Thursday, September 07, 2006
The Last Meal/Last Supper Dichotomy
As some of you know, I am in the middle of writing a book on Jesus Christ as a criminal defendant. There are several themes which emerge, revealing similarities between the trial of Christ and modern criminal issues. A few weeks ago, I wrote a very short chapter comparing our modern obsession with the last meals of convicts about to be executed with the Last Supper. I have included below the final paragraph (the entire chapter is available at www.ssrn.com):
"We are somewhere in between the Savior and the killer. We exist in that wide chasm between the murderer and Christ; yet our common experience meets the murderers in the precise place where it meets the life of Christ. There is an elegant symmetry between the Christ who is perfect beyond our comprehension and the murderer who is flawed beyond our comprehension, and their experiences are like ours in only the most basic of ways. As the murderer picks up the bread, so did Christ, and so do we. Though Christ and the murderer come to us from opposite directions, something inside compels us to try to understand both, and in that attempt to understand we are pulled toward those few brief moments where we share something like the feeling of bread in our hands.
Food… that, we understand."
"We are somewhere in between the Savior and the killer. We exist in that wide chasm between the murderer and Christ; yet our common experience meets the murderers in the precise place where it meets the life of Christ. There is an elegant symmetry between the Christ who is perfect beyond our comprehension and the murderer who is flawed beyond our comprehension, and their experiences are like ours in only the most basic of ways. As the murderer picks up the bread, so did Christ, and so do we. Though Christ and the murderer come to us from opposite directions, something inside compels us to try to understand both, and in that attempt to understand we are pulled toward those few brief moments where we share something like the feeling of bread in our hands.
Food… that, we understand."
