orichalcum

It's nice to have enough energy again to feel actively happy, if that makes sense; I've been struggling through "content" for a while now. On the job front, I made the cut for on-campus interviews at Miami U of Ohio, despite having thought my phone interview was horrible. Don't know about Kenyon yet. So I'm flying out April 4-7th to visit Miami and Oberlin, and in the meanwhile will be working on preparing two radically different job talks, a half-hour talk for undergraduate classics majors at Oberlin on a specific topic, and a 45-minute general presentation to history faculty about my dissertation and what makes it interesting and relevant to non-ancient historians. So I think I need to borrow darkforge's hat stand, but I'm still really excited. Thank you all so much for your good thoughts and wishes - it's great to have a support net when one goes up on the high trapeze.

On a totally different note, this Easter season has seen a resurgence of my latent 8-generations worth of Protestant minister genes, and I've been having sermon-ish thoughts. So the ramble below is almost certainly only interesting to people curious about my thoughts about religion, especially Christianity - feel free not to read if that doesn't float your personal spiritual boat.



      A rabbi in Israel once told me that the central message of the Torah was that God created the a'dam, the bi-sexed first human, in the image or likeness of God. Unlike the angels or the rest of God's creation, though, God gave humans free will, in order that they might eventually come to be not just a blurred, faulty likeness of God but a true reflection and equal. Yet the consequence of that free will is that we also have the right and ability to choose not to be like God, or to come up with our own understanding of what God is and what God wants us to be.
      For this reason God has communicated with various prophets from various times and peoples, trying to give us guidelines towards more righteous, more God-like behavior. But even the words of these wise women and men, guided by divine inspiration, have been interpreted within the cultural context in which those prophets lived.
      And it is clear that God was surprised, at least at first, that we did not readily and immediately follow good paths and become like God. And initially, God's reaction was anger and frustration. With the Flood, God tried to wipe away the slate and start again, believing perhaps that he merely had a bad set of test subjects. But then came the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, who gang-raped God's own angels sent to test the people's hospitality and generosity, and again God, despite his promise of the rainbow, smote the cities down. It is easy, perhaps, to see how God, in her quest for perfection, and in her own perfection, might not understand that it is not always easy for humans to follow a god-like life, to make the moral choices, even with the guidance of the prophets.
      And so, after many millennia, God decided that perhaps the problem was not with humans' innate fallibilty and our tendencies to wickedness, but with God's own inability to understand imperfection, to understand humanity. And so God made a great sacrifice, and caused part of Herself to be born as a human, to experience human life and human free will and to understand what it meant to not know what the true path was, to doubt and to wander, to desire that which one cannot have. And so Jesus lived.
      But while humans are distinguished from angels by our free will, we are distinguished from God most particularly by our mortality upon this earth. And so in order for God to understand us, it was necessary for Jesus to die. Necessary but not sufficient - the sacrifice that Jesus made for us is not that he suffered upon the cross and died, for if that was sufficient than Jesus could have been born with some fatal flaw and died in pain and agony as an infant, as so many did in those days. Rather, the sacrifice is that he lived, and loved, and experienced life, and then made the choice to die willingly, knowing that there would be pain and suffering. Jesus did not want to die! In the garden of Gethsemane, he begged God, "Let this cup passeth from me." But he also said, "But thy will be done." Knowing that the only way to reach true understanding of humanity, and true compassion for our lot, was to experience the ultimate end of human life, Jesus allowed himself to be killed. And Jesus did not know that he would be resurrected as a symbol and sign of hope, of God's new understanding.
      So when it is said that the miracle of Christianity is that Jesus allowed our sins to be wiped away, it is a simplification. Jesus' life, and Jesus' choices, and yes, Jesus' death allowed God to understand our sins, to enter into communion with the human race and say, "I know now that this road to perfection is not easy. I understand that it may take you all a while. But I have faith that, over the long journey, you are heading towards righteousness, not towards mutual destruction."
      And for our parts, the sacrifice that God made endows all of us with a responsibility. For as God went to such great lengths and such pain to understand and know us, to appreciate why we make our choices, we have a renewed commitment to make the right choices, to try to know and understand God and to be like Her, as He chose to learn how to be like us. So on this Easter weekend, remember that God cared enough for us to experience all that is being human, the good and the bad, the comfort and the pain, and that therefore we must strive to appreciate and learn how to be like God, that mystery greater than any other.