Tag Archives: Jesus

September 17, 2012 · 11:40 am

Never As Good?

With some regularity, I have a habit of listening to song lyrics addressing one topic, and seeing how they could be re-interpreted to address another.  In the song “Never As Good As The First Time” for example, pop-jazz singer Sade croons about how nostalgia for the past, the good memories and thoughts of what might have been, always seems better than starting over again with second chances.  ”The rose we remember,” she sings, “the thorns we forget.”  I have always thought rather a nice turn of phrase.

Now, this is not merely an excuse for me to plant a song earworm in your head, gentle reader.  Rather, I would like you to consider whether in the present age, we increasingly look at the world around us as a series of compartmentalized experiences of either roses or thorns, when the truth is that both are essential parts of the whole.  This is true not only in the romantic, as this pop song points out, but also in the broader questions of life reflecting on society as a whole, and our role within it.

This weekend I had three separate, rather long conversations with three different friends in three different cities and time zones, about the question of living out one’s purpose in life. When one is no longer young but not old YET, as Mac and Katherine Barron like to put it on the “Catholic in a Small Town” podcast, certain doors are closed. It is almost guaranteed that if you are now over 30 and have never played tennis in years, you will not now be able to dethrone Roger Federer from the top of the heap. At the same time, you are not going to be toddling your way down the hallway on a Zimmer frame for many, many years yet, so to become despondent over this realization would be the height of self-obsession.

One thing which came to light during all three of these conversations was a common perspective of a sense of uncertainty about the future, as compared to what people experienced in the past. Grandfather started working for a certain company as a young man, and stayed there for decades until his retirement, when he received his gold watch and his pension. That world in many places is already long gone; those of us in Gen X or Gen Y will most likely never experience it.  Yet however much we may bemoan the death of some of the virtues which made Grandfather’s life seemingly more certain, we compartmentalize what he went through in the Depression and World War II.

This present life promises us only one absolute, unavoidable truth, and that is that there are always going to be barbarians at the gate. It may be illness, or heartbreak, or disappointment, but it will indeed come, with the ultimate reward of leaving this life entirely.  What has happened in the Western world is particular in the second half of the 20th century, is that a majority grew up not really knowing what it was like to be hungry and cold, stalked by disease, armies, or other predators.

This is why what we see going on in places like Ireland, Spain, or Greece is so shocking to many of us in the West, even though the kinds of misery we presently see are as nothing compared to what people in the Third World go through all the time, with no hope of relief.  It is also why the Third World in so many respects is much tougher than the First: for they expect disappointment, and while they hope they will make it through today, they have no illusions that they will be cheating suffering and death of their due.  We have grown too lazy in assuming that comfort is something we are entitled to, rather than privileged to receive.

Yesterday at mass Monsignor used the Gospel reading as a jumping-off point for the exploration of these ideas of uncertainty and suffering.  We are no doubt familiar with Christ’s rebuke of St. Peter who, shortly after declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, then takes Him aside to upbraid Him for talking about His forthcoming suffering and death.  Christ then turns on him and rebukes him in front of the other disciples, warning them that if they expected to be His followers, they were going to have to accept suffering.  In his homily, Monsignor pointed out that no one likes to talk about the experience of uncertainty and suffering, or ultimately death, but Christ tells us that it is in how we accept our trials that we prove our worth.

This was further echoed in the reading at Lauds this morning, for the great Jewish heroine Judith points out to her people in the midst of a terrible crisis that:

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God who, as he tested our ancestors, is now testing us. Remember how he treated Abraham, all the ordeals of Isaac and all that happened to Jacob. For as these ordeals were intended by him to search their hearts, so now this is not vengeance that God exacts against us, but a warning inflicted by the Lord on those who are near his heart.

Judith 8: 25-26, 27

Returning to Sade, who of course is speaking of romantic love in this song rather than about the overall purpose of one’s life, reflection on what might have been and what is “rightfully” ours is a deadly exercise.  Too many spend their lives trying to recapture a moment when everything seemed wonderful and new. Or they use the irritation of suffering and loss in their lives, in the mistaken belief that by so doing they are making some sort of pearl, when in reality they are merely creating an ulcer which will eventually perforate. The line between the formation of each of these is very slim, indeed.

