Jason Micheli's Blog, page 89
May 24, 2022
I have no other words
A society that tolerates the ongoing slaughter of children in the name of “gun rights” is not a free society but an idolatrous one.
May 19, 2022
Not a Place, A Person
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Just after Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, he begins to say farewell to them. The God who wept for Lazarus speaks to his fearful followers, already grieving his absence, of the place he goes to prepare for them:
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you there myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
When Jesus got up from the table in the Upper Room, removed his outer robe, and stooped down on his knees before them like a slave, Peter had protested. “You’ll never wash my feet,” “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me,” Jesus had replied. “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet,” Jesus elaborates, but one who has been bathed is entirely clean.”
Jesus wasn’t talking about feet. He was talking about baptism. He was talking about the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection. If you’ve been baptized by me, baptized into me, you are entirely clean, Jesus promises. It’s what we pray over the water, “Pour out your Holy Spirit, Lord, to bless this gift of water and ____ who receives it, to wash away his sin and clothe him in Christ’s righteousness; so that, dying and rising in the waters of baptism, John may share in Christ’s final victory.”
Wash away sin and clothe him in Christ’s righteousness— that’s everything.
That’s all any of us will ever need before a Holy God.
That’s enough.
That’s your enoughness.
Baptism saves.
Or rather, through baptism into Christ, God saves you.
Faith clings to baptism, Martin Luther taught. Whenever doubt or despair attacked him, Luther said he could always return to the fact of his baptism and take comfort. No matter what’s going on inside you, Luther taught that you can always point outside of you to your baptism and know that, by virtue of your baptism, you are in Jesus Christ.
Whenever the valley of the shadow of death casts its pall over you, you can cling to your baptism and know that everything you need to enter the Father’s house was already gifted to you by Christ through water and the Word. Speaking of the Father’s house, after making this promise about the power of baptism not simply to cover all our sins, but to clothe us in Christ’s own perfect righteousness, Jesus makes this other promise about going to prepare a place for us in his father’s house.
Jesus isn’t giving blueprints of heaven.
Jesus is talking about a wedding.
In first century Jewish weddings, when a bridegroom betrothed himself to a bride, before the wedding ceremony, he would first go to his father’s house and build an addition onto the family home. Only after the bridegroom had prepared a place for his bride at his father’s house would the bridegroom return, make his promise of forever to his bride, and then take her to the place he had prepared for them.
This promise at the Last Supper— it’s not about a place.
It’s about a person.
Jesus is promising to make good on the betrothal he pledges to us at our baptism. He’s promising that you, who are in Christ by baptism, will be with Christ eternally.
In Jewish weddings, it’s the bridegroom who does all the work to prepare the bride’s home with him. And when his work is done, he gifts it to his bride. In this case, the work that prepares our home with him is Christ’s own work of death, resurrection, and ascension. This is why, when Thomas asked, "Lord, how can we find the way?" Jesus doesn't give a list of directions, does he? No, Jesus tells them, "I am the way, I am the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father, except through me."
Christians often use that verse as a bludgeon, but it’s meant to be immense comfort as you face the dark hours of your life. When Jesus says, "I am the way," what He is saying is, He is the one who stands uniquely in the gap between a Holy God and sinful humanity. “You came to show us the way,” the praise chorus sings.
Actually, Jesus comes to be the way, reconciling a fallen world and fallen humanity to the Father. And because Jesus is the way, Jesus is not a truth among many truths. Jesus is the truth. Jesus is the truth that speaks to the lie that God’s love must be earned or deserved. Jesus is the truth that speaks to the lie that it’s your faith that justifies you before God rather than Christ’s faithfulness gifted to you as your own.
Jesus is the truth that speaks to the lie that what you do or leave undone can undo what he has done for you. Jesus is the truth that speaks to the lie that there is any way to his Father’s house other than in him.
The outrageous Gospel promise of baptism is that, by grace, you were irrevocably incorporated into Jesus Christ, and in him, who has already born all our sins in his body upon a tree, you will be carried across the threshold into the place Christ has prepared for you— a place for which the blueprints were drawn up prior to Creation itself.
When it comes to what happens when we die and where we go after life, the promise isn’t so much about an abstract place as it is about a specific person, Jesus Christ has betrothed Himself to you by his blood and baptism.
And, this is why when Jesus tells his disciples not to let their hearts be troubled, it’s not a request or an encouragement.
It’s a command.
He’s commanding them not to let their hearts be troubled, because their destiny beyond death is not a place they can hardly imagine, but a person they’ve already met in the flesh.
It’s not a departure so much as a reunion.
So do not let your hearts be troubled. No matter your past, whatever your sins or regrets, regardless of your doubts or your failures to live up to his commands, Jesus has gone the way of death and resurrection for you. He’s done all the work already. And he applies that work to us at our baptism.
