crucifixes

A nun once announced to a Senior literature class I was in that The Old Man and the Sea was a Crucifixion metaphor. I loved that class and it formed my thinking. But sometimes a nun would say something so outrageous that I slumped in my seat in adolescent sullenness and wondered. Is there something here I don't see, or is this as idiotic as it seems? I am now pretty sure that Hemingway had no such idea when he wrote the story, but that doesn't necessarily make the idea untrue. The question has followed me around for more than forty years. Finally I've come to realize that the real question is, What exactly does the Crucifixion mean to all those people with crosses on their walls ? A school doctor once asked me whether I didn't think I would want a crucifix on the wall above my death bed. What in world could she have been talking of? Another question that follows me around. Can all those cross hanging people get something I am missing? What exactly does that image mean to people? It has never done anything for me, even at Mother of Sorrows elementary school, where I sang in the choir, went to Confession every Saturday and Communion every Sunday.
I went for the nuns' obsession with my virginity; I wrote long essays against birth control, couched in formal logic. I worked at night to pay my tuition, and I pressed those white blouses. I couldn't wear brown for years because of the hideous uniform, but I wore it and paid for it myself. I get Marian worship, but the crucifixion hangs there, pardon the pun, a mystery of agony for my sins. The nuns told me the hell I lived through was a manifestation of the love of God. I decided years ago that I could do without any more of that kind of love, but still He hangs there, has hung for two thousand years. People have been flogged to death, stoned, electrocuted, pressed to death, beheaded with sword and guillotine, dunked. and thrown from cliffs, and we recoil in horror. But we use the crucifix to comfort us for something. What? I still don't know, but I have some thoughts on the matter.
A long time ago, in a desert land far away, a tribal people with a penchant for writing down stories as the Word of God or something were oppressed by the Romans. The Romans oppressed pretty much anyone they came in contact with, but they had the good sense to leave the oppressed alone with their beliefs, taking off a lot of the pressure that creates revolutions. The Romans were practical above all They pretty much left you alone unless you were a threat to their supremacy. Then they were brutal, and they were public so that everyone could see the consequences of defiance. They crucified people on top of hills and left them there hanging for the education of the people, a kind of ultimate spin. This is how it really is. .
There are few hard facts to the story of the Crucifixion of the Christ and Savior. We have no proof that Jesus Christ ever lived and no evidence of any kind for modern Catholic theology. He never claimed to be the Savior, and no one ever called him Christ, which is a Greek word. Jews of that time and place did not mostly speak Greek and they were picky about who got to be the Savior. They had a hope of salvation all right, but from the Romans. They wanted their own state. God had promised it and broken the promise again and again. God being God, the Jews did not waste time blaming Him; they figured they had done something to force God to abrogate his word, and they figured eventually a new David would come and fix it with military genius. They had nothing that correlates with a modern American's concept of sin. They, reasonably did not think horrendous suffering was a consequence of God's love. They knew they had fucked up and needed a military man to get them out of the mess they were in.
There were always a lot of wandering Messiahs around; the Romans ignored them if they were not threats and probably crucified the ones they thought might be. Most messiahs were careful, I imagine. The people were still waiting for someone who could take on the Romans with a slingshot, charisma, and brilliant military strategy and beat the Romans out of their homeland before he got crucified. Jesus of Nazareth, a harmless preacher who told his followers to give the government what was the government's and God what was God's, rode into Jerusalem at Passover on a donkey to the hosannas of a crowd of Jews lining his path. He had made a name for himself by violently chasing the money changers out of the temple. The Romans liked commerce a lot; they based a lot of their prosperity and thus power on it. I'm sure they heard about the temple incident, and they noted. This man had preached a fairly innocuous set of beliefs until then. Loving one's neighbor as oneself is okay as long one did not piss one's neighbor off about the Romans, roads that all led to Rome, and commerce.
He talked about Samaritans giving their cloaks to beggars, not suggesting that beggars and lepers were socially unacceptable because they had no bootstraps. He preached not only the right of women to study with masters but the obligation over household duties. Men studied; women were pure and got ritual dinner on Friday night. Jesus said that a prostitute was no more deserving of stoning than any male who broke the Law. He was a Jew; he probably had a wife and children. He left them at home or took them with him on these revolutionary walks through the country. He may have hoped to change the world through through changing the people. He may have been a classic Jewish prophet. Wake up! You have offended God, whoever he is. You must change now, or you are doomed! But he threw the money changers out of the Temple and then took that ride at Passover. It was all over. Before he was arrested, he said, One of you will betray me. He was very likely brilliant; for sure he was no fool. Like Martin Luther King, he did not expect to grow old, and death to revolutionaries in those days hurt like hell. Someone for sure would betray him, and in fact, they all did. No Apostles were crucified with him. He died alone, except for the Romans and maybe his wife and mother. The apostles ended up in the upper room knowing exactly what had happened and who they were. The rest is salvation myth and atonement. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans about a hundred years later and had been occupied for two thousand years until 1947.
Christianity remained a small Jewish sect among many sects until Saul of Tarsus, a Romanized Jew, who persecuted Christians for a living, fell off his horse, changed his name as a result of realizing he could solve his problem by co-opting Christianity. He turned it into a Roman sect and proceeded to sell it to the civilized world as the new Roman truth. It has since been used as an excuse for every sort of imperialistic aim in history. People all over the world have been forced to join the empire and worship its new god. They reacted by burying their goddesses under Marian basilicas, and the empire goes on. The United States is loathed all over the world as a result of the behavior of our newest Christian leader, and we are busily imposing our morals on nations who have no clue what they mean or why they should practice them. Meanwhile loving one's neighbor as oneself is still a revolutionary concept that really well change the world, but few of us really want revolution. I get it about crucifixes now. If I can find one I can stand to look at as art, I'll hang it,or maybe I'll just get a little figure of a donkey.
As for The Old Man and the Sea, maybe it most closely correlates to The Stations of the Cross. Let me know what you think.