There is of course nothing pleasant about experiencing pain, suffering, setbacks, and loss, but we will experience all of them. If you believe that you will have everything easy in your life from now on, you are exceedingly naive and ill-prepared for what lies ahead.  Better to stay focused on the task ahead, of using your gifts and abilities for the greater good of others, in recognition of and preparation for the life to come.  It may not always be as good as the first time one experiences that thrill of something good – a first dance, a first touchdown, a first job, a first apartment – but at least we will take the future as it comes, without staying stuck in the past.


Still from the video for “Never As Good As The First Time” by Sade

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April 6, 2012 · 8:20 am

Good Friday

See, my servant shall prosper,
he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.

Even as many were amazed at him—
so marred was his look beyond human semblance
and his appearance beyond that of the sons of man—
so shall he startle many nations,
because of him kings shall stand speechless;
for those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.

Who would believe what we have heard?
To whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

He grew up like a sapling before him,
like a shoot from the parched earth;
there was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him,
nor appearance that would attract us to him.

He was spurned and avoided by people,
a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
as one smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our offenses,
crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,
by his stripes we were healed.

We had all gone astray like sheep,
each following his own way;
but the LORD laid upon him
the guilt of us all.

Though he was harshly treated, he submitted
and opened not his mouth;
like a lamb led to the slaughter
or a sheep before the shearers,
he was silent and opened not his mouth.

Oppressed and condemned, he was taken away,
and who would have thought any more of his destiny?

When he was cut off from the land of the living,
and smitten for the sin of his people,
a grave was assigned him among the wicked
and a burial place with evildoers,
though he had done no wrong
nor spoken any falsehood.

But the LORD was pleased
to crush him in infirmity.

If he gives his life as an offering for sin,
he shall see his descendants in a long life,
and the will of the LORD shall be accomplished through him.

Because of his affliction
he shall see the light in fullness of days;
through his suffering, my servant shall justify many,
and their guilt he shall bear.

Therefore I will give him his portion among the great,
and he shall divide the spoils with the mighty,
because he surrendered himself to death
and was counted among the wicked;
and he shall take away the sins of many,
and win pardon for their offenses.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12


The Pistoia Crucifix by Pietro Tacca (c. 1600-1616)
National Gallery of Art, Washington

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April 5, 2012 · 11:25 am

Law in the Balance

This is the last in my series of posts – though there will be a very simple post tomorrow – in which we have looked at the Passion Narrative in St. Mark’s Gospel in the context of broader social and cultural issues. I have tried to do my best to look at this text during Holy Week, the most sacred time of the year for Christians, and take some themes or ideas from it which I believe are worth the consideration of both my Christian and Non-Christian readers. On Monday we looked at the importance of studying symbolism in the creative spheres; on Tuesday we considered what it means to be naked; and yesterday we looked at the role of women in society.

Today we are going to look at something which is very much in the news these days, but then for that matter always seems to be in the news, and that is the rule of law. No, I am not going to discuss the constitutionality of Obamacare, or the HHS mandate.  I will leave that to those Constitutional law scholars who regularly argue before the Supreme Court, and thus actually know what they are talking about, rather than pay any attention to those who simply talk about it on television or in magazine articles.

Instead, my goal today is to make you a bit uncomfortable, if I can.

If we turn to what happened after Jesus’ Crucifixion in St. Mark’s account, which you can read here, we are told that after He had breathed His last on Friday afternoon, there was a very important question to be answered by His Jewish friends: was there time to take His body down and bury it before the Sabbath?

Joseph of Arimathea,
a distinguished member of the council,
who was himself awaiting the kingdom of God,
came and courageously went to Pilate
and asked for the body of Jesus.
Pilate was amazed that he was already dead.
He summoned the centurion
and asked him if Jesus had already died.
And when he learned of it from the centurion,
he gave the body to Joseph.
Having bought a linen cloth, he took him down,
wrapped him in the linen cloth,
and laid him in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock.

Before we get into a consideration of what Joseph did here, we need to take a step back and look at the issue of the law, for the law is inextricably linked with what St. Mark is describing.

It is hard for me to look at what St. Mark reports without thinking like a lawyer. The legal mind, as my readers are no doubt well-aware, differs somewhat from the rational mind, although it has its own, at times cruel, logic to it. The lawyer works within a closed universe, wherein certain types of proofs which might make a difference in an argument between one friend and another may not even be considered within the context of a legal argument. It is important to understand this, because such an alternate universe has its own rules and ways of working, which do not always correspond to what we may and may not do in our private lives.

