The scene is one of tumult and horror. In the midst of the clamor, words are about to be spoken that will not find their meaning for twenty centuries. An innocent man, victim of Roman torture, bleeding from head to foot, staggers between uneven lines of jeering, gesticulating people. His arms are tied to the heavy beam, and he is unable to break a fall. He has fallen twice, his face smashed upon the rough stones of the street, his nose broken. A sturdy man, Simon from Cyrene, has been forced by the soldiers to carry the beam because the man can no longer bear it up and walk.
Gasping for breath, Jesus is nevertheless fully conscious. Despite the pain and terror, he has been meditating on the prophecy of Hosea which explains it all. No one in the Hebrew Bible had expressed the meaning of this scene more accurately and poignantly than the great prophet of eight hundred years earlier.
Hosea loved Gomer, his wife, enough to rescue her repeatedly from her addiction to prostitution. He didn’t even know if his children were really his own; yet he went out, purchased her back from the religious cult where she worked, and brought her home. God told Hosea that now he knew God’s own heartbreak, because that was how God’s beloved, Israel, had treated him; Israel too had gone after other, pagan lovers.
Jesus looks at the thrill-seeking mob. These contorted faces belong to him specially. He knew them before they were born, he was sent for them, and he has loved them, each one. He is the Bridegroom, they the Bride. Rejected, he is handed over to death by the Bride who prefers anything to him; though he has the power to do otherwise, willingly he will die for her even while she despises him.
Who is this “she”? It is the Israelite people who for two thousand years have been prepared to consider themselves in explicit sexual terms the spouse of God. Consistently and without deviation he has revealed himself to them as masculine to feminine, as Husband to Beloved. They know the language well. The Hebrews had only a sexual term to describe what it was like to be known by God and to know him. “Knowing” was not information stored in the brain, not an intellectual exercise at all; it was a thoroughly personal and intense experience involving the whole person.
A theophany, surprisingly enough to us, was identified with sexual intercourse. The Hebrew language had no place for abstractions; it was concrete, and the same term, yada, was used both for the sex act and for the experience of a personal encounter with the Lord God. It was a way of thinking, and a language of expressing thought, specifically chosen by God when he chose these people, because it best expressed in human terms the reality of the relationship of God to mankind.
Upon that concept of sexuality is based the symbolic nature of ordained priests as representatives of the masculine love which Christ epitomizes when he becomes one flesh with his Bride in the Eucharist. We use that chosen language in theology and liturgy because of its relationship to revelation.
When John the Baptist had pointed out Jesus to his own disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God,” he also identified him as “the bridegroom.” Jesus used the term about himself. Every Israelite knew what that meant. God through the prophets had stated to Israel, “I am your Husband.” Jesus was claiming that kinship, and it riled the Jews. They considered the very meaning of sexual interrelationship to have to do with what the right relationship to God was-like a Bride they were to be surrendered to their Creator. Obedience and submissiveness, in the best sense feminine, were to be descriptive of their trust and love.
On the other hand, a harlot was a sign of the way they rejected their divine Lover. The term “harlot” described them when they entertained false loves in the apostasy of worshiping pagan gods and goddesses, in the love of material wealth and the adulation of men, or in the trust in foreign powers and weaponry for their well-being and safety. God himself uses this sexual analogy in the revelation he gives through Hosea:
“Rejoice not, O Israel! . . . for you have played the harlot, forsaking your God. You have loved a harlot’s hire upon all threshing floors. . . . They became detestable like the thing they loved. . . . Ephraim’s [Israel’s] glory shall fly away like a bird-no birth, no pregnancy, no conception! … Give them, O Lord-what wilt thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts . . . The high places of Aven [false worship], the sin of Israel shall be destroyed. Thorn and thistle shall grow up on their altars; and they shall say to the mountains, Cover us, and to the hills, Fall upon us” (Hos. 9:1, 10, 11, 14; 10:8).
All along the Via Dolorosa, Jesus had been knowingly living out Hosea’s prophetic words. Swimming into his vision is a group of women who stand out because they are not gloating over his agony. Rather, these women wail and beat their breasts in anguish for him. His response is to stop and quote from Hosea, adding a last, vivid, prophetic pronouncement:
“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:28-31).
Rejection and rebellion has come to this — God’s chosen Bride has betrayed him.
“Ah,” says Jesus (to paraphrase), “this is not the worst of it. This generation’s rebellion against God is like a fire in the green wood; it is slow burning, without much heat. The time will come when the wood will be dry. You women, who so revere God’s creative and nurturing power in your bodies, will not believe those times. Then women like you will rebel against their very meaning. Fruitfulness will be spurned. In those days women will be happier to have abortions than to bear children; they will feel blessed to use contraception and deny birth. These will be the days of dry wood! Beware the fire of those days.”
The prophecy given along the Via Dolorosa was the most mysterious prophecy of Jesus and hardly could be understandable until our own day.
We who are slow of mind and heart to believe must believe this-that the day of this prophecy is upon us. The Holy Father has warned about the effects of militant feminism; its ideological isolation has taken a disastrous toll on the family and thereby on society. Yet much of the Catholic press does not throw its weight behind him, but continues to encourage and promote feminism.
Editor Margaret O’Brien Steinfels extols this feminism that scorns “language [in the Church] that tries to maintain a separate place for woman, an idealized image of her role as mother and her nurturing, maternal qualities,” and she applauds “gender as of declining significance,” brought about by “technology . . . minimizing the differences . . . affording a degree of control over reproduction.”
While 300,000 women, many of them Catholic, march for abortion rights, and twenty-four nuns sign a newspaper ad questioning the Church’s official teaching on abortion, even Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) chides feminism for not only being “indifferent to the problem of mothers, but downright hostile to children and childbearing. The focus has been on reproductive freedom, on women’s having career paths identical to those of men-despite the fact that women can have such career paths only if they choose never to have children.”
From the mother of modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, has been passed on an abhorrence of sexual intercourse as exploitation of women; “the very posture of receptivity means slavery.” Contempt for men and elevation of lesbianism is completing the raging circle of fire. These attitudes will be passed on to the next generation. As Mary Hunt, Catholic “theologian” and professed lesbian, declared in 1987, “We are committed agents for social change. The future of Woman-Church rests with our children. The education of our children is now a serious and important priority for us. When the Pope was here recently, the most frightening part of his otherwise stock-in-trade message was that Catholic schools should be kept pure from the likes of us. . . . It signals the need to create . . . centers, schools, think-tanks, retreat centers, theological centers, where feminist approaches would be normative. I believe it is the students of those schools . . . who will be at our conference in 2037.”
Said Jesus, “Weep for yourselves and for your children, for the days are coming.”
The only piece left to fit into the prophetic picture is that the One Triune God, who uses the sexuality he created to reveal himself as masculine (pure spirit, but, to our sense-dependent understanding, masculine nevertheless), finally is rejected. Now this too is happening. The pagan goddess rises through feminist “theology” to take his place. Writing in a Catholic magazine that enters nearly 400,000 homes, a nun, its assistant book editor, mourns that the earlier pagan goddesses were overcome by the Hebrew patriarchal God, as though a greater had been usurped by a lesser.
“Then,” said Jesus, “they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.'”