[December 4th]
The Carrying of the Cross

I remember I had a lot of trouble with my Mythologies class freshman year of undergrad. Not just because the reading load was crushing and the demands on the tests ridiculous, but because we studied the old myths of a god dying every spring. I had spent most of my life thinking about how remarkably unique the idea of God Almighty coming down to die for His people was, God in human form accepting death. Only to find it virtually omnipresent.

At the time, I thought it out and made the distinction (not insignificant) that it was never the Alpha Creator, that it was symbolic – like the difference between communion to Protestants and Catholics. Not entirely satisfying at times, but there is actually much there about Jesus making Himself the final sacrifice not to spare lambs in the Passover but also all the practitioners of those faiths which demand human sacrifice.

And perhaps I’ll talk about that more when I get to the next mystery, but there is another tradition that Jesus was undertaking on our behalf and bringing together those two – the scapegoat bridled only with shame and the sacrificial representative of God given great honor – is something unique.

The scapegoat – an unfortunate soul upon which a community placed all of their ills and troubles, all their bad luck and bad karma, all their sins and fears and evils, all of the terrible things we have inside of us that we cannot reconcile, and then driven out and away. The Bearer of Pain and Sin. The carrier of the cross for the entire community.

We’re still doing it – one of the things that sucks most about politics – but as a condoned practice it has gone the way of human sacrifice – a purging of barbaric reactions to our desire to be free of the darkness. We are still in many ways a barbaric people, we are still wrestling with the desire to shunt away, medicate away, otherwise excise from ourselves all the darker areas of uncertainty and sin and pain and terror and impulses toward violence and sex and fascination with death. Separate ourselves from pain and our “baser instincts.”

But Jesus already took all of that on His back. His burden is easy, His yoke is so light. That is why. The price is paid, the Scapegoat has carried away the inevitable punishment for such things.

But he also told us – any man who will follow Me must take up his cross. We cannot fling things away from us. ‘What happens when you repress something?’ ‘Um, it goes away?’ ‘No, it comes back all crazy and pissed off!’ We must take on our back all of the things that we would love to cut out of our lives and walk with them instead. Carry our darkness, our tendencies toward sins, as burdens. As things that we keep before our eyes, so that we can keep them from lashing out beyond our conscious control. They do not go away if we refuse to think about them. We cannot expunge them entirely. We must instead learn to live with them and carry them and keep them in balance with our good nature. [And not balance as in they both get equal time, equal expression – that they get equal amounts of our attention so that we can make the choice about them at all moments.]

He paid the price, so we do not have to expunge our sin – exorcise and place it on our past selves as if they are not still a part of us, impose it on those who tormented us and blame them instead of ourselves, put it on our society or the system of class and gender and government, but instead take our darkness up as our own. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Otherwise we give it too much power – the power to destroy us or our chosen scapegoat. Neither of which gets rid of the evil. Repression only gives darkness a free reign to run unchecked. We have to watch ourselves, we have to take it on our back as well.

The price has been paid, long ago, there is no punishment anymore for being who we are. That doesn’t make how we act and who we choose to become any less our responsibility. It makes it more so. We cannot blame the darkness as if it is not a part of us, as if it is an external force controlling us. We are no longer slave to, and therefore can no longer blame, the darker parts of our nature. So we must carry them upon our back and choose. Choose to do better.