Easter Monday Miscellany

One way in which I’m very trad: like many great Catholic princes, I only go to Mass a couple of times a year. Most of my contact with the Bible was in my childhood. This is not ideal for understanding the story, which is largely about adults, and makes more sense to adults.

Take, for example, Simon the Zealot. I can safely say I never thought about him (more than memorizing his name) until last weekend. He is just a type of guy that doesn’t mean anything to kids, and also he gets very little airtime. But last Friday I realized I had very little understanding of who all those guys at that dinner party were supposed to be, so I did some very cursory research, and found myself especially obsessed with Simon the Zealot.

What does that mean--the Zealot? Well, it could mean that he was just really enthusiastic. Or, due to some homophones in Hebrew, it might have meant he was from Cana. But it probably meant that he had previously been part of a religious/political group called the Zealots--political agitators whose goal was to foment rebellion against the Roman occupiers. Well, I guess technically their goal was to win a rebellion against the Roman occupiers. They eventually succeeded at the fomenting. But not the winning.

I totally know this type of guy. I’ve been on twitter and in San Francisco. I’ve listened to Red Scare and watched One Battle After Another. The political-agitator-turned-spiritual, the eternal convert, pivoting from one extremist position to another. With this context, I can imagine that this Simon was pretty helpful. Unlike the rest of them, he had some background as an organizer. Dealing with previously politically inactive fishermen must have taken serious patience and humility--not to mention that Quisling tax collector, Matthew.

Moses is also, I’m realizing, a weirdly modern type of guy: although he’s from a group that suffers a lot, he himself is raised in the heights of privilege before turning to political activism. Obviously, a lot of activists are going to be more privileged than the average person in the group they’re activating for, it’s just easier to do stuff if you’re privileged. But also…you’ve seen how people lash out at this type of guy, both the upper-class people they were raised around, and the less-privileged people who may feel spoken over and misunderstood. “What’s your problem, you never had to build the pyramids!”/”How can you claim to speak for us, you never had to build the pyramids!”

I also can’t help thinking about the situation of the young Hebrew women. Imagine a situation where literally every male in your age group has been murdered. It’s obviously worse for the murdered baby boys than for the surviving women, I’m not trying to pull a Hillary Clinton here. Still, these girls are in a pretty bad situation. They will face great difficulties marrying, they may only ever have sex with their oppressors, who are not likely to be super invested in the children they produce. Then they find out that actually, one boy did survive. And he was brought up as a prince (hot) and then he murdered an Egyptian overseer (also kind of hot), and now he’s coming back as a great leader. I would get my hopes up. And then....you find out he’s married to a Midianite woman. It’s hardly the most important part of the story, but I would be annoyed!