INRI Was Ancient FAFO

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to check with Ship. Brought to you by Operation
Blue Dot Red, turning the second District Blue Dot Red,
one podcast at a time. Fafoe f a f O,
fool around and find out. I cleaned it up a
bit for this family friendly podcast and for good Friday.
The Sanhedrin essentially said Faphoe to Jesus, you keep calling

(00:23):
yourself the son of God, and you're going to find out.
Ponta's Pilot essentially said Fapho to Jesus, you had better
fall on your knees and worship me, renounce whatever claims
you've made, and beg me to get you out of
this jam, or you're going to find out what it
means to be on the wrong side of the Roman Empire.

(00:43):
I n r I Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum Jesus of Nazareth,
King of the Jews. For Pilot, it was the equivalent
of putting Fapho on the cross. Jesus presents the ultimate
faffo choice for all of us. He forces each person

(01:04):
to make a choice. Are you going to ignore him
and his message, mock him and his message, fight him
and his message. You're going to find out You'll find
out for sure when you die, but then it's too
late to do anything about it. My prayer is that
you find out sooner rather than later today this weekend,

(01:25):
so you can live your best life for as long
as possible. The blue dot red angle is that today's
Democrat tends to reject four thousand years of Judaeo Christian teaching,
because today's democrat tends to reject the idea that there
are absolute, eternal principles by which individuals and societies should live.

(01:45):
It wasn't always so. My late father was a lifelong Democrat.
For his generation, the trinity of Irish Catholic Democrat was
almost as sacred as that other trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
But for Dad there was no question the second trinity,
the one with a capital T, was supreme. The blue

(02:06):
daughter tends toward relativism. Truth is relative to me, and
others are free to define truth as they see it. Well,
unless you're conservative, in which case you are not allowed
to have your truth. The relativist believes there is no
one absolute truth, hence the hostility to Jesus and institutional Christianity.

(02:29):
Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth, and the
Life Christianity is the effort to carry forward his message.
The Red Republican conservative position on all issues economic and financial,
as well as social and moral, is that there are
timeless principles that must be followed to maximize individual and

(02:50):
mutual success. People train by Jewish and Christian custom to
humble themselves and admit that they are not the definers
of truth are more likely to sacrifice personal impulses for
the sake of one unified, comprehensive vision of truth. There
is a valid debate about why a supposedly good God

(03:12):
allows suffering and occasionally not only allows, but seems to
require lethal violence. The Christian answer begins with the inability
of a human being to see and comprehend the divine
vision and intention, just like a young child might not
understand why his parents allow and even require that the
child be subjected to a painful shot or surgery. Then

(03:36):
there is the impact of sin, the role of free will,
and the willingness of God to take his own medicine
and suffer with us to the point of being a
victim of lethal violence in the person of Jesus. Unpacking
all of that is beyond the scope of this Humble
podcast and there are others much more qualified than I

(03:56):
am to handle it. Bishop Robert Baron, Fadmike Schmidtz, Father
Chad Ripperger come to mine. There are others. They're easy
to find on social media, especially YouTube. For the moment,
you'll just have to trust me that God knows you
better than you know yourself. He's more honest with you
than you are with yourself, and he wants what is

(04:17):
best for you. You are free to reject that and
go your own way, but you're also free to say yes,
show me the path to my best life. I want
to go back to what Jesus went through on Good Friday,
back to the Roman version of Fappho. The scourging of
Jesus was with the flagrum or flagellum. It was a

(04:39):
whip with numerous thongs containing sharp pieces of bone or metal.
It was designed not just to lash, but to grip
and rip human flesh. The movie The Passion of the
Christ offers a realistic portrayal of that process. The thorns
in that derisive crown were more like nails or spikes.

(05:00):
I invite you to go online to find medical analysis
of the excruciating trauma Jesus experienced in his torture and crucifixion.
The point of Roman crucifixion was not just death. You
could run someone through with a spear or slice off
his head with the sword if you wanted to kill him.
For Roman citizens, beheading was the method of capital punishment,

(05:20):
quick clean, no extended public shaming. Crucifixion was intended to
maximize human suffering. Driving nails into hands or wrists and
feet blasted major nerves that sent pain radiating throughout the body,
but it was asphyxiation that killed the victim. The victim

(05:40):
eventually succumbed to the pain and exhaustion of trying to
inhale and exhale in that position. By the way, the
word excruciating comes from the Latin ex cruce from the
cross for modesty. Images of the crucifixion put a loin
cloth on Jesus, but the Romans crucified their victims naked

(06:02):
to maximize the shame and suffering, Especially in a morally
conservative culture such as Judaism. It was all by design.
It was imperial terrorism. It was meant to horrify and
pacify conquered peoples. It was the example of Fappho in
the ancient world. The movie The Last Temptation of Christ

(06:25):
presents the final temptation as the prospect of avoiding the
gruesome death on the cross and living a happy life
with a wife and children. That movie drew flack from
Christians for presenting Jesus having sexual relations and in other
ways deviating from the accepted Christian narrative about Jesus. One
thing that movie got right is that it was false.

(06:46):
It was a lie. It was not Jesus's best and
truest path of life. He had to go through with
the sacrificial death to fulfill his mission. I think the
last and greatest temptation of Christ must have been the
desire for righteous revenge. Think of all the books you've read,

(07:06):
all the TV shows and movies you've seen, in which
a good person is persecuted and smashed and left for dead,
and then makes a comeback, beats the odds, achieves total vindication,
shows his tormentors that they were wrong about him. In
addition to the excruciating physical pain he suffered, Jesus also

(07:27):
was besieged verbally by people screaming that he was a blasphemer,
a fraud, a pathetic fool who deserved what he was getting.
I think it was in the confrontation with Pilot when
Jesus said, if I ask my Father, he will send
down twelve legions of angels to wipe out all of
you pretentious clowns. That may not be an exact scriptural rendering,

(07:50):
but you get the idea. Isn't that one of the
strongest motivations in human nature, the ferocious desire to prove
to your critics that they are wrong and you are
right to right the cosmic wrong that man's fall had
created in creation. To show solidarity with all who have

(08:10):
undergone the suffering inevitable in this life, and to take
down sin itself and death itself. Jesus had to go
all the way down to the bottom of existence, absorb
all sin, and die, otherwise he would have blown the mission.
And of course he did make a comeback. It's still

(08:31):
in motion today. My dear friend Dave Nevity once shared
with me an Easter sermon by a preacher whose refrain
was it's Friday, but Sunday's coming. He meant that often
in life we may feel like the Jesus movement felt
by sundown on Good Friday smashed shattered, destroyed. Don't despair

(08:52):
Sunday's coming. May this Sunday be a blessed one for you.
Happy Easter. That's check with Chip up Maxwell. Thank you
for listening.