Reflections on Easter Sunday

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 to say 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.

Reflections on Good Friday with Herbert McCabe

Two years ago I wrote a number of reflections during Holy Week drawing from the late Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s sermons. You can find his sermons in God Matters. I’ve decided to re-post these (slightly revised) reflections once again here.

I have heard a lot of complaints about so-called penal substitutionary atonement. Now it is important to remember that there is not one way to understand “the atonement” or God’s saving work in Christ. Certainly, some ways of understanding the atonement are better than others. Nonetheless, 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 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 we must understand that our language and our analogies will always fail.

To be sure, we can say that the Father 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 noted, “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 oppression, torture, and even 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 rejects God; we reject love daily. This is what is meant by “original sin.” The rejection of God is built into the very structures of the society we have constructed. The cross of Christ reveals what we have made with God’s creation, what we have made with the world. We have a made this world a place, structured by fear and violence, in which it is dangerous, perhaps even fatal, to be human. The cross of Christ reveals to us that there is a basic wrong, persistent through history. This wrong is, as McCabe put it, “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. So, 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, even in death. We continue to struggle just as Jesus did out of obedience and love, but even despite some gains we 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 and torturers continue to torture. The establishment continues to oppress the weak and marginalize the poor. Yet Jesus’ prayer to the Father is to work through his failure. As McCabe said, “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). The Father’s response to the prayer of Jesus is the resurrection.

All quotes taken from Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987).

Reflections on Holy Thursday with Herbert McCabe

Two years ago I wrote a number of reflections during Holy Week drawing from the late Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s sermons. You can find his sermons in God Matters. I’ve decided to re-post these (slightly revised) reflections once again here.

On Holy Thursday the church remembers Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples and so also the mystery of communion, or what the church has traditionally called the Eucharist. The Eucharist and indeed everything that the church is about points to the “mystery of unity,” that is, the being-together of people. The church proclaims that all of our efforts toward human unity find their apex and indeed culminate as we participate in the life of the triune God. As the late English Dominican Herbert McCabe pointed out, “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 put it, “God becomes for us the God of our class, our nation, our race or time, the tutelary deity, perhaps, of the ‘free world’” (78). When we recall the launching of an illegal U.S.-led war in Iraq seven years ago we still hear the voices of those who said, “God is on our side.” Lord Jesus Christ, 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 our role in the pervasiveness of sin, which is our continual denial of God’s loving grace.

In the church’s celebration of the Eucharist the Last Supper is made present, but we are also flung into the future, for the future of the world is nothing less than participation in the mystery and life of the triune God. It is the unity, the communion that we long for; it is being-together in freedom and truthfulness. Holy Thursday is the celebration of being together as people, as human beings, and so we also celebrate the unity that is to come with the Father, in the Son, and through the Holy Spirit. Yet, Holy Thursday, like all the church’s traditional sacraments, only exists because of sin, which is to say that these things are temporary and incomplete.

Our only hope for unity is in God. As the church, our effort toward this unity is nothing other than 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). God takes sides. But we do not. And so we can never say “God is on our side.” Let me be clear, this is not because God is somehow neutral to injustice, but because we are, in fact, 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.

What we experience in the United States is not freedom, peace, or unity primarily because it is born out of fear, indifference to truth, and based on violence. The unity that we have as citizens of a nation, that which constitutes the United States as a public, for instance, is a false unity because it is not grounded in the God who is love and truthfulness. The very structure of the United States and the false catholicity that “globalization” seems to offer is built on human antagonism and violence. The depth of human sin is so severe that all our efforts to dismantle structural violence will not finally bring about unity. Indeed, the human race is in need of a much greater transformation, a more radical revolution than the overthrow of systems of injustice: we are in need of forgiveness.

And so, 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 private worship. The Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, is thus a sign of the mystery of unity. The Eucharist as a meal is a sign of community and hospitality—the hospitality of God. Each and every human being is invited to the table to share in the food that is a sign of our present and future unity in God. And so we give thanks for the gift of life and nourishment, for God’s sustaining love and God’s Word made flesh in whom we were made and to whom we are destined to share in life together.

All quotes taken from Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987).

Another forthcoming Herbert McCabe volume

Over the past few years the good folks at T & T Clark/Continuum have done us the wonderful service of republishing the work of Herbert McCabe and with the help of Brian Davies we now have at our reading disposal dozens of McCabe’s sermons and short essays. McCabe was an English Dominican theologian who identified himself as something of a Wittgensteinian-Marxist Thomist. In the 1960s he was a contributor to Slant a Leftist Catholic magazine associated with the University of Cambridge and the Dominican Order in England. He was also an editor of New Blackfriars.McCabe is simply a joy to read. He’s funny and witty and brings Thomas to life.

So, I am happy to announce that yet another volume of McCabe’s work–I believe the sixth since McCabe’s death in 2001–is set to be released this April. Here is a brief description of God and Evil in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas:

What should we mean by words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘being’, ’cause’, ‘creation’, and ‘God’? These are McCabe’s main questions. In seeking to answer them he demonstrates why it cannot be shown that evil disproves God’s existence. He also explains how we can rightly think of evil in a world made by God. McCabe’s approach to God and evil is refreshingly unconventional given much that has been said about it of late. Yet it is also very traditional. It will interest and inform anyone seriously interested in the topic.

Index to Holy Week Series

Here is an index to my series of Holy Week reflections:

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

Reflections on Easter Sunday

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.

Reflections on Good Friday

The following is a re-post of a Good Friday reflection I wrote last year.

See also my previous post: Reflections on Holy Thursday

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.

Reflections on Holy Thursday

Last year I wrote a number of reflections during Holy Week drawing from the late Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s sermons. You can find his sermons in God Matters. I’ve decided to re-post these reflections here.

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.

Jesus and the Trinity

The appearance of Jesus requires that a specifically Christian construal of God be Trinitarian. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the triune persons are revealed. Further, the nature and character of the eternal relationship between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit is actualized in the concrete (i.e. historical) ‘appearance,’ that is to say, the incarnation of Jesus in history. At the same time, we must also emphasize that the person and work of Jesus stands in essential continuity with God’s work with and in Israel. Hence, as the New Testament writers tirelessly insist, Jesus is the fulfillment of the scriptures, the hopes, and dreams of Israel.

A clarification is, perhaps, in order: the significance of the historical appearance of Jesus for the Christian construal of God as triune, importantly, resists all abstraction. The incarnation radically calls into question all efforts to reach for a God behind God’s self-revelation in Jesus, for the historical relationship between Jesus and the Father is nothing other than the eternal relationship between the Son and the Father. Likewise, the historical outpouring of the Spirit in the story of Jesus is the eternal outpouring of the Spirit between the Father and the Son. In the words of Hebert McCabe, “the story of Jesus is nothing other than the triune life of God projected onto our history” (McCabe, God Matters, 48).  Hence, as Robert Jenson puts it, “‘God’ is whoever raised Jesus from the dead.” The reason why this story appears to us as fundamentally gruesome—a story about rejection, murder, and even state torture—is precisely because this is God’s life “projected on, lived out on, our rubbish tip” (McCabe, God Matters, 48).

Index to Holy Week Series

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