While St. Mark tells us what he himself witnessed, or was told later by others, remember that so far as we know, he was not a lawyer.  And as a lawyer, I sometimes find reading the Bible – not just St. Mark’s Gospel – to be frustrating to the part of my brain that has been trained to think as a lawyer.  I know from experience that when I am trying to put together an argument for court, for example, in that universe I need to ask certain questions and obtain certain answers to those questions which may be completely separate from real life in all of its messiness, if I am to convince the court to rule the way I believe it ought to rule.  So even though St. Mark is writing an account of a legal process, he is writing it as a layman would write it, not as a lawyer would write it: he is trying to persuade the reader’s immortal soul, not the mind of a temporal judge.

That being said, keep in mind that Jesus went through proceedings in two separate legal universes, in order for Him to be executed.  He was first condemned by religious authority, and he was subsequently condemned by civil authority. Had He been arrested in a modern, Western legal system He would have had certain protections and rights; if He had been, as someone who knows his way around the appellate system I could cite an almost infinite list of grounds for appeal from His death sentence. Be that as it may, and whatever one thinks of the actions of those such as the Sanhedrin or Pontius Pilate, He was not simply chased down by a mob and lynched, vigilante-style.

Turning then to a deeper reflection on how the law applies to the events described by St. Mark, one of the things we can all recognize is that Jesus taught His Disciples that people in need come before the law, but the law must still be upheld whenever possible. He was routinely criticized, for example, for healing sick people on the Sabbath, because in the mind of the more literal of the religious leaders of His day, this was working on the Sabbath, which was prohibited by the Mosaic law.  Jesus rejected this interpretation, and took the view that it was more important to act, when you found yourself in a situation where someone needed your help, even if it meant working on the Sabbath.

Similarly, in parables such as the very familiar one of “The Good Samaritan”, Jesus challenged His listeners to consider which was more important: proscribed ritual or another in urgent, life-or-death need? The wounded Jewish traveler on the side of the road is not touched by the observant Jewish leaders, who do not want to become ritually unclean, and thereby become unable to serve God in the Temple. Instead, the traveler is aided by someone whom the Jews considered at best a heretic, and at worst an enemy, a resident from what is today the West Bank.  [N.B. Now THERE is an interesting geographical tidbit to chew on.]

At the same time however, in the Gospels Jesus repeatedly reminds His followers that they must follow the law, whether as promulgated by the religious authorities or by the civil authorities, so long as in so doing they do not lose sight of the big picture. A mistake often made by those on the left is looking at Jesus as some sort of early anarchist, forgetting that He commanded His followers to obey the rulings of the Pharisees on religious matters, and of course rendering unto Caesar what is properly Caesar’s under the civil codes. This fact suggests that one needs to find a way to balance out what is intrinsically good and what is unquestionably legal, what is beneficial and what is permissible.

In the passage quoted above about the actions taken by Joseph of Arimathea, the point is that this member of the Sanhedrin does BOTH. He rushes to provide a last act of compassion toward his friend Jesus, but he does so recognizing that the Mosaic law which he follows gives him a limited amount of time in which to act.  He also recognizes that he cannot simply take the body down, because he is legally required to consult the appropriate civil authority, i.e. Pilate himself, before he can do anything, even if Joseph personally believed that Jesus had been wrongly condemned.

That in itself must have been very difficult to do, as St. Mark observes.  Joseph could conceivably have been arrested by the Romans for seeking to encourage sedition, for example.  Once Pilate’s legal permission was obtained, can imagine that there must have been a flurry of activity on the part of Joseph and those who assisted him, to try to get Jesus buried before nightfall.  Though as it turned out, the fact that they could not complete all of the rituals normally mandated before a Jewish burial is in fact why the women come to the tomb at sunup on Sunday morning, so that they could finish what they and Joseph did not have time to do on Friday evening.

Joseph gives us a good example of the personal courage that anyone, be they Jew, Christian, or nothing in particular, ought to do when it comes to acting out of compassion in balance with legal authority.  The mere existence of a law cannot be an excuse for exercising the so-called “Nuremberg defense”, when it comes to how we treat one another. Just because something is perfectly legal, does not mean that we are excused from helping other people, or that we are free to harm them, when we are put in a legal position to do so.

