rain and the rhinoceros

Christian spirituality is often understood in terms of a quest. We think of God as some thing out there after whom (or from whom!) we diligently search or quest. And so we seek God under, beneath, behind, above, or beyond temporality. God is some thing who is outside of it all. Temporal reality, that is ordinary life, thereby becomes something that must be penetrated or even overcome. Of course, we are always in this stage of seeking, for to claim to have “found” God would appear to be utterly presumptuous, would it not? And what would we do then, after we found God? The practice of questing for God is not limited to the “mystics” in our midst. Christians “seek” God in any number of ways, whether it be in social action or contemplation, rocking out to U2 or worshiping in a more traditional way.

According to Robert Jenson, however, the gospel is “an attack on this religious way of dealing with time,” for the gospel “denies the eternity of timelessness” (110). This questing for God is “regularly launched by some event in the world, that makes us see the peril of our temporality and suggests a refuge” (110). Instead, “the true eternity is temporal liberty, from exactly such fixity” (110). Jenson goes so far as to say the gospel unmasks this God of timeless eternity as Satan. This pseudo-God is bent on destroying us with the guilt of our own past and deludes us in a false sense of security in who what we are. In other words, the God of the gospel, the Father of Jesus, is not someone or something to whom we flee. We do not need to fear, flee, or defend ourselves from the future precisely because “Jesus’ triumph is our future” (110).

Christian spirituality is, therefore, not about questing for God, for the gospel reveals that “God” is not some distant thing above, beneath, within, or behind it all in some other realm of being. God is not out there to be reached for. The gospel identifies the eternity of God with radical temporality, for gospel reveals “God” as Jesus in death and resurrection. This is the crucial point. Jesus is not the revelation of some distant and hidden God. In other words, God does not lie “behind” the man Jesus. Rather, God is identified with the very person, the historical man, Jesus. Thus, in Jenson’s own words, God is “not transcendent by his distance, to be quested after; he is transcendent in that he is coming” (111). The Christian spiritual life is perhaps better described as discipleship or pilgrimage, for we follow a person on a journey toward a goal. And this goal is Jesus himself, a man who is “framed by the same time and space as we; we are not called to seek him, but to follow him” (112).

As I alluded to in my last post, only in recent years have I come to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. By “belief,” I don’t just mean a mere intellectual assent to certain dogmatic propositions or truth-claims. Indeed, “belief” in the resurrection of Jesus is nothing less than affirming belief in the aliveness of God. To echo the apostle Paul, if Jesus lies dead in the grave, if he is not alive and with us, then our faith is in vain. If Jesus is dead, then we have no hope. The popular idea that Jesus was a “good teacher” and a “wise man,” akin to Gandhi, provides us with little hope if Jesus has not been raised. For if Jesus has not been raised then there is no future for humanity other than death. Because Jesus is alive, our memory of Jesus’ life, ministry, and his giving himself wholly for others is not simply a recollecting of past events. That is to say, Jesus is not finally useful for our work of building peace, of learning to love each other in all of our differences, for his very person is the peace that we seek. The gospel is the news that this person, this peace, is alive, present, and full of promises for the future.

All of our hopes for communion with our enemy and with our neighbour, our hope for revolution, for the end of capitalism, will finally end in death, if Jesus has not been raised. But, since death has been left behind in the resurrection of Jesus, we do indeed have hope for the future. By virtue of his resurrection Jesus offers us unconditionally the promise of a future in God. This future as future is not a stagnant one, but a future full of surprises. As Robert Jenson says, “If Jesus lives, his future will surprise us. The surprise of his aliveness will be how he will include all our follies and triumphs, each singular variety of publicanism and phariseeism, and the individual plot and style of every human life, in the mutual fulfillment wrought by his hope and acceptance” (Story and Promise, 44). Our future together - the revolution - finally finds rest in Jesus. As Jenson rightly asserts, to say “Jesus is risen” is just another way of saying “We may await surprises dramatically appropriate to his life of unconditional hope for his fellows and the death which came of it; and dramatically appropriate also as the fulfillment of our life, in all its individuality, glory, and alienation” (44).

There is no doubt that talk about morality these days is stranger than it used to be. In discussions about sexuality we often hear Christians expressing worries about the so-called “slippery slope.” It is not at all uncommon to hear Christians vocalizing their concern about the erosion of the moral foundations of society and the all-pervasiveness of what is known as “moral relativism.” It is often remarked that if we allow homosexuals to get married, for instance, then surely “everything is up for grabs.” It is, however, not at all clear why “relativism” is so shocking to a people who believe their God was crucified. The reality of “relativism” in our society should hardly be surprising. The point that I am attempting to express here is quite simple: disciples of a crucified God should learn to expect to come into conflict with the world.

