Part Five - Thursday

Those passing by insulted him wagging their heads and saying "So! The one who would destroy the Temple and built it in three days! Save yourself. Get down off the cross."
In the same way the chief priests joking with each other and with the scholars said "He saved others. He can't save himself! Messiah king of Israel! - let him get down off the cross so we can see and believe."
And those crucified with him reviled him.
- Mark's gospel

"We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and we are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring a taste for it."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864

"In the same way." That phrase, in the heart of Mark's passage above, connects "the chief priests and scholars" with "those passing by" and with "those crucified with him." We have a triumvirate of bobblehead subhumanity; all wagging their heads and insulting, joking, and/or reviling the man whose head bobbled to stay alive just a little longer.

They wagged: Save yourself and He saved others.

Not once did they wag: Save us.

Not once did they cry out to his bobbling sacred head now wounded, "Save us! We do not know how to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood. Take away our shame! Take away the disgrace of us! We're always striving, striving so hard to be less than what we were created by you to be. We are born dead. And we have become content. We have acquired a taste for death. Please. You saved others. Save us!"

Not once did they wag those words. Because to cry those nouns and verbs, they would have to stop wagging their heads. They would have to be still and know who he is. They would have to cease striving and focus on his bobbling head. They would have to try something new, something other than the taste they'd acquired. They would have to try life.

But they had grown content. We have grown content. A world of bobbleheads instead of men with flesh and blood of our own. We live "in the same way."