Therefore, you have a place, you have a home. And in Jesus Christ, you are never lost, but you're always found. In Christ Jesus, you are never dead, but always alive, for He is the way, the truth and the life, He and no other.
Put your faith not in your faith but in your baptism, for there Christ gifts to us everything that belongs to him, including— especially— a place in his Father’s house.
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May 16, 2022
There’s No Sea in the City of the Lamb
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Revelation 21.1-6
One Sunday after Casey returned from his second tour in Iraq he shook my hand in the narthex and introduced himself as the husband of the young woman I’d seen often in worship and as the father of the baby girl who was always in her arms. “I guess I didn’t realize you were married,” I said to her and shook Casey’s hand. “Almost two years,” she replied, smiling nervously, “but— the war and all— this is the first time we’ve gotten to live together.” Even with a baby tow, checkout clerks surely still carded Jennifer, and Casey’s cheeks were so smooth there wasn’t a chance a razor had ever needed to touch them. Neither one of them looked old enough to be married much less parents. “She really loves this church,” he said, shaking my hand, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“Sir?” I waved him off.
Casey’s grip was as steady, his countenance as calm as his face was smooth, the look in his blue eyes seemed tranquil. I couldn’t have guessed then that there was already a storm gathering inside him. One Sunday Casey started to wear his dress uniform to worship. “That’s odd,” I thought, “but then again, in every church, especially in the DC area, there’s always a handful of folks who take the whole God and Country line a little too far.” Another Sunday further down the calendar Casey, unsolicited on his way out of worship after the service, insisted to me that serving as a sniper had in no way effected him. The Sundays following his insistence turned to swagger, bragging to me of the ISIS soldiers he had killed and how his conscience was not at all a casualty of his deeds. The next Sunday he appeared to take pleasure in turning my stomach describing what he called collateral damage. A few weeks later, in the middle of the week, he came by the church office to let us know that during the worship services the coming Sunday he’d be armed and patrolling the perimeter of the church parking lot to protect the congregation from a terrorist attack. That’s when I called Jennifer. Maybe I waited too long to reach out. Hindsight’s always clearer. We always see the present only as though through a glass dimly. After I relayed my recent encounter with her husband, a wave of grief crashed over her and, like a sudden clap of thunder, she broke down weeping. A moment later, catching her breath and gathering herself, she softly in to the phone, “It’s like he’s been sucked out to sea.”
In his book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? my teacher David Bentley Hart recalls reading an article in the New York Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, a large man of enormous physical strength who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent four of his five children from perishing along with his wife in the tsunami. As the man recited the names of his lost children to the reporter, in descending order of age, ending with the name of his four-year-old son, he was utterly overwhelmed by his own weeping and sobbed to the reporter, “My wife and children must have thought, “Father is here….he will save us,” but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”
I couldn’t do it.
The sea won.
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”
For his indelicate Gospel message that Jesus is Lord (and therefore Caesar is not) Rome had exiled St. John to the island of Patmos, a first century imperial Alcatraz. But as we learn on Easter, closed doors or locked deadbolts cannot deter the Risen Christ so from behind bars, John receives a vision from the Living God. The revelation given to John weaves a bewildering patchwork of images, blocks of scripture taken from all over the biblical quilt (Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, Zechariah, and Ezekiel— especially from the prophet Ezekiel), making Revelation the most cinematic, surreal part of the Bible. So odd, in fact, that the Protestant Reformers thought it a book best avoided. Yet the theme of John’s vision is, if not simple, specific. It’s the Gospel promise that Christ’s death upon the cross for you for the forgiveness sins will culminate in a final victory over the Powers of Sin and Death.
The vision given to St. John takes that single promise, encases it in scriptural symbol, and then displays it in a dizzying, kaleidoscopic pattern. From one turn of the page to the next, there’s a seven-eyed lamb, a seven-headed dragon, a lake of fire, sword-swallowing mouths, angels and horsemen and a woman clothed with the sun. The symbols are so striking, the prophetic visions are so strange, we fail to notice that of all the images revealed to St. John— beasts and bowls and a Whore of Babylon— this final picture in today’s text might be the most disorienting of all: “…and the sea was no more.”
There’s no sea in the City of God?
When Christ comes back in final victory— a new heaven and a new earth— there will be no beach honeymoon that follows the Marriage Supper of the Lamb?
Eternity is oceans away?
“…and the sea was no more.”
Literally, in the Greek it’s “…and the sea is not, any longer.” It’s just six words, but you are meant to hear in that spare expression the simplest possible hymn of comfort and hope. It’s the Gospel promise distilled down into six words, into a short clause at the end of a sentence, into single, surprising image.
The sea— no more!
