Like, Happy Easter, man... 🌿

Technically, the first Sunday following the first full moon on or after the spring equinox has only fallen on April 20th thirteen times since the Gregorian calendar was adopted in the 16th century. For those of you who get clammy around the Devil’s Lettuce, I got bad news;

@maklelan#maklelan2634 Cannabis was used in ancient Israelite worship

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I even tracked down the research paper, which confirmed via lab analysis that cannabis was burnt on the Altar of Incense in a shrine in the tribal allotment of Judah in the 8th century BCE, likely before the Northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to Assyria.

The reason I found myself interested in this wasn’t the cannabis connection, as awesome as it is, it’s the archeological piece. I’ve been fascinated lately with the historical experience and record of Israel, and the influence it had on the Hebrew Scripture. To that end, I’ve been reading stuff I wish I had in seminary, like Richard Horsley, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan. From there, I began exploring the composition of the Torah (Richard Alter, David Rosenberg, and John Van Seeters) and its earliest canonization in the form of the Septuagint.

As I continue to think about the big questions, I’ve been pondering this phrase Christ used, “the son of humanity” (ho huios tou anthropou). The Hebrew equivalent is something like “a son of Earthling,” āḏām being short for ăḏāmâ. The widest used definition for the phrase has been an every-person, the humanest of humans. I am therefore been drawn to anthropology and the nature of religion as an archive of meaning. “Am I a good soldier?” eventually became “Am I a good person?” To the extent humanity produced religion, religion cannot escape human limitations. Neither can any science we engage in, from math to morality. Anthropology at least has the honesty to name the only subject we can truly know; ourselves.

Easter reminds us that we are capable of so much more than we realize. Christian anthropology assumes Christ is the best example of what it means to be human. He didn’t raise himself from the dead, otherwise all God did was give up a weekend for you. Christ dying on a Friday the Church has called “Good” was the final human Word on humanity; we can all expect to return to ashes. We can hope for resurrection, but that’s all we can do. So we might as well make the most of the lives we’re given. At least we know the Judahites did…