators from seizing power. The Italians called him il Duce, “the Duke,” because he tried to run the country much like a medieval duke—or one of the early Roman emperors, whom he used as his examples.

The few traits fascists and fascist governments have in common is they’re

• AUTHORITARIAN. The leader tends to act like an absolute monarch, tries to suppress his political foes and hold on to power, and tries to control everything in the country—regardless of existing laws and customs, and even civil rights. (Habeas corpus especially.)
• CONSERVATIVE. Fascist regimes are always anti-Communist, and anti anything they claim to be Communist, like unions and labor laws and government oversight. Always claim to uphold traditional values and standards… and always claim God’s on their side. Often go out of their way to look devout—mainly to help cover up how much they don’t act it.
• NATIONALISTIC. By “nation” they mean the largest ethnic group in the land, so yeah, we’re talking racism. Every other ethnic group is cast as “the problem,” and need to be enslaved, mitigated, deported, or eliminated.

The reason fascism was so widespread in the 1930s, and why it’s returned in such a big way in the 2020s, is because it taps into human nature so very well. People are inherently selfish. We want God to grant us all our selfish desires, Jm 4.3 and if God won’t grant it, maybe this fascist politician will. We want government to grant it, and if a democratic government can’t achieve it through negotiation and compromise, a fascist government can do it through steamrolling all our opponents.

And because fascists recognize that the biggest potential obstacle to their thirst for power is the one to whom we’re meant to grant all power—Christ Jesus—they go out of their way to make Christians believe, “No, really, Jesus is on my side. I’m doing this stuff for him. He approves. Lookit all the sinners I’m going to persecute on his behalf!” Historically they’ve been very successful at this, because obviously Christians don’t know our own Lord well enough to recognize this pursuit and elevation of temporal power, to do our will and claim it’s really Jesus’s, is obviously the spirit of antichrist.

Atonement: God wants to save everybody!

Humanity’s sins have significantly damaged our relationship with God. But not irreperably. God can fix anything. And he did.

As most of us know from the times other people have sinned against us, some of the time we can simply, easily forgive those sins… and sometimes it’s not that simple. Some sins are mighty destructive. When we wrongly destroy something, it oughta be replaced, but that’s not always easy to do. If you destroy something with a lot of sentimental value attached to it, a simple replacement isn’t gonna cut it. If you destroy family photos, sometimes they’re not replaceable. Same deal when you wrongly kill someone: It’s kinda impossible for us to replace them. God could do it, but we certainly can’t.

So when people ask me, “Well can’t God just forgive all our sins, and that’s that?”—it’s not gonna be that easy. Our sins do damage. We don’t always see or care about all the spiritual damage, but it’s there. God can see it, even though we can’t. So God can’t just forgive us; he’s gotta do damage control. He’s gotta fix things.

That’s what atonement is: God’s act of fixing sin-damage.

That’s what it means whenever we try to atone for evil we’ve done: When we try to fix sin-damage… with various degrees of success. We don’t always succeed. Some of our acts of atonement are actually kinda pathetic. Like when a corporation offers people money to make up for harm they’ve done—and it’s always too little money, unless the courts get invovled and make ’em pay something gargantuan.

The Hebrew words for atonement are כֹּפֶר/kofér, כִּפֻּר/kippúr (which you know from the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, “day of atonement”), and its related verb כָּפַר/kafár. It literally means “plaster.” You know, like when somebody knocked a hole in a wall. You put some plaster or putty or spackle or cement on it, paint over it… and if you applied the filler properly, the wall’s as good as new. Sometimes better than new, ’cause your plaster is stronger than the drywall you’ve patched. And that’s the word the LORD uses in Exodus to describe what the ancient Hebrews’ ritual sacrifices represented to him: Their sins poked holes in their relationship with God, and needed plastering. It’s a really simple metaphor: Sin breaks stuff, and atonement glues it back together.

