Today I was struck with the grubbiness and inhumanity of torture.
In the mail last week, we received spam containing a "woman's devotional." It was daily readings for women about beauty. So I read a little. The daily reading I came across talked about the beauty of the cross of Jesus. That true beauty was not what you look like outwardly, but rather true beauty was Jesus being crucified. I felt sick. There is nothing of beauty, or honor, or glory in the inhumanity of some torturing and cruelly abusing the body of another.
At this time of year there is that other silliness that says Jesus suffered more than any other human being ever could or has suffered. I read this week in the London Times the story of a man who survived recently two months of torture in Syria. The story was very difficult to read, and the man suffered horribly. I will not repeat here the torture he endured. Suffice it to say it was excruciatingly painful and was repeated day after day. The world is in outcry at the abuses of government power in Syria, and rightly so. Torture and execution is, and always has been, a grubby and shameful thing.
Thankfully, though the news and entertainment industries lead us to think that violence and torture are on the increase, it is not the case. I read recently Steven Pinker's "The Better Angel's of Our Nature." (See link below) Pinker argues persuasively that violence, war, and torture have been in decline for a long time. If this seems counterintuitive, get his book. Only a few centuries ago, torture was accepted by most in society as a helpful tool in the arsenal of government. Torture and execution were public spectacle, enjoyed by the crowds as a spectator sport. The equivalent would be watching on prime time TV gruesome tortures and executions, just for the fun of it. Such an idea now turns our stomachs.
Pinker roots the change in Enlightenment reason from the seventeenth century onward. It is too long and involved a thesis to consider here. My own gloss on his thesis is that the better Enlightenment sensibilities were themselves rooted in the tradition of humanity that grew in the Jewish wisdom and prophetic traditions, of which Jesus was an exemplar. (A tradition mirrored in the east in the Buddha, the Dao, Confucius and the Baghavad Gita.) It has been the growing realization that violence, war and torture are not the glory of humanity, but its shame. In its place is humaneness, tolerance, kindness, forgiveness—in short love. Human relationships are better as loving relationships than as hateful and harmful ones. It has taken a long time for us to begin to realize this. Collectively we have a long way to go. My conviction is that loving nonviolence is a way of living whose time has come.
For those of us who are Christians, where does it leave the crucifixion of Jesus? Not something of beauty. Not the silliness that his torture and execution was any different to the suffering of millions of others. It leaves us (following Renee Girard) with the notion that in Jesus is the end of torture, executions, scapegoating and sacrificing—as if causing the pain of others is pleasing to God, as if God delights in the torture and death of any.
I have long been convinced that if the death of Jesus has cosmic meaning, it is that God suffers with those who suffer—that because God suffers in and with us we ought to work toward the end of suffering.
+Ab. Andy