It’s Saturday. He is badly bruised and in His tomb. For the moment He’s dead, a state He occupies uneasily and not very expertly, it must be said. He’s wrapped in a shroud which may later make an appearance in the New York Times. Yesterday, after having been beaten up and then flogged up a steep hill and nailed onto a cross alongside a couple of other mischief-makers of, finally, much less consequence, He was in time run through with a spear by an impatient Roman guard attempting to test the mettle of the corpse Christ had evidently become. The mixture of water and blood that is reported to have burst from that wound has been lavishly seen to by forensic bible scholars, an admixture of fluids that indicate, from a CSI perspective, a burst pericardium; the double-walled, fluid-filled bag the heart lives in. The physical stress of the torture and slow death would have filled the bag with even more injured fluid, and it would have burst with Christ’s heart, the fluid filling the thoracic cavity, so we’re told, later pouring out at the urging of a thrust spear. So there He lies, on a rock shelf in a cave, tattered holes in hands and feet, and one other one just under His ribcage. Today is Saturday. Tomorrow, following a probably unnecessary burst of showy radiant energy (again, NY Times; likely below the fold) He will rustle perceptibly in His boulder-sealed grotto, then will fully reanimate with a wince and sluggishly, I imagine, with a far-seeing sigh that acknowledges the millennia of misery this tomb-leaving precipitates, swing His feet over the edge of the stone shelf, roll the boulder aside with magic and make His meddlesome exit. Walking about and stirring up long-term trouble, He’ll stun several locals and one recalcitrant follower whose name is today at the very heart of theological Doubt nomenclature. He will then speak prosaically to an interested gathering of gawpers and fly up into the air like Sally Field, and thence into the realm of legend, war and privation, and just possibly salvation. We Frankly Don’t Know much more. Given the Hubble Deep Field it is a striking failure of the imagination to pretend We Do Know. But such is the nature of Faith that doesn’t know it is Faith.
It’s Saturday
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