of crowns of thorns or the musings of a day on Easter weekend doing yard work

One thing that always puts me off about evangelical or Pentecostal or any other revised form of Christianity is the love of images with Jesus wearing a crown of thorns and blood dripping down the sides of his face.  Of course Catholics do it, too (Mel Gibson’s completely unnecessary gore in that indulgent movie The Passion).  But the fixation on the macabre and destruction of the human form of Jesus never sat well with me.  Firstly, the whole repetition of Jesus died (and was gratuitously tortured) for your sins always seems like a sneaky get out of jail free card for a lot of Christians.  By repeating that over and over and over and showing all the grisly detail, it somehow obscures the ‘sins’ for which he proactively dripped blood from his temples.  And then, secondly, it always struck me as the wrong way to think of things.  The whole story of Jesus (I like to think – but I don’t go to church anymore so what do I know) is all about God made flesh.  So… why use that as an excuse to demean and brutalize flesh?  It villainizes the good stuff like sex and nakedness and skin color and gender.  But these images glorify the destruction of it.  The very thing that makes us human and for which God made his son give up divinity… and we want to show it torn to pieces with thorns and nails… yeah… I don’t buy it.

So… if I haven’t lost the audience of my Christian readers… I found myself thinking about those gory images as I wrestled once again with the prickly branches of the wild rose bushes in my backyard.  Eventually I tamed the beast (or a good half of it), but not without my fair share of scratches and drops of blood.   But I felt good for the conquering of it.  I felt the oxygen in my lungs, the heat of the sun on my skin, the strength of my arms as I ripped apart vine twisted branches… and the only thing that wasn’t so rewarding were the pricks of those wretched thorns.

Roses weren’t the only perpetrator in today’s battle.  Indeed, there was a rose that was rather heroic.  At the end of this wall of thorns is a Rose of Sharon tree my mother planted years ago.  I noticed last summer that it still blooms beautifully – and may in fact be a part of the reason I set about trying to clean up the jungle these plants have become.  This morning I was pleased to see some green sprouting on the tree’s branches… only to realize upon closer look that it wasn’t the tree but the twisted vines of honeysuckle that had crept and wrapped itself around nearly every single branch.

I thought to take a picture of this, but I shook my head out of the impulse not wanting to track mud into the house or get my muddy fingerprints on my camera.  Never mind break the momentum of my determination.  But I will tell you to picture in your mind’s eye a mess of dead sticks and gnarled vines.  I did find the artwork of the vines wrapped so tightly around some branches almost beautiful… until I saw how it killed quite a few of them.  Indeed, there were some twists and braids where it killed itself, forcing out a broom of dead tendrils.  But the hearty tree held its own, reaching out branches close to the ground towards the sun in order to survive.

After some work, it was just a tree again.  Beautiful and strong and soaking up today’s sunshine.

I look forward to a few months from now when the broad white petals open up to the summer air.  I look forward to the crop of irises and day lilies that I found under the cover of the thorny branches.  It may even be…  a garden.

As I ripped up the roots of the vines and pulled apart the prickly branches, I thought about that symbol of a crown of thorns (no doubt somewhere between thinking about Easter tomorrow and the roadmap I scratched into my arm) … and how very willing we are to keep them on our heads, be we Christian or not.  How the thought of cutting our fingers to free our minds puts into one the fear of inaction.  But the symbol validates our martyrdom and the supposed wisdom that comes with letting the painful be the focus.

I thought of how many ideas and fears and inhibitions have snaked their way around my heart and mind just as the honeysuckle did around the tree.  How insidious the invasion that I don’t know how to pull apart the truth from fear or hurt.  Something I thought about in the broad picture and a couple specific instances of recent months – taking the chance at a new job, speaking up for myself against insult, and just the simple necessity of getting off my butt on a Saturday morning to do some yard work.  All have their stings… but ultimately let me look up at the sun and free my heart a little bit.

When I was a kid, I used to think of it as an emblem of a good summer if I had scratches on my shins at the end of the day.  It meant I was brave enough to explore the untended part of the WTAG fields and not the well worn paths to and from the towers.  Today I look at my forearms (that should have been protected, but I absently kept pulling up my sleeves in the heat of the sun) and feel the same sort of accomplishment.

I’m glad I pulled back the nest of crowned thorns and vines to reveal a garden.