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.

To confess the Lordship of Christ is to say that the most determinative reality is love. The confession reminds us that love constitutes and sustains our very being; it is love that lies at the heart of the universe. Hence, to confess the Lordship of Christ amounts to a denial of the notion that the most determinative reality of our existence is suffering and death. The love of which I speak can never become abstracted from the particular cruciform shape it takes in the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ reveals to us the embodiment of love. The Word of God enfleshed reveals that God is always for us even to the brink of death. The resurrection is God’s “yes” to love and the confirmation that our lives have meaning. The resurrection is the ground of our hope. To follow Christ means to live in this hope that death is not determinative of our existence. The love that moves the sun and the stars is the same love embodied in the Paschal Mystery. It is God-with-us and God-for-us. The Spirit of God breaths new life and empowers us to witness to and anticipate the eschatological love of God that has, and does, and will always prevail over death. The self-giving love of Christ is the basis for Christian life. Christ’s particular embodiment of love is normative for Christian ethics precisely because Christ is the very life of the church. The Christian life is always an imitation of Christ and therefore a life of love for others.

And so we die with Christ. The incarnation reveals to us the foolishness that the power of God, the source of life, is to be found in a frail human body, that is, in weakness, nonviolence, and total self-expending love. As Paul notes, “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8). Thus, the cross reveals not only that God is nonviolent, but it also suggests that God suffers with and for the weak, the oppressed, and the marginalized. The cross reveals that the eternal God, the creator of life itself, is not removed from our world of suffering and death. All of this means, among other things, that God is not removed from Guantanamo Bay or Pinochet’s Chile. God is not removed from torture. And Christian discipleship is the call to suffer as Christ suffered, that is, for the sake of this suffering world. It is in our absolute obedience to this call that we discover true freedom, joy, and peace. However, ”there is no room in the inn.” In other words, there is no room for love in this world.

And so to follow Christ means to die with Christ. Yet, it is indeed Christian conviction that to die with Christ is to find life. We must lose our life in order to find it and we must lose our life with and always for Christ. The cost of discipleship is to quite literally lose one’s life, which means we must ultimately lose our grip over our possessions, including our grip on the lives of others -even our own families. We must drop all that we have in order to follow Christ, because Christ demands absolute obedience from us and our undivided worship. As Bonhoeffer rightly points out,  ”Following Christ means passio passiva, suffering because we have to suffer. . . If we refuse to take up our cross and submit to suffering and rejection at the hands of men, we forfeit our fellowship with Christ and have ceased to follow him. But if we lose our lives in his service and carry our cross, we shall find our lives again in the fellowship of the cross with Christ” (Cost of Discipleship, 101). What would the cross look like today? Does this mean we take up the guillotine, the electric chair? Of course, the problem with this is that it isn’t a reality and thus we risk abstracting or spiritualizing the gospel. In other words, because our lives are not threatened,  to take up one’s cross quickly becomes purely a metaphor.We might think of figures like MLK, Bonhoeffer, or Oscar Romero, as exemplary figures of Christian discipleship, but we are not being shot at when we give or receive communion. I must say that this ought to be raised as a serious problem for Christians in the United States. There is no resurrection without the cross preceding it. Indeed, to quote Bonhoeffer again, “To bear the cross proves to be the only way of triumphing over suffering. This is true for all who follow Christ, because it was true for him” (Discipleship, 101).

The Christian gospel is not good news in any ordinary sense. The gospel does not promise success or a good life. In fact, there aren’t even any perceivable “spiritual” benefits to Christianity. The gospel does not bring us closer to God, nor does it provide us with some secret knowledge to rid the world of evil, injustice, and suffering. The gospel doesn’t make good citizens or good revolutionaries, for we preach Christ crucified, that is, we worship a human being who has been defeated.Do not be mistaken, Christian discipleship does not bring about happiness, security, safety, justice, or freedom to our lives. To follow Christ is to love as Christ loved and die as Christ died, that is, pouring out oneself for the sake of others until death. Of course, the phrase, we preach Christ crucified is profoundly political - the apostle didn’t just say we preach the death of Christ. The way in which Christ died, that is at the hands of the powers, is particularly important for Paul. We preach Christ crucified, tortured and murdered at the hands of the ruling powers. Though the crucifix is deeply political it is not a hopeful politics. It is, after all, defeat. The gospel is utter foolishness. To follow Christ is to be wholly for the other and the world cannot bear this kind of love and so to follow Christ means to suffer and die a torturous death with Christ.