Of course, the challenge is that in order to receive this revelation given to St. John— to hear its message— you have to know the Bible better than most United Methodists do. You cannot interpret John’s shorthand if you don’t know the language. In the same way John assumes you know enough of scripture to infer that the slaughtered lamb seated on the throne is the crucified and risen Christ or that the sword protruding from the Son of Man’s mouth is the Gospel, he takes it for granted that you know the scriptures well enough to understand that the absence of the sea in the New Creation signals the presence of something else , something even better than the beach.
In the beginning, the Book of Genesis announces, God swept across the dark waters and brought forth light and life. It even sounds ominous in the Hebrew, Tohu wa-bohu. The tohu wa-bohu, the dark waters— in scripture, the sea is somehow prior to creation and ambivalently adjacent to God’s creative intent. After God rescued his people in Egypt, parting the Red Sea in two, the Lord made those same waters a cascading coffin for their slave masters. In the Book of Jonah, the prophet attempts to flee God’s summons by sailing across the sea; in other words, water symbolizes the opposite of God’s will. Meanwhile, the psalms liken the threats of Israel’s enemies to the “roaring of the seas and the roaring of their waves.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus exorcizes demons from two men amongst the Gerasene tombs. The demons possess a herd of swine instead and immediately plummet to their death into the sea. While in Luke, Jesus proclaims that “the roaring of the sea and the waves,” almost in opposition to him, will signal the long-awaited coming of his Kingdom.
In the symbolic world of the Bible, the sea is not a place of tranquility or rest.
In scripture, the sea epitomizes danger, judgment, confusion, suffering, evil, and death. In scripture, the sea signifies the world gone wrong, a creation out of control; as though, in the beginning, God pushed back the tohu wa-bohu to word the world but ever since the dark waters have been leaking back into the world and crashing into our lives. Even if all the world repented of sin and obeyed God’s Law, even if we could eliminate racism and abolish war and overcome every -ism, even if all the world converted to Christ, it would still be a world with the sea in it.
The vision God gives to John, therefore, a vision of a new world made present with an absent sea— it’s a promise. It’s why Christoph Blumhardt calls this verse ‘the greatest word that crowns all other words.” It’s what Gustaf Wingren means when he writes, “the opposition against resurrection faith strains is despair.”The sea will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more. Every tear will dry when the many waters recede. The world gone wrong will go away. There will be only a world made right by Christ who is making all things, including you, new.
The vision is not a pie-in-sky picture of the great bye-and-bye.
It’s a narrow escape into hope.
And, notice, the vision is one hundred percent, undiluted grace. God doesn’t hedge his bets, “Perhaps I will make all things new. God doesn’t dangle a carrot, declaring, “Under certain conditions, I will wipe every tear from your eyes.” The new creation is not conditional, “If you get your act together, then the sea will be no more. It’s grace, which is to say, it’s a promise. It’s God’s promise that one day, soon and very soon, the Father will be here. He will save us from the dark waters. And the sea will be no more.
But.
What about in the meantime?
One day the world gone wrong will go away. That’s all well and good. It’s good news even, but in the meantime the world gone wrong is the only world in which you and I live. And I’ll be perfectly honest, lately it feels like I’m waist-deep in the tohu wa-bohu. Don’t just point me to the dry shores of a one day down the horizon, give me a promise for the meantime.
Give me a promise for you:
For you who are wracked by waves of sorrow or shame or frustration.
For you who’ve been pulled under by addiction or anger or anxiety, swept out to sea by sickness, drowning in despair.
For you who are fearful that the world is tossing to and fro and circling the drain.
One day the sea will be no more, but what about those of us treading water in the meantime?
On the day before his assassination, April 3, 1968, at Mason Temple Church of God in Memphis, Tennessee, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last sermon, posthumously titled, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” It’s a sermon on Christ’s coming again and the advent of the new heaven and the new earth. He’d escaped an attempt on his life just the day before so the specter of death loomed over his preaching.
Like in many of his final sermons, King’s last sermon betrays a tone of resignation beneath the hopeful theme; as though, the vision he’d shared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial years earlier had grown into a God-sized dream, a dream only could accomplish. The dark waters had proved too vast and the movement felt to King like bailing water from the ocean a cup at a time. He was weary, tired of tread water. Only God could put right a world gone so wrong. Instead of the optimism of his “I have a Dream” sermon or the cautious rebuke of his jailhouse letter to fellow clergy, King’s final sermon seethes with fiery, righteous anger. In it, King recalls the Birmingham bus boycott more than ten years earlier and how the police chief, Bull Connor, attempted to terrorize the protesters into surrender:
“Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth,” King preached, “and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around.” Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And we went before the fire hoses [because] we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denominations, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water. And because we knew water, that [the fire hoses] could not stop us…And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham. Now we've got to go on in Memphis just like that.”
One day the sea will be no more.
