rain and the rhinoceros

I recently wrote a series of reflections on four days of Holy Week. Thanks to everyone who commented.
I encourage you to read them and comment! Happy Easter!

The following is the series index:

1. Holy Thursday
2. Good Friday
3. Holy Saturday
4. Easter Sunday

No, I’m not going to quote N.T. Wright. Let’s see if you can guess who I’m going to quote…

Because this man Jesus carried his obedience and love to the point of accepting destruction (not just the torture of the cross but death, an ending, a total failure), because of this, he has been raised up beyond death to love which is the life of God. The resurrection of Jesus was the creation of the new bodily world, the new way of being human, the new way of being bodily. The risen Jesus did not enter paradise. He is paradise. Heaven is not a place beyond the sky. It is the risen Christ, the body of Christ living by love, the beginning of risen humankind, the ultimate future of humanity. It is because our bodies share in this bodily life of Christ (the thing we anticipate and symbolize in the eucharist), it is because we belong to this bodily world, that we conquer death, that we are able to live not for ourselves but by love, the love that Christ brings to us from God. And it is because of this that we celebrate the cross at Easter.

Hebert McCabe, God, Christ, and Us (New York: Continuum, 2005) 90-91.

Christians have no theory about life after death; we do not think we are old enough to understand such eternal life; we have instead our faith in the love of the Father, our faith in Jesus Christ, that the Spirit of love in us will conquer death and our future is the substance of things hoped for.

Herbert McCabe, God, Christ, and Us (New York: Continuum, 2005) 24.

The following post is the fourth and final part of a four part easter series I’ve written. See also my reflections on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor 15:20).

Although the resurrection of Jesus is a distinct event and, indeed, reveals that the most determinative reality of the universe is love, it does not erase or cancel out the suffering and death of Jesus in any way. Far from it. The resurrection is the Father’s “yes” to the Son’s gift of himself; it is the Father’s proclamation that a particular person and embodied life is the content of love. I think Herbert McCabe is correct in saying that “the best picture of the resurrection is the cross” (God Matters 106). In this post, I want to emphasize that the resurrection of Jesus does not finally mean that we won’t suffer and die. This is what I mean when I say it does not erase the cross. I think this is important to note because we too easily interpret our hope in Christ as escape from suffering and death. I think exactly the opposite is the case. I want to suggest that the resurrection is not so much about escape from suffering and death, rather it tells us how to go about living and dying. In other words, I want to suggest that the shape of our living (and our dying) must take the form of the cross. In the words of McCabe, “the cross does not show us some temporary weakness of God that is cancelled out by the resurrection. It says something permanent about God: not that God eternally suffers but that the eternal power of God is love; and this as expressed in history must be suffering” (109).

This, however, is not the final word. The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of our hope for a future of being together in God. It is God’s eternal promise to humanity. The form of Jesus’ life and death is not trivial; it is what love looks like in a broken world. Our participation in the resurrection (and we will all be raised) takes a particular form in the here and now. I want to suggest that it takes the form of the cross, which is nothing less than offering our whole lives to the other, especially the poor and rejected ones of our world, as a prayer with Jesus to the Father.

See also my previous post: Reflections on Holy Thursday
I hope to turn this into an Easter series with posts for the remainder of the holy days, but I can’t make any promises. This one is posted early because I won’t have time to post it tomorrow.

Recently, I have heard a lot of complaints about so-called penal substitutionary atonement. Now it is important to remember that there is no one way to understand “the atonement” or God’s saving work in Christ. Certainly, some ways of understanding the atonement are better than others. However, I do suspect that penal substitutionary atonement is usually misrepresented and not all that well understood. There may very well be problems with this “theory,” but probably all theories of atonement are problematic precisely because they are always theories. God’s saving work in Christ is truly a mystery. This is not to say that we cannot reflect on it or attempt to articulate what it might be about, but our language and our analogies will always fail. To be sure, we can say that God in no way punishes his Son. The Father is nothing but “well pleased” with the Son. I think that we can also say that the Father is not interested in divine child abuse. Yet, the Father “knew” the Son would be killed because he knew his Son was entering a crucifying world, a world that rejects God. As Herbert McCabe notes, “The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human…And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human” (93). Thus, Jesus was crucified because he was human not because the Father planned to have him killed for some greater cause. We must always remember and never shy away from the fact that we crucified Jesus not the Father. We have created a world that is characterized by suffering and death -by crucifixion. We must not become confused on this point. God never causes suffering. God is always God for us, always for human flourishing, always for love.

Jesus was killed not because God wanted him to be killed but because we wanted him to be killed. He posed a challenge to the ruling powers, to the establishment and to each individual and he continues to do so -and we continue to respond by crucifying him. The cross signifies humanity’s rejection of God and, indeed, of all humanness. It reveals the depth of our sin. Jesus pours his heart out and quite literally his blood for the sake of humanity. This is an invitation to love, to enter into a relationship with a person who is love.