The word English-speakers used to use to describe kofér, and its Greek translation ἱλασμός/ilasmós, was “propitiation.” It’s still found in the King James Version Ro 3.25, 1Jn 2.2, 4.10 and comes from the Latin verb propitio, “to appease; to regain the good favor of.” It sorta misses the point of kofér—and of grace. Thanks to God’s grace, we already have his good favor; he already considers us right with him. But sin-damage still needs to be dealt with. We still need to make things right in the universe. God’s just fine—a fact which many Christians still don’t wholly grasp (and occasionally send me rebuking emails to complain I’m making God sound too radically gracious, as if that’s possible) ’cause we still struggle to fathom how deep and wide God’s love and grace is.

Anyway, there used to be a Middle English word, “onement,” which means unity. John Wycliffe used it in Ezekiel 37.17. English-speaking preachers started to use the prefix “at-” with it, meaning in, to describe our relationship with God: We’re in unity with him. Supposedly atoning acts bring us back to this state of unity… but remember, God does grace, so we don’t need to do these atoning acts.

Because Christ Jesus already did the atoning act: He sacrificed himself for the sins of the world. Cl 1.22, 1Pe 1.19 He took care of it. We need do nothing more than accept that he took care of it. We can’t add to it; we’re not good enough to sacrifice ourselves for anything more than our own sins.

Since Jesus is God, it makes God himself our plaster. We have him patching the cracks that sin made in our lives—in much the same way the Holy Spirit was sealed to us when we first turned to God. But don’t play with that metaphor too much, lest you get the idea it’s okay to poke holes in your life so God can putty them with more of himself. We’re not meant to keep on sinning so we can get more grace. Ro 6.1-2 Instead look at your life as a wall full of holes, patched over by God. We might imagine it as flawed; we can’t get past the idea of all the holes beneath the paint. But God nonetheless considers it a perfectly good wall. It serves its purpose: It keeps out the wind and rain. It keeps prying eyes from looking through it. It keeps listening ears from hearing better through it. It provides shelter. We can hang pictures on it. And so on, till the metaphor breaks down and we just get silly. But you get the idea.

God wants us, and our relationship with him, repaired, back to the way he originally meant things. He doesn’t want to knock us down and start again from scratch.

Plucking Jesus’s beard. Or not.

Isaiah 50.6.

Because Jesus was foretold in the Old Testament, a lot of Christians throughout history have dug around the OT looking for as many scriptures as possible which might be foretellings of Jesus. They claim to have found hundreds.

And okay, fair, there are hundreds. But there are also a whole lot of passages which actually aren’t about Jesus. They’re about other stuff. Other people, other events, other teachings. Even other messiahs. (“Messiah” is a title of the king of Israel, and Jesus is the current king of Israel, but of course he had predecessors.)

These passages resemble Jesus-stuff, so Christians claim ’em for Jesus. But in fact we’re taking those Old Testament passages out of context. It’s so important to Christians that we amass as big a number of OT “Messianic prophecies” as possible, that often we don’t care we’re misinterpreting and misquoting bible.

Today’s Isaiah passage is one of them. I originally wrote about it for advent, but it has to do with Jesus’s suffering and death, so it’s important to talk about it during the Lenten season too. It’s about how it was foretold that Jesus would get his beard plucked. Supposedly that happened after he was arrested; while he was tortured before he was crucified. Some Jesus movies throw in a scene where inbetween smacking him around and spitting on him, someone grabs a big tuft of Jesus’s beard and rips it out. Yee-ouch!

Years ago I tried to find that beard-ripping moment in the gospels, and found it’s not there at all. Doesn’t come from the gospels. It’s supposedly from Isaiah 50.6.

Isaiah 50.6 KJV

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

Some Christian musta read Isaiah, found this verse about someone getting their face spat upon, thought, “Well Jesus had his face spat upon,” and concluded this was a prophecy about Jesus. And Isaiah apparently also foretold Jesus had his cheeks plucked. So there we are! They pulled out his beard.

Is this passage a foretelling of Jesus? Nah; it’s about Isaiah himself. But tradition says it’s about Jesus… and as we all know, traditions aren’t infallible. This one sure ain’t.