In the meantime…you already know water.
With water and the Spirit, the Father has already incorporated you into the Son. The Almighty God who takes the form of a servant is a God who loves to work in ironic ways. In this case, the way in which God brings this promise of the future into your present is by drowning the Old Adam in you.
One day the sea will be no more— God applies that promise to you, for you, in your life, through water.
And those waters are no tohu wa-bohu. They’re living waters. The waters of baptism, scripture says, incorporate you into Christ. Regardless of what you do or leave undone, no matter if you’ve brought the storms in your life upon yourself, by your baptism you are in Christ. That’s Galatians 3.27. By the waters of baptism your life is hid in Christ with God. That’s Colossians 3.3. So no matter the storms raging in your life you can point to your baptism and know “Father is here” because you are in him.
More than a year after my phone call with Casey’s wife, he asked me to meet him for coffee. He’d been getting help in a support group and meeting with a therapist. The storm hadn’t passed, but it had calmed.
“I don’t need to advice from you,” he told me, holding his cup but not drinking.
“Good,” I said, “despite what church people think, they don’t offer any advice-giving classes in seminary.”
He didn’t laugh. I’d interrupted.
“I don’t need advice,” he said, “and I don’t need a prayer to make it all go away. I don’t even need you to tell me everything’s going to be okay.”
“What do you need?”
“I need you to promise me I’m not alone.”
“That’s one of the few promises I can make,” I told him.
“You are not alone.”
The sea still is. The world gone wrong has not gone away. There is no escape from the storms of life— that’s not the promise of faith. There is no escaping the dark waters of this old world, but you are not alone in navigating them. You’ve already known water; therefore, you are not alone. That’s the promise. That’s the promise of your baptism. Christ is with you. He’s not standing on the shoreline shouting instructions at you, “Swim harder!”
No.
He is with you.
Like a stowaway aboard a ship of fools, Christ is with you. He is with you as the storms of life toss you to and fro. He’s in the boat on the sea with you. And he is not asleep.
So come to the table. Like drowning men and women, take and eat. Grasp the bread and the cup as though they are your solid ground amidst the swirling seas. They are.
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May 11, 2022
Take and Read
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Here’s my latest article for the Christian Century, a review of five theology books from the past year:
When I was in high school, I worked as a volunteer for a Republican who was running in the twenty-seventh district for the Virginia General Assembly. A woman I knew only as Mrs. Smith was the district operative who told me where to post signs, stuff mailboxes, knock on doors, and— on election eve— take down the other candidate’s signs. For each one of my campaign endeavors, she drove me, along with a van load of other volunteers, from place to place all over the south side of Richmond. And every outing, with some AM squawker on the radio, she’d turn away from the steering wheel to proselytize us in her latest conspiracy theory.
“Did you know,” she told me as I rode shotgun into some planned community, “President Clinton is responsible for the murder of several witnesses in the Whitewater scandal? Well, I read about it on the INTERNET,” she said, “do you have it? It’s an INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY!”
I shook my head.
“Honestly, would you say if I told you Bill and Hillary were behind Vince Foster’s suicide being faked for political purposes? It’s a coverup!”
Because I was a recent convert to Christianity, who thought Jesus expected us to tell the truth (even if the President did not), I told her the truth.
“Honestly, I’d say you sound like an insane person.”
A few years later, I was home on break from college, at church. I was surprised to find Mrs. Smith in the row ahead of me. Even though I knew Mrs. Smith a militant pro-lifer, back in the day at least, she wasn’t a Christian.
“Mrs. Smith,” I said, “What are you doing here?”
She frowned, and then she smiled.
“Something took ahold of me,” she said, “Back then. What’s Jesus call him? The Prince of Lies? Anyways, thanks to these folks here I’ve been set free.”
I thought about Mrs. Smith last January as I watched the lie-driven mob storm the Capitol armed with zip ties and Christian paraphernalia. Numerous commentators have observed the extent to which the protest on January 6, 2021 should be understood as a Christian riot. If this is true, then insurrection represents not only the erasure of political norms or the breakdown public trust but a grave theological error across the Church. I chalk it up to providence that the past year has gifted us books that can equip preachers and believers to think theologically about the odd and trying time that has been given us.