At the same time, if we do not obey law and order when it acts to provide structure and avoid chaos, then we need to question ourselves as to whether we acting out of compassion for others, or whether we are really acting out of selfishness. A healthy and vibrant civilization is only possible when human beings voluntarily impose certain limits on how we interact with one another.  Yet it only survives if its members recognize that a balancing act, or indeed an outright change if the law proves to be unjust, is sometimes necessary.


“Joseph of Arimathea Seeking Out Pontius Pilate”
by James Tissot (c. 1886-1894)
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York

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April 4, 2012 · 11:22 am

Consider the Ladies

We are continuing on with our series of posts relating some of the details of the events of Holy Week to wider cultural issues, so that I can speak to both my Christian and Non-Christian readers in a way which, I hope, will encourage them to do a bit more lateral or creative thinking.  Today we do as Abigail Adams once directed her husband, and consider the ladies.  The ladies always need our consideration, of course, but I would like us to reflect a little bit on what very tough things the members of the fairer sex can be, when they set their minds to it.

In St. Mark’s Passion Narrative, which you can read here, he tells us the following detail about the scene on Golgotha, where Jesus is crucified:

There were also women looking on from a distance.
Among them were Mary Magdalene,
Mary the mother of the younger James and of Joses, and Salome.
These women had followed him when he was in Galilee
and ministered to him.
There were also many other women
who had come up with him to Jerusalem.

Whether or not you are a Christian, this passage gives us an opportunity to think about the role of women in society more deeply, and I believe there are lessons to be learned here, for both Christian and Non-Christian alike.

It would be helpful to keep in mind that we need to view the scene described above not with modern eyes, which most of us in the Western world employ with respect to how we look at the role of women in society, but rather with the eyes of an ancient Semitic people living in the Eastern Mediterranean. In all four of the canonical Gospels, we are made very much aware by their (male) authors that when the crucial moment came, all of Jesus’ male disciples ran away after he was arrested. And yet apart from St. John, when Jesus is actually executed by gruesome, public torture, His female disciples are the ones who are there, witnessing the horror of his death.

We may not think of this now, because we have grown so accustomed to works of art or films depicting Jesus’ Death, but this kind of event was not something which these women would have been accustomed to attending or viewing. Ancient Jerusalem was not Ancient Rome: Jewish women in Israel would not have gone to an arena to watch men and beasts tear each other to pieces or to see men executed for entertainment, as some of their pagan sisters might have done in Italy. And yet here these Jewish women are, unknowingly about to become the first Christians in a few days’ time, watching every drop of blood fall and being unable to do anything but stand nearby and weep, as the only support they can offer to Jesus and to each other.

It is interesting to note the presence of a disciple named “Salome” at the Crucifixion. Traditionally, she has been identified as the wife of Zebedee, and the mother of St. James and St. John. However when I was listening to the reading of St. Mark’s Passion this past Sunday, I could not help but pose myself the hypothetical question, unsupported as it is by any evidence whatsoever: what if she were the same, infamous Salome from earlier in St. Mark’s Gospel?

For those unfamiliar with the story of Salome and The Baptist, St. Mark tells us:

Herodias’ own daughter came in and performed a dance that delighted Herod and his guests.
The king said to the girl, “Ask of me whatever you wish and I will grant it to you.”
He even swore many things to her, “I will grant you whatever you ask of me, even to half of my kingdom.”
She went out and said to her mother, “What shall I ask for?”
She replied, “The head of John the Baptist.”
The girl hurried back to the king’s presence and made her request, “I want you to give me at once on a platter the head of John the Baptist.”
The king was deeply distressed, but because of his oaths and the guests he did not wish to break his word to her.
So he promptly dispatched an executioner with orders to bring back his head.
He went off and beheaded him in the prison.
He brought in the head on a platter and gave it to the girl.
The girl in turn gave it to her mother.

As a caveat, I should point out that St. Mark does not use the name “Salome” in his Gospel, it is identified elswhere; and the name itself was not uncommon in Judea at the time of Christ. For example, besides the aforementioned disciple and princess, we know that there was a pre-Roman Jewish Queen of that name, who was the last independent female ruler of Judea. In addition, the sister of King Herod the Great, who ruled Judea at the time Jesus was born, was also named Salome, and that same Herod had a daughter whom he named for his sister.

