Pope stresses "fundamental" value of women in Church

[PATRICK]

48. You have the Gospels

and then you have historical speculation. Guards were scared away by the event- if guards were actually posted all night. The women at the crucifixion helped by a bold insider Joseph of Arimethea got away with a rushed but respectful burial in a decent crypt. The women returned for a proper preparation(cleansing,better anointing) of the body troubled by the size of the rock they remembered at the tomb. The men had good cause to fear arrest. The issue of giving a decent burial was a big one lost in the empty tomb story but still there, as in the pre-anointing story which Judas found so wasteful.

Now we come to Mark's Gospel with special issues and axes to grind we vaguely see under modern scholarship. The women saw an ampty tomb and told no one. Or in other versions were simply not believed- for the usual reasons. Once on the way to check it out Peter(and John) probably began to feel the chill of possibility and memory of Jesus' own words. Seeing the empty tomb they believed. The possibility of a stolen body seems to be played down from the side of the Sanhedrin and the predictable disbelief of the close disciples but this is overshadowed and obviously redacted especially in Mark's Gospel. the obvious addendum in another's style, words and content jumps to the glory of the Resurrection. To my mind that looks both like lopping off some lost ending to the rather bitterly critiquing of the men apostles and a correction of redemption by the Cross for topdown triumphalism.

So no one "saw" the event. The corpse is gone and no one on any side wants to talk much about that. It didn't merit an investigation- or a purge- in the eyes of the establishment and the Church had the appearances, no Oedipus at Colonus empty awe ending. Meaning, mission, glory and not a ghost story, nor the typical hysteria cult cloud. It still is something like a blow between the eyes to the world as it is and human illusions as they really are not. Not historically satisfying even in the meager ways we would like, but not overwhelmingly mythologized or easily dismissed as the naturally hostile would judiciously scrutinize.

The irony is the situation has not changed much. We have perhaps a stunningly unique relic in the Shroud of Turin or maybe not. The real issue- it is still a piece of cloth after all- is how science and belief fumble all over themselves to create a state of murk over the whole thing. That in itself keeps at bay the facile positions of anyone, even the astonishment that reason and logic can't tame our sad state of affairs and simply do the job.

As a believer I have let myself doubt and examine all the possibilities and credibility with the little we can know with a corrupted thumb nail sketch of the history subject to the extrapolations of the sorry human condition. I have no belief in the absolutism of my own judgment. So it makes it comforting? if not ever comfortable to have a religion where the Absolute has entered the muck and mire and pulled us out despite everything.

Despite the lavish glorification bestowed by human theology upon the meaning and the painful picking away at the historical crumbs on the Judaeo-Christian china, you still only have a bitter out of hand dismissal with rather extreme prejudice and an experience of awe that only can be maintained and non-verbally understood by living out the entire mission.

Then when you say in the same movement of personal realizarion "He is Risen," you will get the same treatment as the perennial second class citizens. Crazy, hysterical, naive, mistaken- which is strangely usually the case when you put enthusiastic faith in any of our wonderful heros and leaders nowadays, strangely the ones not very much at all like Jesus. And far dumber, less daring and less humble. Even statutory leaders of his own Church.

Other cloudy details: the young man(men) at the tomb saying he is not there in a question form used also by third person questions and lack of recognition of the Risen Jesus in the Emmaus and Magdalene story. This confusion of recognition and belief/disbelief and words. There is sort of a protracted second "going" announced with a coming of the Spirit. No simple apotheosis or departure. No sense of finality or closure but of the real beginning. Decades later the next generation bridges the historical gap where commonly mythologizing buries history and changes the meaning so much that it must have some fundamental value greater than most human imagination to survive.

That said, I think the Pope, in what some would consider "shrewd" Jesuit fashion is paving the way for women in all posts of leadership in the Church by stressing the most important issues and leaving aside the biggest objections without mentioning anything- now- about advancing their status in Church ministry. The issue is, as in the Gospels, that women have taken the initiative already and that is in itself inspired already, even while Jesus was preaching with the traditional coterie of men disciples beginning with the rules of Scripture and culture but never ultimately constrained by them.

This has to driving the supposed "conservatives" of the Church mad with anger, which in itself puts them on the losing side. Conservatism everywhere seems to represent lies, hypocrisy, authoritarian arrogance, enmity toward the Spirit- and that is a charitable hypothesis.