To be sure, theology is never done in a vacuum. Theology is always contextual, yet this is no guarantee we rightly discern the context in which we live. It is never easy to know where you are in the world or what time is in God’s history. Few anticipated, for instance, a year that began without the peaceful transfer of power would end on the dawn of a new Cold War. That we see our time as in a mirror dimly makes the work of theology and proclamation a fragile, always occasional endeavor. In his latest collection, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas explores Barth’s short volume Against the Stream, written in the uncertain years when Stalinism waxed as Nazism waned. Hauerwas finds Barth doing theology in light of politics in a manner more subtle than suggested by his claim that we should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand.“Karl Barth’s famous claim may be good advice,” Hauerwas observes, “but surely the newspaper is just as likely to mislead as it is to help us know where we are and/or what time we are in. Barth’s advocating reading the newspaper fails to answer the question of which newspaper we should be reading. I am not raising the problem of so-called fake news. Rather I am simply calling attention to the different worlds the different headlines of papers presume as well as create.” Because we live in a world of different worlds, worlds created by headlines and algorithms and amateur “experts,” Hauerwas shows the value in the way Barth refused to take a position against the Soviet Union based on abstract principles or general values. “For Barth,” he writes, “the Church’s obligations do not lie in the direction of fulfilling a law of nature but rather toward her living Lord. Therefore, the Church never acts on principal but judges spiritually and by individual cases.” On such a case-by-case basis, Hauerwas proceeds in Full Alive to apply Barth’s apocalyptic humanism (that is, a humanism determined by the God revealed in Jesus) to individual subjects such as pastoral care, civil society, and race.
It may indeed be difficult to know where we are in God’s history, as Hauerwas writes, but it certainly appears that we live at a time where race, identity in general, is just one of the fissures tearing the body politic asunder. In a very helpful book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, Alan Noble identifies and dissects the, often unexamined, premises in our discourse about identity. No doubt the anger that animates many who stormed the Capitol— the Q Shaman is but the most obvious example— is that, try as we might, our identify is neither manufacturable nor achievable. Noble puts the lie to the assumption that we possess an authentic, unadulterated self latent beneath the surface of the life we’ve been given, a true self that we must discover, build upon, or to which we must be true. In a culture fraught with debates about individual liberty, Noble reminds us that we are not self-derived. We are another’s product and thus property. We belong not to ourselves but to God. In You Are Not Your Own, Noble buttresses his argument with persuasive examinations of how contemporary culture understands identity in ways that finally lead to the opposite of an inhuman expectation of the self, one that produces, on one end of the the pole, burnout and anxiety, and on the other end, anger and injustice. Noble’s is a culture crash course, taking us to Augustine’s epiphany that our hearts will always be restless until they find their rest in the God to whom we belong. That is, Noble provides us a fortuitous and real world reclamation of the promise proclaimed to us by water and the Spirit.
How God applies the promise to us is the subject of Steven Paulson’s third volume of Outlaw God, series probing Martin Luther’s emphasis on the hidden and the preached God. The late Cardinal, Francis George of Chicago (definitely not a Lutheran) said famously that “Our culture permits everything but forgives nothing.” Every passing year it feels like our culture only doubles down on that dialectic. The third volume Outlaw God is invaluable for preachers, therefore, for it examines the agency behind preaching and the sacraments. In word and water, wine and bread, the Absolute gives himself to us in his absolution, apart from any earning and deserving. The pardon of God not only removes any need for constructing a Christianity founded on certainty, Paulson shows, it silences the accusation of the Law and thereby creates faith, ex nihilo. Not only does Paulson provide an account of the preacher’s office that preachers and church members will find reinvigorating, he excavates the language of Protestantism exactly at a time when we could use help silencing the din of accusation in our culture.
Of course, we’re not the only accusers in our midst. The blame game is literally Satan’s name. In over twenty years of ministry, I’ve often found that laity, like Mrs. Smith, exhibit greater nimbleness than seminary-educated, pensioned pastors in speaking about the one whom the New Testament names as the Enemy. Reinhold Niebuhr said original sin was the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the faith. The past year has made a case that what Paul calls the Principalities and Power also require little catechesis or conversion. For this reason, Means of Grace: A Year of Weekly Devotions is assuredly more than an entry into the Chicken Soup for the Soul variety. Like a sculptor chipping away, Laura Bardolph Hubers has distilled Fleming Rutledge’s thick, challenging sermons into shorter, weekly devotions. If the insurrection revealed a theological error widespread in the Church and a captivity binding many believers, then church leaders must learn how to do substantive, faithful theology in brief, digestible bits. Likewise, we need to recover the apostles’s language of the Powers. In Means of Grace, a deft editor has aided a treasured preacher in teaching other preachers how to speak of a world that is ruled by the powers of evil yet awaits the sure victory of the crucified and risen one.
Like Mrs. Smith learned, it’s no easy undertaking distinguishing the Holy Spirit from the spirits of this evil age. This year received a new book that wasn’t, Ernst Kasemann’s Church Conflicts: The Cross, Apocalyptic, and Political Resistance. Much like Karl Barth, Kasemann’s career was forged in the crucible of conflict and read like a man calling due the promise of God in a world enthralled to an Other. In this newly translated book of essays and sermons from the autumn of Kasemann’s life, we glimpse a theologian, like Barth, attempting, on a case-by-case basis, to obey his Lord in a time when it’s difficult to discern the time. The past year has demonstrated, I believe, how desperately, the Body needs the spiritual discipline of discernment. If scripture is right and the world is bondage to a Power that is not God, then we require a greater facility to discern, and so to resist, the forces of evil and oppression. No matter time it is or how clearly we can see through the glass of God’s history, Church Conflicts points us forward, not only to profess the Lordship of Jesus in our time and place, but to live, in dark, discombobulating times, clinging to the promise of the Gospel.