The cross reveals that each of us reject God, we reject love daily, this is what is meant by original sin. This rejection is built into the very structures of the society we have constructed. As McCabe states, “So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made of it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist” (97).

It is important to note that Jesus refuses to take up arms, to resort to violence in the building of his new society, the church, which is to be defined by self-giving love, forgiveness, and the sharing of life together. Instead, he trusts in the work of the Holy Spirit. Yet, he was killed. Jesus on the cross represents the failure of human life. The cross shows us the reality that all of our efforts to love, to struggle against the oppressors of this world, finally end in failure, in death. We continue to struggle just as Jesus did out of obedience and love, but even despite some gains we will continue to fall short. It is important to remember that whatever the political significance of Jesus’ death may be it did not transform the world. Killers continue to kill. Torturers continue to torture. The establishment continues to oppress the weak and marginalize the poor. McCabe notes that Jesus’ prayer to the Father is “to work through his failure” (100). “Before his death Jesus had tried, but in the end failed, to bring the Spirit of love to a small group of disciples; now through him the Father pours the Spirit through the world; by this the world is to be transformed into a community of love, the Kingdom of God” (100). Thus, the Father’s response to the prayer of Jesus is the resurrection.

On Holy Thursday the church remembers the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples and so also the mystery of the Eucharist.
Because I’m immersed in the work of Herbert McCabe right now this post primarily consists of my reflections on a Holy Thursday sermon he once delivered that was published in God Matters. For McCabe, the Eucharist and indeed everything that the church points to is about the “mystery of unity,” that is, the being together of people. The church proclaims that all our efforts toward unity culminate in God. “The ultimate unity of people is only to be found in God, and the real God is only to be found in unity between people” (God Matters, 78). Needless to say, humanity has not reached a point of unity. Today, we solemnly remember our utter estrangement and alienation from one another. As a result of our persistent disunity our concepts of God constantly slip into idolatry. As McCabe points out, “God becomes for us the God of our class, our nation, our race or time, the tutelary deity, perhaps, of the ‘free world’” (78). As we recall the launching of an illegal war in Iraq five years ago we still hear the sound of “God is on our side.” Lord Jesus forgive us, the church, for our complicity in this idolatry and our collusion with nationalist politics. To recognize the disunity of humanity and our own complicity in this is to recognize the pervasiveness of sin.

In the church’s celebration of the Eucharist the Last Supper is made present, but we are also flung into the future. The future of the world is nothing less than participation in the mystery of triune God. It is the unity, the communion that we long for; it is being-together in truthfulness and freedom. At the moment, as McCabe notes, “We can see humankind itself as one only in mystery, in the gesture towards the reality that is to come. We cannot see love except in hints and guesses of what is to come” (79). Holy Thursday is the celebration of being together as people, as humans, and so we also celebrate the unity that is to come. Yet, Holy Thursday like the sacraments only exist because of sin, which is to say that these things are temporary and incomplete. Sin is “the depth within our quarrels and disunity and dislikes. Sin is the seriousness within human injustice, where it becomes a matter of what God we serve.

Our only hope for unity is in God and our approach toward this unity is, as McCabe points out, to be in solidarity with “the poor and the exploited against their oppressors,” for “the only God we know is the God of the poor, the God who takes sides in the struggle, and that any God of consensus who is supposed to belong to both sides is an illusion and a dangerous one” (79). In McCabe’s view, though God takes sides we do not. And so we can never say that “God is on our side,” but this is not because God is neutral but because we are compromised. Because God is on the side of the poor, so the church if it is to be a sign of the kingdom must be the church of the poor. Despite the optimism of modernity “there is no real unity to the world, the only authentic unity is in the struggle, and it is because this is our real unity here and now that we can only express the Kingdom sacramentally” (79).

What we experience in the United States is not true peace or unity primarily because it is born out of fear and based on violence. The unity that we have as citizens of the U.S. is a false unity because it is not built on love. Indeed, this false unity is nothing but “concealed hatred, a hypocritical pretense of fellowship” (80). The entire structure of the United States and the false unity that we have through global capitalism is built on antagonism and violence. However important the dismantling of structural violence is it will not finally bring about unity. If we believe this, according to McCabe, we have not come to recognize the depth of human sin. The human race is in need of a greater transformation, a more radical revolution than the overthrow of systems of injustice: we are in need of forgiveness.

