Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [175]
But God was also Jesus, who got nailed to the cross. Who nailed him? Roman soldiers, who wore armour. There they were, three of them, looking brutal and making jokes, while Mary in blue and Mary Magdalene in red wept in the background.
It wasn’t really the Roman soldiers’ fault because they were just doing their job. Really it was the fault of the Jews. One of the prayers in chapel was a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, which meant they would switch over to being Catholic and then get forgiven. In the meantime God was still mad at them and they would have to keep on being punished. That’s what Sister Conception said.
Things were more complicated than that, thought Roz, because Jesus had arranged for himself to be crucified on purpose. It was a sacrifice, and a sacrifice was when you gave your life to save other people. Roz wasn’t sure why getting yourself crucified was such a favour to everyone but apparently it was. So if Jesus did it on purpose, why was it the fault of the Jews? Weren’t they helping him out? A question of Roz’s that went unanswered by Sister Conception, though Sister Cecilia, who was prettier and on the whole nicer to Roz, took a crack at it: a bad deed remained bad, she said, even if the result was good. There were lots of bad deeds that turned out to have good results, because God was a mystery, which meant he switched things around, but humans weren’t in control of that, they were only in control of their own hearts. It was what was in your heart that counted.
Roz knew what a heart looked like. She’d seen lots of pictures of hearts, mostly the heart of Jesus, inside his opened-up chest. They were nothing like Valentines; they were more like the cows’ hearts in the butcher store, brownish red and clotted and rubbery-looking. The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.
Every sin people did was like another nail pounded into the cross. That was what the nuns said, especially at Easter. Roz was less concerned about Jesus, because she knew it would come out all right for him, than she was about the two thieves. One of them believed right away that Jesus was God, so that one would sit on Jesus’s right hand in Heaven. But what about the other one? Roz had a sneaking sympathy for the other thief. He must have been in just as much pain as Jesus and the first thief, but it wasn’t a sacrifice because he didn’t do it on purpose. It was worse to be crucified when you didn’t want to be. And anyway, what had he stolen? Maybe something small. It never said.
Roz felt that he deserved a place in Heaven, too. She knew something about the seating plan: God in the middle, Jesus to the right of him, the good thief to the right of Jesus. The right hand was the right hand, and you always had to use it to make the sign of the cross, even if you were left-handed. But who sat on the left hand of God? There must have been someone, because God had a left hand as well as a right hand, and nothing about God could possibly be bad because God was perfect, and Roz couldn’t see that side just being left empty. So the bad thief could sit there; he could feast along with the rest. (And where was the Virgin Mary in all of this? Was it a long dinner table, with maybe God at one end and the Virgin Mary at the other? Roz knew enough not to ask. She knew she would be called wicked and impious. But it was something she would have liked to know.)
Sometimes when Roz asked questions the nuns gave her funny looks. Or they gave each other funny looks, pursing their mouths, shaking their heads. Sister Conception said, “What can you expect?” Sister Cecilia took extra time to pray with Roz, when Roz had been bad and needed to