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May 9, 2022
A Sheep Without Any Verbs
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Psalm 23
My first funeral sermon two decades ago flopped. "It didn't sound like you knew him at all," a worshipper told me on the way out of the funeral home chapel. "Uh, I didn't know him at all," I replied. I was just a student. I didn't know then— they don't warn you in seminary— that most lay people consider it the mark of a good funeral sermon when the preacher sounds like he knows the deceased. When it comes to funerals, lay people don't usually judge whether I've proclaimed the Gospel or done a good job unpacking the scripture text or pointing to the promise of Cross and Resurrection. For services of death and resurrection, it's a good sermon only if the gathered can shake my hand at the door and say, "It sounded like you really knew her” or "You really captured him."
Whenever one of the flock is lost, most people don't care whether or not the preacher speaks of the Shepherd or proclaims that the Shepherd is good. Whenever one of the flock is lost, most people want to hear about the one lost sheep not the singular Shepherd. They want to be assured that the preacher knows the person whom they've lost. They don't think they need to be reassured that the lost member of the flock is known by the Shepherd.
It’s only fifty-five words, but I’d wager Psalm 23 is the most beloved— certainly it’s the most familiar— text in the entire Bible. “We cling to life through it,” my former teacher Ellen Charry says, “when the angel of death stalks our path.” The metaphor at the heart of the twenty-third psalm is an image that recurs throughout scripture. Fully half of the books of the Bible liken God’s relationship to us to that of a shepherd and his flock. Jacob, who knew better than most what it means to wander and stray, is the first person in scripture to call God his shepherd. John frames his entire Gospel around the metaphor, beginning with John the Baptist’s acclamation “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” and ending with the Risen Christ commissioning the formerly lost sheep, Peter, as a shepherd. The very reason the image of God as Shepherd is such a refrain in scripture perhaps makes its cherished status somewhat ironic. Chances are, you’ve heard these lines about “thy rod and thy staff” recited or prayed or sung so many times in worship you no longer hear the oddity of Psalm 23 or the offensiveness of it.
The Lord is my Shepherd.
It’s not “The Lord is my Guide; I shall not fail to follow his way.”
It isn’t “The Lord is my Teacher; I shall not disobey.”
Nor is it “The Lord is my Guru; I shall not ignore his wisdom.”
The Lord as our Life Coach casts us in a more flattering position.
But the Lord as our Shepherd?
To profess that the Lord is your shepherd is to confess that you are a sheep. Sigmund Freud was correct; sheep are lame. Sheep most often appear in scripture as hapless dolts. Even when they end up on the winning side of the divide, as in Jesus’s yarn in Matthew 25, they come off as dumb as rocks, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you?” To profess that God is your Shepherd is to confess that you are no more capable or impressive than an animal who is easily and happily domesticated for food.
Less familiar than Psalm 23 is the forty-fourth psalm that Paul quotes in his Epistle to the Romans, “You have made us like sheep for slaughter, and have scattered us among the nations…Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” Translation: Clarice Starling notwithstanding, sheep are such stupid, helpless, self-involved animals that they are blissfully and absolutely ignorant of their surroundings, incapable of sensing danger and thus easily, happily led to their own slaughter.
Scripture says, “That’s you.”
Which is to say, sheep need a shepherd. As Ellen Charry writes, the frequency of the shepherding motif in scripture owes less to Israel’s semi-nomadic origins and more to their lived experience that God’s people need to be led, cared for, and helped by someone more intelligent, able, and sophisticated than oneself.
Sheep are stubborn. Sheep wander. Sheep get lost. Sheep fall into valleys. Sheep are dependent totally on their shepherd. Sheep need to be led and guided and protected by their shepherd. The passive voice there says everything you need to know. There aren't any stories, or epics, or legends called Dances with Lambs. There’s no Crouching Tiger, Hidden Sheep. No, scripture makes the point over and again, Old Testament and New, sheep are stupid. By themselves, sheep are lunch for wolves. When sheep wander and get lost in the wilderness what do they do? They bleat as loud as they can; they might as well be wearing a dinner bell around their necks.
