A book club that is following up the recent course I took on Religious Experience is reading Kamel Hussein's City of Wrong, which is a Muslim's serious consideration of the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus with its surrounding events. Due to the Kuran's comments about the crucifixion, such a serious consideration is rather uncommon. It was translated to English by Kenneth Cragg, the (very) widely respected Christian scholar of Islam. Hopefully, I'll have more from it later, but the first paragraph of Cragg's introduction was beautifully written with a growing power as the sentences roll on. I'd highlight certain lines, but it's more powerful in the aggregate.
Readers of the Gospels have often been uneasily aware that in their verdict against Jesus men were in fact involved in an inclusive verdict against themselves. The Governor Pilate’s familiar cry in presenting the Prisoner to the pity and, as it finally proved, to the brutality of the mob with the words Ecce Homo, ‘Behold the Man,’ turns on reflection into the plural. Here more than anywhere humankind is discernible in representative moral perversity, epitomized in ecclesiastical, political and popular choices made by particular people caught in a personal and communal crisis. The Ecce Homo scene in the precincts of the Roman praetorian presents a man to the judgement of a crowd. But such are its implications that the tables are reversed. The man becomes the crisis of the crowd and the moral meaning of the scene becomes a judgment by and of humanity. All its import gathers into one revelation chief priests and people, governor and onlookers, and cries to us all: Ecce Homines, ‘Behold humanity.’
Kamel Hussein, City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem. (quotation from Kenneth Cragg's 'Introduction')
No comments:
Post a Comment