OPINION:
This coming weekend, the world’s 2½ billion Christians will celebrate — emphasis on “celebrate” — the torture, execution, and the resurrection of an obscure Jewish carpenter.
Others will simply note the execution of that same man in passing.
Those are really the only two choices that people have. Either Yeshua bar Yosef (better known as Jesus) was God, in which case his torture, execution and resurrection are central to the lives of everyone on the planet, or he was an itinerant Jewish preacher and a madman.
While both seem improbable, the second option — that he was, essentially, a nobody from a fringe outpost of the Roman Empire — may be as difficult to explain and believe as the first.
If you believe that he was just another Jew executed by the Romans, you’re left with the uncomfortable fact that what he did and what he taught touches almost everything we do, say and see on this planet. His life, teachings and example have driven humanity for the last 2,000 years.
Even now, at this desiccated spiritual and intellectual moment, the religion he created remains the most powerful force for good in the world. Most of what we consider Western civilization — art, music, sculpture, literature — was built or created by his followers. Most of the institutions that have survived for any length of time — universities, hospitals, orphanages, nursing homes, the legal system, etc. — were invented or reinvented in their current form by his followers.
Most of what we aspire and appeal to every day — fairness, charity, free will, the proper relationship between rulers and the ruled, etc. — is derived directly from what he taught.
That’s not bad for someone who never published a thing, never left his small Roman province on the edge of the Mediterranean, never had children, and died without a penny to his name at the age of 33. Most of his immediate associates were illiterate; one or two could manage a bit of Latin or Greek, the dominant languages of commerce and statecraft for 1,500 years after the first Good Friday.
It is almost easier to believe that the man tortured and executed on a hillside outside of Jerusalem was, in fact, God and did, in fact, rise from the dead.
The story of Jesus’ execution and subsequent resurrection has all the sad themes that have followed humans throughout the ages. The corrupt official — in this instance, the Roman governor — who cynically asks “quid est veritas?” right before sentencing a man whom he knows to be innocent to death.
The hypocrisy of the tribal elites and the collaborators of an occupied nation who seal the prisoner’s fate by asserting that they “have no king but Caesar.” The fickleness and the brutality of the mob. The treachery of a friend. The loneliness of the accused. The love and desperation of a mother.
The story also contains great joy. The resilience of truth. The ultimate victory of good over evil. The possibility — for all of us sinners and perhaps especially for those who do not yet believe — of redemption.
Seven hundred years before Jesus appeared on Earth, the great Jewish prophet Isaiah wrote about the carpenter and his terrible moment on Good Friday: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. But he has borne our griefs, and he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was upon him.”
The hope we recognize on Christmas bears full fruit during the Crucifixion on Good Friday and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. The certain knowledge that God loves us. He wants us to be happy, to live lives of meaning and beauty. That we are important, loved, and worthy of being redeemed. That whatever travails we endure are temporary.
The cross on Friday and the rolled-away stone on Sunday are testaments to all of that. This weekend, think carefully about which of the two options is more likely to be true, and have a happy and reverent Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times and a co-host of the podcast “The Unregulated.”
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