To hear that God is your Shepherd is to be told that you are a sheep. And to hear they you are no better than a sheep is offensive for us who rate our worth by our resumes. Not only are sheep weak and stubborn and easily led astray, they're completely useless. Sheep aren't like other animals. Sheep aren't like asses. Sheep don't do any work by which they merit their worth. Sheep don't bear a burden like mules do. Sheep don't pull a plow like oxen do. Sheep don't lead a wagon like horses do. Even goats do work by which they earn their value. Even goats graze down briars and thickets and earn their worth. The only real work— if you can call it work— the only real work a sheep performs is listening to the Shepherd's voice.
If you measure animals' worth by the work they perform, sheep are useless and, thus, worthless. Unlike other animals, the value of a lamb is intrinsic to the lamb. In its lamb-ness. Its worth isn't in the work it does; its worth is in who it is as the creature the Creator made it to be. Its worth is its wool and its meat.
So, Psalm 23 is an odd, offensive song to hear in this season of Resurrection. Aren't we supposed to respond to the news that God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead by doing and saying everything that Jesus did and said? Aren't we supposed to earn this Easter gift by living like the Lamb instead of going on like a goat, loving our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, just as God, when he became one of us, loved his neighbors? Does God really need to remind us we’re no more impressive than a dumb sheep so soon after he raised Jesus from the dead?
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus spins a yarn about a single lost sheep who wanders off from the flock of ninety-nine. We forget how the parable of the lost sheep is Jesus's way of responding to the disciples's attempts at elbowing each other out of the way in terms of importance. The parable of the lost sheep is Christ’s answer to their question, "Who is the greatest in the house of the Lord?" Notice that Jesus doesn't answer their question about their worth in the Kingdom with an exhortation about the work they must do. Jesus doesn't tell them the greatest in the Kingdom are those who sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor. Jesus doesn't tell them the greatest in the Kingdom are those who do the things that Jesus did, those who love their enemies and turn the other cheek and clothe the naked. No, Jesus answers with an image of a sheep who actively accomplishes absolutely nothing. The sheep in Jesus's story is nothing but the passive recipient of the Shepherd's finding.
The parable is an odd way to answer a question about greatness because you don't need to be a ranch hand to know that a lost sheep is a dead sheep just as surely as a lost coin is a dead asset. How impressive can the House of the Lord be, after all, if the only ticket you need for greatness in it— much less for admission— is your lostness? Not only is the parable an odd way to answer a question about worth, the parable is just as offensive as the psalm because the "Parable of the Lost Sheep" (that's what the header in my Bible calls it) the "Parable of the Lost Sheep" isn't really about the sheep who gets lost at all. The only verb the sheep gets in the parable is getting lost. All the other verbs belong to the Shepherd. The sheep doesn't search out the flock. The sheep doesn't scramble out of a thicket and wander back to the fold. The sheep doesn't even bah-bah-bah until its voice is heard by the Shepherd. And once it's found, the sheep doesn't even so much as say its sorry for getting itself lost.
We love the parable where Jesus the Reckless Irresponsible Shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to search out the lamb whose lostness will surely soon enough make him lunch for wolves. But we seldom stop to appreciate what it says about us that we are all that single sheep. We think the story's supposed to be about the sheep, lost from its flock, but it's about the Shepherd. It's not about the work the sheep does to get itself to a findable place. It's about the Shepherd's work of finding. It's about the Shepherd's gracious and saving determination to rescue his sheep from death. The only verb the sheep gets in the parable is getting lost, which is to say, the only "work" the sheep does in the parable is to know that, apart from the gracious folly of the Shepherd to find him, death has the last word.
Just like the Shepherd in the parable, God gets all the good verbs in the Easter story.
He bore our sins in his body on the tree.
He died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring us to himself.
God raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
Just like God at Easter, the Shepherd in Jesus’s story gets all the good verbs. The Shepherd puts the lost sheep on his shoulders and carries it back to his house and calls together his friends and his family and his neighbors and, like a fatted-calf-killing Prodigal Father, says: "Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep." As if it's our sins and not our goodness, our wretchedness and not our worthwhile work, that most commend us to the grace of God.
The Shepherd gets all the verbs.
The Shepherd takes care of the sheep’s every need.
The Shepherd is the Intelligence who knows the sheep’s true need and the Power who is able to bring it to pass.
Last Wednesday, I stopped by the home of Freda Hill. If you didn’t know Freda, let’s just say a good bit of the makeup stains on my stoles and the lipstick on my collars are from her cheeks and lips. Before the pandemic, Freda once expressed the desire to take the cardboard, directional cutout of me in the atrium home with her. When I asked why she wanted to take a life sized cutout of me home with her, her answer made me blush. Let’s just say she unanswered in the sort of unfiltered freedom that only old age allows. That and she clearly missed her deceased husband.