Yet imagine if Salome, the girl who basically tried to seduce her stepfather on her mother’s orders, and who received a decapitated head which she herself brought to her mother, had undergone a conversion? What if she had decided to leave the hedonistic, perverted, and luxurious life she was being brought up in, to try to make amends for her part in the death of St. John the Baptist? What if she had become a follower of Christ, and a supporter of His ministry?

I do not want to delve too deeply into this sort of speculation.  However it is interesting to consider the possibility that if Salome had guts enough to carry about a human head on a platter in the service of evil, she probably would have had the guts to stand at the foot of the Cross and pity Jesus, and provide comfort to His Mother, in the service of good.  For women, in case you were not aware of the fact, are made of very tough stuff indeed.

Another woman whom St. Mark describes at the Crucifixion alongside Salome, i.e. The Magdalen, we already thought a bit about on Monday.  However, going back to her role for a moment, whenever I think of her I cannot help but remember the fictional exchange which takes place in Franco Zeffirelli’s film, “Jesus of Nazareth” when, after the Resurrection, Anne Bancroft, playing the role of Mary of Magdala, comes to tell the Apostles that Christ has risen from the dead and that she has seen Him.  They ignore her, and tell her that she is having a woman’s fantasy.  Bancroft in her inimitable way lashes back, “A fantasy? Was His DEATH a fantasy?” – pointing out that she was there for Jesus, along with the other women, and Simon Peter and the others were not.

Whenever contemporary society tries to redefine the nature of male and female, common sense speaks up and tells us that certain natural differences remain between the sexes.  A disordered attempt to try to re-engineer human nature does none of us any good for, paradoxically, it denies human nature in the process.  History has shown us that women can be as resolute as men, and on occasions such as that described by St. Mark even more so, when it comes down to making difficult decisions or facing unpleasant circumstances.  There is no need for them to try to behave like men, when they can behave as themselves.

Therefore rather than try to make women into something they are not, we are better-served by remembering that as our fellow human beings, women ought to serve as a reminder to us men that oftentimes it is they, rather than we, who have repeatedly shown that they are capable of making the kind of tough decisions which many of their brethren would shrink from.  This should not be misinterpreted as a statement that women are superior to men, but rather taken for what it is: a recognition that sometimes it is the case that they go through things which many men would find incapable of even attempting.  St. Mark clearly recognizes this, just as he admitted in his humility that he had been stripped naked in his attempt to follow Jesus, and had failed.

Even if in the end, we speak here of two Salomes, rather than a single individual, I do not think that any reasonable, intelligent member of either sex would deny the fact that whoever this Salome at the foot of the Cross was, she proved herself to be a far better friend to Jesus than the men whom he kept closest to him during His preaching and teaching.


Detail from “The Crucifixion” by Andrea Mantegna (1457-1459)
The Louvre, Paris

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April 3, 2012 · 11:43 am

The Naked Truth

Continuing on from yesterday, when we talked about Mary Magdalen and sugar bowls, today I’d like to talk about being naked.

Now that I have your attention, I hope that you will continue reading. Remember that this is Holy Week for Christians, such as this scrivener, as we approach Easter Sunday, and I am looking at some of the details from the Passion Narrative contained in the Gospel of St. Mark, which you can read here. Hopefully, I am doing so in a way which will cause both my Christian and Non-Christian readers alike to pause and reflect on some larger, cultural issues raised herein.

We read in St. Mark’s account of Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane about the following incident after the Apostles all took to their heels:

And they all left him and fled.
Now a young man followed him
wearing nothing but a linen cloth about his body.
They seized him,
but he left the cloth behind and ran off naked.

Traditionally, this unfortunate young fellow has been identified as being St. Mark himself. Now, for a Jewish youth like St. Mark – assuming that this was he – to admit in his writing that he was involuntarily stripped naked must have been a very difficult thing, indeed. While the pagans of his day may have had fewer qualms about nudity, for an observant Jew like St. Mark to publicly admit that this happened to him must have been mortifying.

