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Perhaps it is fitting that the first reaction is one of dis-ease.
Perhaps the uneasy reaction is because it seems, well... scandalous.
Maybe even sacreligious.
Sacreligious because well, it portrays the Holy as wellll... common meat.
And everyone knows common meat isn't fit for God.
And maybe that is the point.
We've sacrelized the Incarnation and Nativity to the point of sanitizing it.
The scandal of God in flesh/God with meat has been lost because it has become religion, not history.
The scandal of eating His flesh and drinking His blood has been lost because we are fed it out of gilded cups with golden spoons by royalty in gold robes.
The Incarnation has lost its power because we've composed majestic hymns and painted reverent pictures and set cute little plastic scenes of it on white cotton cloth instead of beds of saurkraut.
Maybe this is closer to the reality of the Incarnation.
Perhaps the real scandal is what we've turned it into.
17 comments:
I think your incarnation is undercooked.
Also, OW.
This reminds me of when I would take an icon of Christ away from our son when he was smaller, and feel awkward saying, "Don't eat Jesus ... right now."
Because "Carne" is the Reason of the Season. LOL
CREEPIER THAN THE FELLOW IN THE TURQUOISE CARDIGAN
I am wordless
I am really, really impressed with such a clean oven....
It is meat and right. (Beer talking, sorry.)
Apo, precisely. I did a homily once with a can of chili to make the point: God con carne. That was the scandal of the Gospel, still is.
David, LOL! Have another beer on me.
Anon, the picture certainly wasn't shot in OUR oven.
that's just awesome.
Makes me wanna sing...
"Away in the bacon, no ham for his head..."
Babushka Jo
I'm not sure about this. But then, I don't like saurkraut.
I had a long e-talk with a friend last year about the "scandal" of the incarnation, and found I had a hard time communicating just what was meant by that. On his part, he had a hard time accepting the "mythology" of the event - that God would come indwell flesh, to him, didn't sound all that different from the stories of Zeus taking the form of a bull or swan or whatever.
Bill M., That is a common "Bill Moyers" argument, but I think it is GK Chesterton (or CS Lewis) has a great reply to it (paraphrased): of course there will be similar stories because we are "hard wired" to know the truth of God. Because a culture or a religion has a similar myth does not necessarily make the True Event a myth, it just points to the validity that the Truth exists.
Bill M, it's critical to compare not simply how such stories are the same, but more importantly how they are different. A more useful parallel perhaps is the difference between the Son incarnate as a fully God and fully man and the Holy Spirit appearing in the form of a dove. I think it was St Athanasius who pointed out that the Spirit did not take on a dove's nature, and thus did not become incarnate.
Another key difference is that the Son became incarnate to save the human race from sin and corruption, whereas practically every time Zeus takes on human form is for the purposes of seduction or rape.
I said when I first came across Fr Stephen's blog (before my slow migration to the Church) that it seemed to me that all theological controversy came down to which verses you took literally and which you took metaphorically. One of the greatest gift's God has given me has been the few close brothers who've kicked me in the side of the head (with a muddy boot of reality) when I had become attached to the clouds.
I am me, a man who is serious about humor and lighthearted about things of true import. God save me.
"The Coming of the Messiah as Depicted by Various Cuts of Pork" is not to be used as a tool of evangelism.
Certainly can ignore the possible Freudian implications, you know with all the sausage etc.
Anon, I dunno... edible BBQ tracts on the Incarnation might be a real "soul winner". You can convert me to almost anything with BBQ ribs. :)
I was talking to my students about the etymology of "carnival" (from "carne vale" or "goodbye meat"). Then, we talked about the meaning of the word "incarnation." In one class, I inadvertently used the phrase "en-meated." They all laughed, but it's totally appropriate. Jesus was en-meated.
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