Holy Saturday, 2010

Love love love that Stuart Murdoch song below.  So good.  I’m not saying it’s about Holy Saturday, per se, but I am saying I love it.

Last night I went to a Good Friday service and got into a discussion about what some theologians call the hypostatic union of Christ’s supposed two natures.  The idea that Christ had two full natures, one human, one divine, has a long history in the church and it has all kinds of explanations, interpretations, supporters, detractors.  But for the sake of this post, let us presume that Christ was fully God and fully man (which is also the premise of the if statements in the KtB piece from yesterday).

The question posed to me last night was if being fully God made being fully human easier for Jesus.  My response was that part of what I find compelling about the possibility of Jesus is the idea that even though he may have been God in a way that makes my theology of the cross workable, there were just some things Jesus the man didn’t know or have access to.  For me, the power of the Thursday story isn’t that Jesus had an existential crisis over having to die, knowing all the while he’d be raised.  I like the idea that Jesus goes to the cross hoping that the things he believes about himself and God are true.  I like the idea that Jesus doesn’t know everything “the Father” knows…that his full human nature trumps his full God nature if it’s to mean anything.  A Jesus who has the same anxieties we do, a Jesus who is open to doubt…I want to say more about this and think about it in terms of yesterday’s post, but I have to finish reading and explicating The Sound and the Fury by Wednesday.  I’ll keep kicking these things around.  I’m sorry that this is a half-baked post, but I have to go back to Stuart Murdoch and William Faulkner for now. Peace.