Dear Four-Week Hiatus,
The other day, inundated with medieval Christian imagery, I realized something. I realized something worth blogging about!
It's likely you know this story better than me, but I'll do my best to recount the basics. One day, a little baby named Jesus was born. This was a pretty unusual birth because his mother was a virgin (Give me a break! I'm sure she got around.*). Jesus also turned out to be a pretty unusual guy. He did a lot of good things, like clean people's feet and revive the dead and give good speeches. For some reason, however, the Romans and/or other Jews were not too pleased with Jesus, so they sentenced him to death by crucifixion.
Pretty harsh! The main point of this story, though--apart from all those bits about doing good on earth and whatnot--is that crucifixes are pretty deadly. Go into any church, except those silly Lutheran ones,** and you'll see a bleeding or otherwise visibly distressed Christ bound to the cross, on the verge of death or whatever else befell him before his body disappeared from his tomb.
Flash forward to the twenty-first century, the era of iPads, eyeglasses and independent Ireland. Today, the main usage of the cross is not in the capacity of a murder-or-incapacitation-of-the-Messiah device, but rather in the following way:
The Red Cross: if this ain't reappropriation of religious imagery, I don't know what be.
By the 1860's, when Wikipedia says that the International Red Cross was begotten by (most likely) a number of non-virgins, the cross, unlike the Jews, must have lost its connotation of "Jesus Killer."*** Otherwise, it would have taken a great deal of insensitivity--much like that which I display in this blog entry--to venture out onto the battlefield under the banner of the crucifix and heal the wounds of good Christian soldiers.
Happy Easter!
A Concerned Friend
*God, please don't kill me. I was just joking.
**Just kidding, I swear! I even have Garrison Keillor's autograph.
***Killer Jesus, on the other hand, might make a good side-scroller game.
**Just kidding, I swear! I even have Garrison Keillor's autograph.
***Killer Jesus, on the other hand, might make a good side-scroller game.
