This is not about religion nor reason for the season but something peripheral which has profoundly affected me.
Between Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, there are many ways to look at the holidays.
One is the Norman Rockwell view of cultural tradition and maintenance of family bonds with going over the river and through the woods to spend the feast with Grandma. Some people genuinely love Christmas with all the decorating, Christmas songs, holiday cooking and wrapping presents. The other extreme has to do with unpleasant, extended family drama plus the painful ordeal of spending 5 hours in traffic to go 70 miles one way. Then, either way, we do it all over again a year later.
An older friend, who is obviously way past the furtive childhood thrill of searching potential hiding places for unwrapped Christmas presents, recently asked me “What are the best Christmas lights?” His answer - “The tail lights.”
Christmas, the celebration of the birth of the man who would be crucified during Passover some 30 years later, the celebration of which most modern American businesses would go broke without “Black Friday,” the specified Friday being the day when normally sane grandmothers will beat each other down in the store isle over the last popular, on sale, toy on the shelf.
The Romans of Jesus’ time were extremely touchy about anything which slightly interfered with the emperor’s authority. The penalty for non Roman citizens was crucifixion, where death of the convicted was not so much the point as was it was a public object lesson to others. It was designed to be extremely humiliating while inflicting the most pain possible while prolonging life for as long as possible. Death was the desired end but definitely not the point.
The Romans seem to have had a lock on execution in Judea, there was what seems to be an endless series of attempts by the Jewish religious elite of the time to set up and entrap Jesus in such a way that Roman authority would inflict legal punishment on Jesus, preferably death. Such things long proceeded Jesus, it increasingly goes on now in America, and the case against dissenting Jesus was religious and political and without substance – regardless of whether Governor Pontius Pilate washed his hands or not.
So, at the end, the crime which was posted by Roman custom over Jesus on the cross was “Jesus, King of the Jews”, a capital offense against the emperor.
It was something Jesus didn’t directly claim, the Jewish hierarchy rejected, and the Romans used to not only mock Jesus but the Jewish population at large – “We crucified your King”.
I have not read scripture in more than 40 years, but I recall one of the attempted entrapments had to do with a group dragging a prostitute in front of Jesus and demanding to know if he approved stoning the woman to death per Jewish law going back to Moses. The trap was that if he said yes, he violated Roman authority. If he said no, he would be slandered and ostracized as rejecting Jewish faith.
It was brilliant that Jesus replied “He who is without sin cast the first stone.” Presumably being among the woman’s clients, the accusers all slunk away. Jesus then said to the woman “go forth and sin no more.”
Whether or not the woman heeded the admonition is not the point, and it’s none of my business anyway. There may be many potential reasons why she may have fell through the cracks of what cultural tradition was supposed to do for the poor, without fault of their own, among the descendants of Israel and she sold what she had to sell.
But what strikes me is that in a world of towering injustice and great hypocrisy, Jesus expressed great mercy and consideration.
I cannot think of this story without tears coming to my eyes.
Editor's Note: Jesus is the only person ever born on Earth whose primary purpose was to die, and then conquer death.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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