Crammed With Heaven: The man who ended the Roman games

God understands fully our experience of being human. It’s a truth we know well, but in our familiarity with the incarnation we can lose the profundity of it. Jesus was a baby, requiring the care and nurture of parents; he was a boy who had to learn responsibility and societal norms: how to respond when hurt, angry and afraid, how to listen to his teachers, and obey his parents even when He didn’t feel like it. He was a regular child and teenager needing love, discipline and encouragement. He felt the pain of grief in the loss of Joseph, and the protectiveness of a son for his mother; He felt anger, and betrayal and heartbreak and joy. He was immersed in the beauty and brokenness of life on Earth. 

Growing up, my picture books of Jesus showed Him as a serene and ethereal-type human. I don’t think I could have imagined Him angry, like I felt angry, or hurt by the betrayal of a friend in the same way I did. Yes, He looked like me and I was sure He could identify with any physical hurt, but I battled to see Him existing in the realm of human emotion. I think this was partly because I subconsciously believed emotions couldn’t coexist with divinity, like sin: Jesus was without sin, so therefore emotions – particularly negative ones – were foreign to Jesus’s experience. I recognise the deception in this now; God is a fully emotional being. Emotions are a gift; they help us navigate the world, and process pain and disappointment. In denying them, or suppressing them, we struggle to heal or to enjoy rich and dynamic relationships. Jesus required the experience of emotion to function as a healthy human being.  

I hope most of us would be appalled at the thought of purposely watching the violent spectacles hosted in the Colosseum of antiquity. I have often wondered at the psyche of the spectators who cheered for the slaughter of fellow humans. Was violence such an everyday reality that the emotion of empathy in ordinary men and women was so severed they could watch unblinking the horrors served up as entertainment? How could any soul be healthy when it was witness to such degradation and trauma? And how is it that the games were popular for so many centuries, the 60 000 or more seats filled over and over for hundreds of years? 

There is an extraordinary story about a monk – Telemachus – who felt led by God to attend a gladiatorial game at the Colosseum in 404 AD. So horrified by what he witnessed and broken hearted at the callousness of the Roman audience, he rushed into the arena crying out: “In the name of Christ, stop!” One of the gladiators plunged his sword into Telemachus, and the monk fell dead in the sand. There are different versions of what happened next, but the one I like tells of a hush that falls across that vast space, the spectators muted by the death of the monk. Where blood and death and suffering had failed to move them, the tear-streaked face of Telemachus, and his courageous compassion, provoked an awakening in their hardened hearts. A man stood and walked toward an exit. Another man followed, and then another and another – all in silence – until the very last man. And no one came back, ever. That day marked the end of Rome’s gladiatorial games. 

It’s as if they had been in some kind of stupor for six centuries, and Telemachus’ humanity woke them up. His heart that he wore on his brown-drab sleeve woke them up to the beating thing inside their own chests. How often do we hide our tears, our anger, our rage against injustice, out of pride and fear of our own vulnerability and exposure? It is a great act of humility to allow our humanness to be seen, and it gives permission to others to respond, not to what is logical and rational, but to what is felt. Healthy emotion that prompts change in others, springs from a pure and healthy place; it is not manipulative nor soap-opera syrup. It is the weeping woman at Jesus’s feet who anointed Him with oil, the tax collector who beat his chest in sorrow at his own sin, and the man of sorrows Himself, who cried out in the garden for the road that lay ahead. 

It is a beautiful thing to weep with face aloft for others to see, or to laugh out loud that some would stop and stare. The person who is not afraid to show their anger at injustice, speaks courage to others to stand as well. Our emotions are God breathed; they are not to lead us – for Christ alone does that – but they are His gift, in us, for a world that has lost its humanity. We are crammed with Heaven, the very likeness of God forged into our DNA, and we can live, unashamed, of what He has created us to be. 

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