Jesus carried the cross on his shoulder, the wood thick and heavy. His head, crowned with thorns by the Romans to simultaneously mock and punish him, was set firmly downward.

He was a man going off to die, in one of the most horrible ways possible. He was suffering from the torments of the Romans and all I wanted to do was relieve the poor man of the burden.

This was the painting projected on a movie-sized screen in St. Peter’s Square while my wife and teenage daughter waited on line to go through the airport-like security check to get into the Vatican in mid-March of this year.

The work was displayed as part of a new series of fourteen oil paintings made by a Swiss artist for the Catholic Church’s commemoration of Lent. The Vatican had organized an international competition requesting artists submit their work to display new interpretations of the Stations of the Cross, Jesus’ tragic path towards the crucifixion.

The paintings depict a Jerusalem of intense, almost harsh sunlight, but Jesus himself is often surrounded by shadow, a forewarning of the terrible fate that awaits him.

One painting shows Jesus walking down the steps from a dark room, presumably where he’s been condemned to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea. A Roman soldier behind Jesus has his hand on the cross. It’s not clear if the soldier is pushing Jesus or helping him hold up the cross. Another shows Jesus crushed on the ground under the cross, his face plastered against the uneven boulders and stones of the road leading to Calvary.

A third print shows a Roman soldier overseeing a beardless man, not a soldier, who is getting ready to hammer a mallet into Jesus’ feet. A second man, also not a soldier, kneels by Jesus’ head. It’s not clear who he is, or what he’s doing.

I was grateful that no Jews were portrayed as doing anything demonic to Jesus. The Judeans portrayed in the paintings are standing by, watching Jesus through his passion, cloaked in sorrow. These may be the apostles, as well as Jesus’ mother Mary.

In the crucifixion, Jesus is accompanied by two other men who have been executed. Blood leaks from his hands and feet, where they’ve been nailed to the cross. Jesus is in quiet agony. Blood trails onto his forehead from the crown of thorns the Romans have put on his head.

After Christ has been executed, two men handle his body, in the artist’s rendering. The Romans are gone. His mother, eyes hooded, hovers over his lifeless form.

The series is meant to evoke anguish in the viewer. It certainly did that to me. It’s not only Jesus’ suffering that troubles me, but two additional problems.

First, it feels like the church keeps fetishizing the suffering of Christ. I think I know why they’ve done it for at least a thousand years. The stations of the cross send a message to Christians. This is how Christ has suffered for our sins. His torture and execution are what he had to do to redeem you and the rest of humankind from damnation. The Jews turned away from human sacrifice, as signified by God telling Abraham not to kill his son Isaac. But Christian theology brought this ethically horrific idea back.

Second, the identity of the witnesses to the stations of the cross has been obliterated, from his small group of followers to the mother of Jesus. They are all Judeans. The passion story takes place in Jerusalem, of course, home of the Jews for more than three thousand years. Yet the Catholic Church has seen fit to erase the Jewish identities of Jesus and his band of adherents, as if they were simply blank outlines in a paint by numbers kit, waiting to be imprinted with a Christian identity.

The only clue that Jesus, his family and his followers were Jewish is the sign affixed by the Romans above Christ’s head on the cross to mock him. It says, “INRI.”

“INRI is an abbreviation for the Latin ‘Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum,’ (Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews), posted on the cross by order of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate,” states catholic.com (https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-do-the-abbreviations-inri-and-spqr-stand-for).

How many Christians know what the sign says? I don’t think many people have bothered to find out.

Which brings us to an additional aspect of my sadness about the crucifixion. While the Jewish character of Jesus and his followers has been wiped out, the Jewish character of the mob demanding his death is made very plain in the Gospels, written at least thirty to forty years after his crucifixion.

The Jewish mob wails for Jesus’ death by pledging to curse themselves and their descendants. This is simply insane. No one would demand that Jesus’ blood be upon them or their children (source: Matthew 27:25).

That line in the Gospels has marked the Jews as the ultimate villains for 2,000 years. We killed the Lord. That’s our place in the story. The Christian message of universal love specifically excludes the Jewish people, mostly because we demanded the Roman governor put Jesus to death, according to the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, who may not have even been alive at the time of the crucifixion.

Jesus had been in Jerusalem for less than one week. It’s hard to believe what he could have done to make dozens of Jews so angry that they would demand the execution of a man who had just come to town and ask to be damned in exchange. It’s more reasonable to conclude that he had aroused the anger of the Romans. They didn’t like rabble rousers stirring up the population. But Matthew excuses Pilate and lays the blame on the Jews.

Dwelling on these matters puts me in a very deep, dark corner.

The only way out is to stop thinking about it. It helped that our little family left shortly to look for lunch.

