The women who came to tend the tomb in the garden had no doubt that their Lord was dead. Rejected as he had been by his own people, legally condemned as an enemy of Rome, brought to a squalid and ignominious end, his defeat had seemed total. What victory could there possibly be in the wake of such a death?
Yet then something miraculous happened. Spreading from east to west across the Mediterranean, travelling along the great network of roads and shipping lanes that constituted the arteries of the Roman Empire, news began to spread that this man whose mortal remains supposedly lay entombed in the grave had been seen alive.
‘Christians’, these deviants were called, after their founder, ‘Christus’, a criminal who had been crucified in Judaea some decades before, under a previous Caesar. Nero, ever fond of a spectacle, had some of the condemned, dressed in animal skin and torn to pieces by dogs. Others, lashed to crosses, had been smeared in pitch and used as torches to illumine the night. Nero, riding in his chariot, had mingled with the gawping crowds. Suetonius would include his persecution of the Christians in the list — a very short one — of the positives of his reign.
[Nero's followers believed he would rise from the dead, and yet] despite the various imposters who appeared, his fate was to be commemorated, not as a saviour, but as a monster.
Among those put to death was a man who in time would come to be viewed [by some] as the very keeper of the doors of heaven. In 1601, in a church that had originally been built on the site of the tomb where Nero’s two nurses and his first great love had buried him, a painting was installed that paid homage, not to the notorious Caesar, but to the outcast origins of the city’s Christian order.
Peter, the story went, had demanded to be crucified upside down... Caravaggio, choosing as his theme the very moment when the heavy cross was levered upwards, portrayed the first pope as he had authentically been — as a peasant. No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio portrayed Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of Nero, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of 'the keys of the kingdom of heaven'.
That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. Nero, charging the Christians with arson and hatred of humanity, seems not to have undertaken any detailed interrogation of their beliefs — but doubtless, had he done so, he would have been revolted and bewildered.
Radically though Nero had sought to demonstrate to the world that the divine might be interfused with the human, the Christians he had tortured to death believed in something infinitely more radical. There was but the one God, and His Son, by becoming mortal and dying the death of a slave, had redeemed all of humanity. Not as an emperor but as a victim. The message was novel beyond the wildest dreams even of a Nero; and was destined to endure long after all his works, and the works of the Caesars, had crumbled into dust.
This Sunday, when billons of people around the globe celebrate the triumph over death of a man laid in a tomb in a garden, the triumph they celebrate will not be that of an emperor. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)
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1 comment:
The day would come when people would name their *dogs* ‘Nero’ and their *sons* ‘Peter.’
(With apologies to TR Glover, who said this about Paul)
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