When the local church gathers together on Holy Thursday, the whole church is present, just as the whole Christ is made present in the Eucharist. This gathering is never private. Whenever the church gathers it gathers as a public in its own right. There is no such thing as a private mass. “Those who are actually enacting the liturgical sign of eating the Body of Christ and drinking his Blood are doing so not for their own private sakes, but for the whole community, just as actors are not acting just for their own private satisfaction but for the whole audience as well” (83).

The Eucharist is thus a sign of the mystery of unity and “Christ is present precisely as the sign of our unity and not in any other way” (84). The Eucharist as a meal is a sign of community and hospitality. Each and every human being is invited to the table to share in the food that is a sign of our unity in God. And so we give thanks for the gift of life and nourishment, for God’s sustaining love and his Word made flesh in whom we were made and to whom we are destined to share in life together.

There is a depressing tendency on the part of both conservative and liberal christians to assume that discussions of christian morality are going to be mostly about sex. Sex is obviously a profoundly important mode of human communication, but to treat of it in isolation from the other social, political, and economic relationships between people is asking for trouble -asking for intellectual trouble I mean; in the practical field it is asking for a quiet life. So long as christian morality is thought to be mainly about whether and when people should go to bed, no bishops are going to be crucified. And this, as I say, is depressing. If the christian moralist is doing his job properly he has been promised that he will encounter the hostility of the world, of the established power structure.

Herbert McCabe, Law, Love, Language (London: Sheed and Ward, 196 163-164.

A great number of modern theologians make the claim that God suffers. Indeed, the belief that God suffers is so widespread that it has been called a new orthodoxy. It is usually argued that in contrast to much patristic thought, biblical thought depicts a God that is intimately and radically involved in the world. The patristic notion of divine impassibility (that God does not suffer) is commonly attributed to Hellenistic influences on Christianity. After all, it was the Hellenistic gods who were “static” and without feeling or concern for the world, whereas the biblical God of Israel was “active,” sympathetic, emotional, even to the point of suffering with his people. It was the great Adolf von Harnack who argued that the development of doctrine experienced a period of massive and widespread Hellenization. As Paul Gavrilyuk points out, “The process of Hellenization for Harnack had a negative connotation: it implied a deterioration of the originally unadulterated gospel into a rigid doctrinal system” (Gavriyuk 3). First of all, we must say that the stark contrast commonly made between Hebrew and Greek thought is highly questionable from an historical perspective. Second, it is theologically problematic to reject Hellenistic influence out of hand for the sake of some pure Hebraic mode of thinking. In his wonderful book The Suffering of the Impassible God, Gavrilyuk argues against what he calls the “Theory of Theology’s Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy.” Gavrilyuk rightly points out that the stark distinction drawn between the unemotional and uninvolved God of the philosophers and the passionate God of the Bible is “fundamentally flawed and misleading both with regard to the opinions of the philosophers and with regard to the biblical material” (Gavrilyuk 21). He notes that it is common to read the early Fathers with this distinction in mind. Gavrilyuk convincingly argues that matter is much more complex. There is no unified Greek view on the matter of God’s suffering neither is there a unified biblical view.

In chapter four of God Matters Herbert McCabe discusses “the involvement of God” in the world. McCabe is concerned with this question of the (im)passibility of God, that is, does God involve himself in the world in such a way so as to experience suffering? In recent times many theologians have dismissed figures like Thomas Aquinas for saying too much about God’s nature philosophically without enough reference to God’s self-revelation in Christ. For instance, McCabe quotes one of the foremost proponents of passibility, Jürgen Moltmann on Aquinas’ Five Ways:

The cosmological proof of God was supposed by Thomas to answer the question utrum Deus sit, but he did not really prove the existence of God; what he proved was the nature of the divine, . . . Aquinas answered the question “What is the nature of the divine?,” but not the question “Who is God?” (Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 12).

Interestingly, as McCabe points out this is exactly what Aquinas avoided. In regular apophatic fashion, Aquinas believed that we cannot know what God is, that is his nature, but only what he is not. For Aquinas, even God’s self-revelation in Christ does not change the incomprehensibility of God. In McCabe’s words,

it is extremely difficult for readers of Aquinas to take his agnosticism about the nature of God seriously. If he says ‘Whatever God may be, he cannot be changing’ readers leap to the conclusion that he means that what God is is static. If he says that, whatever God may be, he could not suffer together with (sympathize with) his creatures, he is taken to mean that God must by nature be unsympathetic, apathetic, indifferent, even callous. It is almost as though if Aquinas had said that God could not be a supporter of Glasgow Celtic, we supposed he was claiming God as a Rangers fan. (McCabe, God Matters 41).

