Laetitia

There is something that is haunting about Goya’s Still Life with Sheep’s Head.  When I view this painting, I am reminded of Our Lord’s Passion. The sheep has been slaughtered, butchered, so that the ribs have been cut open. The position of the ribs is such that one side has been put up against the other, forming a cross. The head sits left, and though severed has an eerie quality that suggests that the sheep witnessed its own slaughter.

This witnessing of one’s death is precisely what Christ knew he was doing in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Indeed, realizing that the very people who called themselves apostles would abandon him he says in Matthew:

Then Jesus said to them, “This night all of you will have your faith in me shaken, for it is written: ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be dispersed’; but after I have been raised up, I shall go before you to Galilee.” (Matt 26:31-33)

And yet are we not the sheep? What about our own death and how does this relate to Our Lord’s Passion?

A fraternity member who was a teacher in a public school used to tell her grammar school age students this: we all cry, we all bleed, and we all die.  Jesus, who as St. Paul tells us, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped, humbled himself becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Phil. 2:6,8). He cried, he bled, and he died. He humbled himself embracing our humanity so that we might share in his divinity. In that sense, we can unite our sufferings to his. This idea is known as redemptive suffering, that we can participate in the Lord’s death by uniting our suffering to his for a new life in his resurrection.

I cannot be certain Goya intended anything religious in this painting. He was preoccupied with death and how it can sometimes be cruel. And yet, when I see the very vivid image of the sheep I think about how we are united with Christ in his suffering and death so that we may live.  And most profoundly it is worth meditating this Holy Week on the humility of God’s love, becoming human to die with us so that we might live with him in paradise, like the thief who asked to be remembered. Will we be remembered? 

There is a danger in Lent of focusing too much on physical suffering of Jesus’ crucifixion. This is an old pre-occupation in the Church that goes back to the early Church fathers Origen and Anselm.

Origen held the “ransom theory of atonement”, while Anselm held fast to “satisfaction atonement”. Both are attempting to answer the meaning of salvation. Origen felt that Jesus’ death was a ransom — that because Adam and Eve had sold humanity to the Satan, only Jesus being both fully human and divine could win humanity back to God. The idea is that as a human he died, so it appeared to trick the devil into giving his humanity. But, as God he was able to conquer death and bring us back to God.

Anselm took issue with crediting the devil with so much. He sees humanity as being stained with sin. Indeed because God’s love is so infinite and gratuitous, human being s could never satisfy repayment to God. Jesus as fully human substitutes for our humanity; because he is also fully divine he is able to properly restore the balance for humanity.

Satisfaction theology developed a linkage between suffering and sin. It developed into a notion that in order for Jesus to take on the sin of humanity, Jesus had to take on proportionate suffering. But how do we know the extent of the suffering?

Attempting to determine just how much suffering can lead to dangerous strains of thought. Indeed I am cautious not take a Gnostic tendency. Taking the view that Christ suffered the most suffering of any human being not only fetishizes the suffering, but also rejects the humanity of Christ. This is not to say that Christ’s death was not immensely painful and violent. We know it was. It is to say then that if we take the view that Christ suffered more than any other human being past, present or future, it diminishes his ability to be human as we are human; it instead makes him to be an uber-mensch son of a sadistic father who will only redeem humanity if his son actualizes the highest potential of pain. It does not allow for Christ to participate in our suffering because his suffering is higher. Such a view denies the love of creation and instead privileges the spirit over the body. The concern here, therefore, is that satisfaction theology can slip into such gnostic tendencies.