Once we left the Vatican, we saw churches almost everywhere we walked. But the general atmosphere of Rome is like Mardi Gras. The hard stone streets are filled with tourists from all over the world. They’re eating pizza or gelato, walking in and out of thousands of colorful cafes, restaurants, taking photos with their phones, talking, laughing, enjoying life, all while dodging cars and motorcycles racing through the narrow, uneven streets.

My wife and daughter had arranged for us to do a street food tour the next night. Our guide met us in the square of the Campo di Fiori.

We started the tour in the middle of the square, by a statue of Giordano Bruno. Bruno was an astronomer who theorized that the stars were other suns that had planets orbiting around them. He said those planets might well have life on them. Bruno backed Copernicus’ theory that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around, which was the church’s doctrine at the time.

Bruno also denied church doctrines concerning Christ’s position as the Son of God, the virginity of Mary and the concept of damnation in Hell.

Our tour guide told our group of fifteen about Bruno, saying the Pope ordered that Bruno be burned at the stake in the year 1600 because he had disagreements with the church. I raised my hand to say that Bruno agreed with the Copernican theory, to make the point to everyone in our group that for this view alone, the Church found him obnoxious.

The implication of what I said was that the message of universal love preached by the church contained glaring exceptions. Especially when it came to disagreements with church doctrine. In this way, Bruno, a Catholic Italian, and the Jews are very much alike.

The tour guide took us to a store selling cheese and numerous pork products. My wife, daughter and I ate the cheese and shunned the salami. We ate fried rice balls, called suppli. We learned about the history of pizza and sampled a few strips at another stop. The guide got us gelato cones at a shop just a little bigger than the size of a walk-in closet.

Our final stop was the Jewish ghetto, where the Jews were locked in at night by the Roman authorities. It was Friday night, so most of the Jewish restaurants had closed or were closing. One place was still open, and the owner offered us fried artichokes, which looked like a mass of seaweed surrounding a piece of driftwood.

Our guide explained that Jews had been allowed to live freely among the rest of the population in Rome and other cities, until the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church, feeling besieged and defensive, determined that it could not countenance unorthodox religions in its midst.

So, in 1555, the Jews were herded into a small, dense area to live. The ghetto in Venice was established first, in 1516, a year before Martin Luther started his revolt against the church.

The establishment of the ghetto in Rome came almost forty years later. It lasted for 300 years. Jews were not allowed to own property. They were restricted to selling rags, and household junk they collected. The men had to wear a yellow pointed hat, the women yellow kerchiefs. They were ordered to attend sermons on Catholicism on Shabbat. The idea was to put intense pressure on the ghetto Jews to convert.

The Pope at the time, Paul IV, wrote in his edict: “Since it is absurd and utterly inconvenient that the Jews, who through their own fault were condemned by God to eternal slavery, can, under the pretext that pious Christians must accept them and sustain their habitation, be so ungrateful to Christians, as, instead of thanks for gracious treatment, they return contumely (insolence and insulting language), and among themselves, instead of the slavery, which they deserve, they manage to claim superiority…”

I thought about these ancestors of ours, wearing their yellow headgear as dictated by the pope, hurrying from their menial jobs to the ghetto before sunset, under threat of punishment if they didn’t arrive in time before the gates were locked.

St. Peter’s, the biggest church in the world, a vast, awesome space, more than 440 feet high, laden with gold ornaments, priceless sculptures, including Michelangelo’s Pieta, showing the Virgin Mary holding her crucified son in her lap, contains soaring artworks of Jesus, saints, martyrs, and doves of the holy spirit, of peace and light.

Compare the majesty of the Vatican against the cramped, dark apartments in the ghetto. Here was the culminating point of the discrimination and hatred towards the Jews in the Middle Ages, the consequence of Catholicism’s teaching that only the church understands the universal truth and that the roles laid out for various peoples by its doctrine are eternal.

The Catholic Church owes the Jewish people an enormous debt that can never be repaid. They appropriated for themselves our Bible, our stories, and a crucified Jewish preacher of the first century, and made it all their own. In return, they persecuted us with centuries of discrimination, maltreatment and execution. The Jews are still paying for the Christian story.

I don’t want to be saved by Jesus. I want to save him. I fantasize about spiriting him away from the Romans before they kill him, giving Jesus a large cloth bag filled with fresh loaves of bread, olive oil and oranges and sending him on his way to freedom. That would free the Jews too, from the frozen morbidity of the lie of Jewish guilt for Christ’s crucifixion, which lit the fires of antisemitic hatred and persecution through the centuries.

Next time our family goes to Rome, we’ve agreed we’re not visiting the Vatican.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)