So why did St. Mark tell us about this rather embarrassing moment? On one hand, such an inclusion lends a greater degree of authenticity to St. Mark’s account of what happened. In all four of the Gospels, we often find what we might call “throwaway details”, which do not really appear to have anything to do with the story they are telling, but give us the sense that the writer himself either personally witnessed these events, or they were told to him by those who had personally witnessed them. I would refer you for example to St. John’s Gospel at 21:24, where we are told: “It is this disciple who testifies to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.” However I think there is something else which we ought to consider here, Christian and Non-Christian alike, and that is our attitude toward being exposed.

I had to visit a specialist this morning due to a knee problem. While the results turned out to be much better than I had feared, the process of putting myself into the doctor’s hands was something I found mortifying, even though I did not have to completely strip off my clothing. Although the ultimate goal of the examination was beneficial, the partial disrobing, the poking and prodding and manipulation, were all embarrassing. Of course, neither the physician nor myself were doing this for kicks, if you’ll pardon the expression, but there was still an element of exposing oneself in the context of acknowledging a weakness that felt slightly humiliating.

Within the Judeo-Christian paradigm which formed the basis for Western Civilization, or what remains of that civilization at present, nudity is something that holds a somewhat different meaning than it did for the Classical Civilization which it supplanted. The ancient world celebrated physical beauty, particularly when displayed in the altogether, as a symbol of divinity and perfection, and Western Civilization did not deny this – Adam and Eve, for example, have appeared, starkers, in Western art from the very beginning.  However, there was a shift in the understanding of exposure, for while recognizing beauty Western culture simultaneously recognized that exposure was also a sign of weakness.

Despite what you may have read or been taught to the contrary, human nature has not really changed very much over the centuries. It is not at all unusual that human nudity is a trigger for thoughts related to the act of sexual reproduction. Our species does not put on the type of visual display that many members of the animal kingdom do during the year, in order to signal their readiness to mate, by changing colors or the like. For the pagans this was not necessarily a problem, since their ideas about human sexuality were often focused on self-gratification as being of paramount importance, in a kind of proto-Darwinian state.

For those in the Judeo-Christian community, on the other hand, who ultimately supplanted the pagans in the Western world, nudity was not only a potential catalyst for things like adultery, promiscuity, and resulting disease and illegitimacy, it was also paradoxically an opportunity to care for those in need who might otherwise receive nothing. Thus, two of Noah’s sons cover him up when he is naked and unable to care for himself, and Christ tells His Disciples that if they clothe the naked, they are clothing Him. Selfishness, whether in terms of sexual gratification, laughing at the expense of others, or maintaining one’s material comforts, was replaced by the virtue of self-sacrifice.

Western Civilization came to understand as a result of the Judeo-Christian influence that a healthy attitude toward nudity has nothing to do with the amount of bare flesh exposed, and everything to do with the intent of the individual.  For example, a pop star who is technically completely clothed while performing on stage, may be more scandalously clad than someone completely or nearly naked at the doctor’s office. The intent of the former is malicious, in advocating a selfish, personal gratification, where the needs of the self come before the needs of others, while the intent of the latter is either completely innocent, or at the very least morally neutral.

In recognizing human weakness, Western Civilization changed the way that we behave toward one another, and ultimately did so for the greater good of all mankind. It brought about a shift in the attitude toward how human beings were to treat one another sexually, so as to create a more stable society, but it also established both the mindset and the institutions necessary to care for those who had nothing – people whom the pagans would have looked down upon, abused, or completely ignored. Those who would argue that we would be better off if we all went about naked are missing out on a very critical point: it is in the self-sacrifice of clothing, both by those who wear it and those who give it, that Western culture has been able to take the focus away from advocating selfishness, and toward advocating self-control, good judgement, and charity, in order to build up a more equitable society.

Returning to where we began, a pagan would not have found what happened to St. Mark to be anything other than a source of amusement, if not worse. We however recognize that in the stripping away of his dignity, St. Mark was humiliated, and we feel sorry for him: he is meant to be an object of our pity, not our scorn, for what he went through in trying to find out what was happening to his friend, Jesus, as He was arrested and hauled away.  We would hope never to find ourselves in that position.

The human body may indeed be a beautiful thing, but we need to remember that it is the intent or the context in which that body is presented to us that we prove our mettle as the inheritors of centuries or Western culture, or whether we are simply neo-pagans who value our own self-gratification above all other things.


“Christ in The Garden of Gethsemane” by Arkhip Kuindzhi (1901)
Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg

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