Hi SD,
How do young Christians react when they first see or experience the story of the Crucifixion? I know I would be a little scared of or freaked out by any depiction of a torturous or agonizing death if I were a child. Or does religion make Jesus’ death more palatable for some reason? I’m Jewish, so I have no idea about this. Why don’t children run away screaming when they are exposed to Jesus’ bloody and gruesome fate?
Thanks,
Dave
IME (K-4th grade Catholic school), a lot of things were glossed over: virgin birth and the Crucifixion being two. I didn’t understand crucifixion until Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out. But that’s probably just me.
Crosses with Jesus on it are everywhere. I just accepted that he died. We are taught in Church that he was resurrected and lives.
I didn’t make the connection that he was tortured until I was a teenager. The flogging and carrying of the heavy cross is described in the Bible. Seems odd now but the real significance of those details eluded me as a young kid.
You just grow up with it. There’s plenty of other horrible things that occurred in history (or are currently happening). Knowing Jesus was crucified is like knowing the United States used to have slavery or that the Nazis killed twelve million people.
As a 5-yr-old I was given a cross made of Palm leaves at Easter in Sunday School. Five would be the age one enters full understanding.
From then on we were told He suffered and died a horrible death, but that His Agony was offered unto God to pay for our manifold sins, granting us a full redemption; and entry into Heaven.
At that time a five-yr-old couldn’t accumulate a large number of sins; and we kind of took this under advisement.
There’s crosses and crucifixes and Ecce Homos and… all over the place. It’s not something you’re specifically introduced to at some point, it’s something that’s always been there just like the sun and the rain.
For many children, the first event that really brings meaning to the word “death” is that of an elderly relative. My paternal grandfather died when I was 4; my nephew’s maternal one when he was 3. Younger kids actually have much less of a problem with that than older ones: they tend to just accept and classify new information, judging everything comes later.
Why is his sacrifice any greater than others where people gave up their lives not knowing they’d be ressurected? I ask this as a Christian, albeit on who doesn’t interpret the ressurection story literally.
Because he was brought in Earth TO be sacrificed, which let Christians get into heaven and you know the rest of the story.
I was also not given any details about the crucifixion until I reached high school. Other than that it was “he died for your sins and it’s not a nice way to die so he REALLY suffered”.
Because in Christian doctrine He is God, come down to redeem His fallen people.
Seems a long way round.
Seven.
As mentioned, you grow up with the story every Palm Sunday/Easter and you know He was scourged, was given the crown of thorns, carried the cross and was crucified. I just felt sad and overcome, not freaked out. The miniseries Jesus of Nazareth came out when I was a kid and we got a filmstrip version in school. I remember the audio “and there they crucified Him” and then the recording of the guy screaming did make me wince.
I’m sure someone will be along to point out the massive thread on this, but the sacrifice was the greatest because He was true God and true man, and He humbled Himself to be killed for all of us. He had to power to do whatever He wanted (which no one else had) and He didn’t use it but sacrificed Himself to save us. No one else’s death would bring this about. Only the death of the Son of God would be the measure needed to atone for everyone else’s sin.
If you grow up Catholic, you’re pretty much surrounded by crucifixes and other images of saints and martyrs dying from the time you’re baptised. So by the time you’re old enough to understand exactly what’s going on, you’re pretty much used to seeing it. (Although some of the lives of the saints are pretty gruesome – ever see the image of Saint Lucy holding the dish with her eyes in it?)
Let’s face it: Catholicism is a pretty morbid religion.
It’s really not something I thought about in depth growing up, at least the torture part of Jesus’s death. Our teachers weren’t constantly going on and on about the agony of crucifixion, more about the meaning behind it, and his resurrection.
Yeah, but I’m British.
In a lot of Protestant denominations, Christ’s resurrection is given a lot more weight than attention than his death. As a kid, crucifixes were something that existed on TV and in the movies.
But that doesn’t mean I didn’t ever experience the creeps. I hadn’t properly grasped metaphor at the tender age of 7. The Sunday School teacher told us that Jesus was inside all of us, and I went home believing a hippie-looking white dude was wearing me like a cheap Halloween costume. Freaked me the fuck out. So I guess you can say the living Jesus scared me more than the dead one.
I couldn’t run away screaming because, as a child, I was fairly trapped in the situation. I did do perhaps the next best thing: on the day of my first communion (old school Catholicism) I was so wrecked with fear as I literally believed I was about to fed a piece of the body of Christ. As I sat in the pew awaiting my turn, my nerves gave out and I vomited all over my pretty white dress. That didn’t get me out of things, however, I do see that it was a defining moment in my life.
I was introduced at an age I don’t remember. I do remember the way I was taught.
Here’s the basic story at the kid level.
It was an old custom among the Jews to sacrifice a goat to carry away people’s sins. God wanted people to appreciate the great love he had for all his people. He wanted to do this in a way that the Jews could understand. He sent his son down to live as a human being, with all the people he loved. When Christ grew up, he offered himself up as the final sacrifice (a symbol of the ancient custom) to show people that God would forgive their sins, and loved them so much that his own son would die for them. One of Christ’s last acts was to forgive the thief, and welcome this poor man, who had committed crimes, to go with him to heaven because the thief asked humbly to be remembered.
Dodge all the bit about the Pharisees and the Romans, and the trial until they’re older. Make the story simple. Stress the part that Christ was willing, and he suffered for us in the way a father or brother would, willingly to help us all as an act of loving protection. A Gift. The bit about the thief is important. The crucifixion without the act of forgiveness and redemption steals it of its power.
Don’t introduce the Trinity. That’s sippery. There’s days I feel I can hold onto it, then there’s days I’m all WTF? about the Trinity.
When do Jewish kids typically learn about the sacrifice of Isaac or the plague of the firstborn? Do they learn about Masada?
I don’t remember not knowing he was crucified, one sees the images all around us in church. But as to how awful a death it was, that was in later grade school or junior high. It got even more gruesome when I was old enough to read about the technical and physical aspects of what a human body goes through when a crucifixion occurs.
Anybody else see the movie Spartacus, with Kirk Douglas? There’s the scene near the end when all the rest of the rebels have been crucified, with two more to go, Spartacus himself and Antoninus. Crassus pits them against each other in a fight to the death. The winner will be crucified. Although the two men are supposed to have a deep friendship they do their best to kill each other, because death on a cross could last for days of torture. You know how bad it must be if dying with a sword in your guts is the better option.
Most people have no choice. Dying is the price you pay for being born. God had other alternatives but he chose to be born and to die as a mortal man.
Now if you start asking why he made that particular choice, things get murky.
Its ubiquity make it seem cartoonish and false to me, so it wasn’t any more horrific than a Halloween costume. It’s on statues and windows and necklaces and bumper stickers and everything else so it hardly seemed to be a serious thing.
Only decades later when I learned that crucifixion was real and one of the worst forms of torture imaginable did the horror set in. But not regarding Jesus; that bit is still ridiculous to me.
The Crucifiction itself? It was a part of what you had to know to be saved. So 5 or 6 for me. Though I only gradually became more and more aware of the significance of the events. I mean, death wasn’t even something I understood at that point, let alone that type of pain.
Heck, many Christians today still haven’t fully realized. They freaked out about how bloody Mel Gibson’s movie was. It was relatively tame–Jesus still had an intact body.