Thus, McCabe reminds us that when reading Aquinas we should be careful not to jump to conclusions when we read that God “cannot be changing.” He goes on, “As with the Celtic and Rangers, it does not follow that, if God is not affected by, say, human suffering, he is indifferent to it. In our case there are only two options open: we either feel with, sympathize with, have compassion for the sufferer, or else we cannot be present to the suffering, we must be callous, indifferent. We should notice, however, that even in our case it is not an actual ’suffering with’ that is necessary for compassion, but only a capacity to suffer with. Sharing in actual pain is neither necessary nor sufficient for compassion, whose essential components are awareness, feelings of pity and concern” (McCabe God Matters 44). However, McCabe notes that God cannot literally be understood to have “feelings” of compassion.

McCabe explains that when we have compassion for others, when we are present to another’s suffering we want nothing less than to fully take on that suffering, but we cannot do this because we are always outside the other person. Compassion is all that we have and there is always a sense of frustration involved in remaining outside of the other person, that is, not being able to fully be with the other. In contrast, God, as the creator cannot be outside of his creature; “a person’s act of being as well as every action done has to be an act of the creator” (44). Thus, “if the creator is the reason for everything that is, there can be no actual being which does not have the creator as its centre holding it in being” (45). In McCabe’s view, our compassion is a feeble attempt to be “what God is all the time: united with and within the life of our friend” (45). With Augustine and Aquinas McCabe affirms that precisely in being transcendent God is intimately involved with each creature much more than creatures could be with one another.

In the second part of his essay, McCabe argues that the rise in the belief of a suffering God is correlative to a weakening and at times a misunderstanding of the traditional doctrine of the incarnation. In accordance with the doctrine of Chalcedon McCabe speaks of the one person of the Jesus as truly human and truly divine. Following Chalcedon McCabe affirms that we can say “quite literally that God suffered hunger and thirst and torture and death” (46). The traditional doctrine allows us to affirm that the Son of God assumed a human nature and therefore we can say that God suffered in his human nature. But McCabe cautions against speaking more generally of God suffering as if it was by virtue of something in Jesus’ divine nature that he suffered. For instance, we can say that “The Son of God died on the cross” and also “God died on the cross,” but though God signifies Jesus divine nature it refers to what has this nature, that is Jesus of Nazareth.

McCabe goes on to argue that “the doctrine of the incarnation is such that the story of Jesus is not just the story of God’s involvement with his creatures but that it is actually the “story” of God. There is one sense in which we must say that God has no life-story - and it is essential to my thesis to insist on this, as we shall see - but there is also a sense, the only sense, in which God has or is a life-story, and this is the story revealed in the incarnation and it is the story we also call the Trinity” (48). Thus, for McCabe the incarnation is the story of the triune God. He beautifully asserts, “The story of Jesus is nothing other than the triune life of God projected onto our history, or enacted sacramentally in our history, so that it becomes story” (48). McCabe’s shows us his radical Christocentricism and his sacramental theology here. The story of Jesus is the projection of the trinitarian life of God on “the rubbish dump that we have made of the world” (48). The story of Jesus is sacramental in that it not only signifies the trinitarian life of God, but it contains the reality it signifies. Thus, “the mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal generation of the Son. That the trinity looks like a story of (is a story of) rejection, torture and murder but also of reconciliation is because it is being projected on, lived out on, our rubbish tip; it is because of the sin of the world” (49).

Sex for the Christian is sacred in a quite technical sense, it is something which contains and shows forth the creative power of God, and sex in marriage is more sacred still since it contains and shows forth the redeeming love of God. But to be sacred means first of all to be dangerous. It can mean much more, but it first means this: “No man can look upon God and live.” If we profane the sacred we shall be destroyed by it. This is the inner meaning of taboos with which sex is surrounded; they are expressions, or began as expressions, of the reverence and fear which are proper in the presence of something sacred. Of course other people’s taboos always look ridiculous, and in a rapidly changing world, the last generation but one is already “other people.” their taboos are foreign to us and are apt to look absurd. This does not matter - it is not the nature of the taboo that counts - but there would be, I think something seriously wrong with a society which did not have any taboos about sex. It is not dangerous because it is bad, it is dangerous because it is sacred, powerful, capable, if it is divorced from the world of love, of destroying the personality as effectively as a drug, and equally capable of bringing us, through the power of Christ’s passion, to eternal union with God.

Herbert McCabe, The People of God: The Fullness of Life in the Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964) 117-118.

Because the current world is crucifying, Christ-rejecting, even in its bodily structure, mankind can only achieve its destiny, its unity in love, through a revolution that goes as deep as this, through the the revolution of death. The new world comes only through the death of this world. Thus every revolution which deals with structures less ultimate than this is an image of, and preparation for, the resurrection of the dead. The Cuban or Vietnamese revolution is a type of the resurrection in the sense that we speak of Old Testament events as types of Christ. 

Herbert McCabe, What is Ethics All About? (Cleveland: Corpus Books, 1969) 134.