Easter: Mytherious Ways?

Holy week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.  Wow.  One would think spectacular things would happen on the religious front this week.  Doesn’t look like it.  Looks more like bombings in Syria and brinkmanship around North Korea. 

Saw a post on Facebook this morning that asked everyone to pray to God to cure those who have cancer.  Said if you agree to like and share.  Right.  Like that will make some kind of difference.  Why not pray to extinguish all cancer?  Why not ask why God allowed cancer in the first place?  Especially childhood cancer.  Seems to me if He allowed it then there is no reprieve from it.  Same is true of all terminal illness.  And so I get to thinking about Easter and the nature of god.

Why did God develop a plan to save humans from sin by conducting a torturous death of His son?  What kind of nonsense is that?  I am the Great Almighty God and I cannot figure out a way to forgive sins other than nailing my son to a cross?  What is wrong with this picture?  Why does the Almighty need to conduct a blood sacrifice?  Why must we gather cannibal-like and eat his flesh and drink his blood?  Good Lord that is barbaric.  Why not just say if you love me and pray to me and do good works and obey my laws you will be saved and go to heaven?  Why all this melodramatic torture?

Are we to assume that the measure of God’s love for us is killing his own son?  (I assume God was capable of stopping the execution, Jesus asked him to, but he allowed it; therefore he did it.)  Is that our model?  Should I kill my son so that my daughter knows I love her?  What kind of god would structure it that way?  I do not feel his love for me via the death of Jesus.  I am horrified.

On the other hand, if God knew all along this was a temporary deal in that Jesus would die and then presto-chango come back to life then is it really a sacrifice at all?  If I give all my wealth to the poor knowing that three days later someone is going to reimburse me, have I made a sacrifice?  The crucifixion and resurrection make no sense at all no matter how one slices it.  There had to be a better plan available.

Unless the entire story was concocted to appeal to Bronze Age thinkers who were accustomed to sacrificing animals (sometimes humans!) as part of their religious practices.  Was this merely a myth circulated to appeal to other pagans who believed that killing something helped them in their relationship to whatever god they worshipped?  If that is the case, no wonder Jesus went beserk in the temple seeing money changers selling sacrificial animals.  One wonders if Jesus identified with the animals.  On the other hand, has God been enriched by the death of His son?  I would say yes.  (As George Carlin pointed out, God the Almighty is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and capable of anything, but he needs a lot of money.)

Can this be possible?  Can it be that the son of god died in a horrible, torturous execution, and was buried?  A stone was rolled away and guards sedated or terrorized.  Women talked to an angel.  He rose from the dead.  He appeared to his closest followers who at first did not recognize him.  He allowed the one with doubt to touch his wounds, but does not allow anyone else since then to do so.  In fact, he requires that his followers believe with no real evidence.  He literally floated up into heaven.  Is heaven “up”?  Jesus raised Lazarus, God raised Jesus, but no other follower in modern times has ever been raised.  And if he is still alive why doesn’t he make guest appearances somewhere other than tree trunks, shrouds, and waffles?  And most of the people who talk to angels, ghosts and aliens are institutionalized.

No.  I cannot buy it.  I cannot respect, much less love, a god who would do such a thing to his own son.  I cannot fathom a resurrection for some but not for all.  I cannot believe when some are given evidence but not all.  I cannot believe there is a god so stupid as to develop this plan, or so vicious as to carry it out.  The leap of faith required to buy all this is not a leap of faith.  It is sky diving without a parachute.  It flies in the face of all the logic and science we know to be true.  It must be a myth.

Therefore, if there is a God, he/she works in Mytherious Ways.  And that is very sad.