I was heading to a conference in Manhattan on Thursday morning and I knew Freda was in hospice so I made sure I stopped to see her on Wednesday evening. Save for Jesus, the death expectancy rate remains damn near one hundred percent. For the rest of us life is made up of minutes as much as its made of moments, and last week I knew Freda’s time was short. She was lying in a shiny stainless steel hospital bed in front of the fireplace in her living room. Her breathing was shallow and raspy. Her eyes were closed to the world. But for the hospice worker who lingered in the threshold between rooms, her head covered in a hijab, she was alone. None of the people in the pictures on the mantle and side tables were present with her. Every family is complicated, I thought to myself, but some families are incomprehensible apart from the promise of grace and the hope of a final, healing resurrection.
Freda was unresponsive, or so I thought.
When I bent over and spoke loudly into her ear, reminding her of the church who remembered her in their prayers, of the God who loved her from before the foundation of the world, and of the Lamb whose red blood rendered her sins as white as snow— when I gave voice to the gospel in her ear, she reached out her hand as though grasping. Sure, it simply could’ve been the last blank, agitated jerks of the dying. I chose to think differently. I took her hand in my mind and, possibly imputing to her a memory that was no longer there, I prayed two prayers with her and for her and over her, the LORD’s Prayer followed by the twenty-third psalm.
She didn’t— couldn’t— pray it with me.
Not that it matters.
The Shepherd gets all the good, important verbs anyway.
Almost a year ago, I visited Freda in the hospital. A dizzy spell in the narthex after worship one warm spring Sunday landed her in the ER where she learned she had cancer. A different caregiver was her only companion to chew on the news of inevitability. She talked. I prayed. We hugged. As I let go of her and turned to leave, she reiterated a point I’d heard her make several times, “If I didn’t have my church, I’d have no one.” To be honest, I didn’t think much of it at the time. People blow all kinds of pieties up a pastor’s ass. But I realized this week that she meant it. Indeed she was deadly serious.
If she didn’t have you all, the church, she would have had no one.
Last Wednesday, after I left her and drove home, certain she was soon leaving this side of the veil, it struck me that this was but another one of the verbs our Shepherd had worked for a particular member of his flock named Freda. Even more than a place in the House of the LORD in the life everlasting, the Good Shepherd had gifted her a community in this life— friends called saints (who are really sinners) and a family not of blood but by baptism.
The Shepherd really does do everything that ultimately matters. Done for you— that’s the Gospel. The Gospel’s not Do this for God.
Done for you.
Sheep are strange.
They can't carry a Christ into town to shouts of Hosanna. They can't bear a Samaritan's friend to safety. The only "work" sheep do is to trust the Shepherd's voice. And as God's feeble flock, that's our only work to do too. No matter what colors with which we drape the altar, we're never far from the valley of the shadow of Death. Therefore, I invite you to trust the good news proclaimed by the saints in the Book of Revelation today, the good news that the blood of the Lamb has rendered yours sins as white as snow. That is, because of his righteousness, you are counted as pure.
Trust not only those sheep we call saints but trust the Shepherd.
Trust the voice of the Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who promises that by his substitution for you, God forgets your sins in the darkness of the grave. Trust the Shepherd's voice when he tells you that his cousin John was right: he is the Lamb who bears away all our sins such that in the House of the Lord, God remembers our iniquities no more. Trust the Shepherd when he promises to you by his cross and his empty grave that in the power of the resurrection he finds us lost to death and he puts us on his shoulders and he carries us back to his friends with rejoicing. Trust the Shepherd when he spins these yarns where there's not a single note of our earning or our merit, not a hint of rewarding the rewardable or saving the salvageable. Trust the Shepherd, for if it's not about our worthiness, there's absolutely no need to worry about our place in the house of the Lord. All that is lost will be found because of his gracious folly to raise the dead to new life.
Trust that our Shepherd— he really is good.
And not only good.
Take Freda as Exhibit A— he really is at work in your life, for you.
And Exhibit B— well, just look. He’s prepared a table for you so that you may find him here, in bread and wine, so that, no matter how far you wander or in what ways you get yourself lost, he’s always as close to you as you are to yourself.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
May 4, 2022
More than a Life-Coach, Guru, or Teacher
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Exactly a week ago I stopped by the home of an elderly parishioner, F. A good bit of the makeup stains on my stoles are from her cheeks. She once suggested taking the cardboard cutout of me in the atrium home with her, the specifics of the suggestion make my own cheeks blush even now.
Save for Jesus, the death expectancy rate remains damn near one hundred percent. For the rest of us life is made up of minutes as much as its made of moments, and last week I knew F’s time was short. She was lying in a shiny stainless steel hospital bed in front of the fireplace in her living room. Her breathing was shallow and raspy. Her eyes were closed to the world.
But for the hospice worker who lingered in the threshold between rooms, her head covered in a hijab, she was alone. Every family is complicated, I thought to myself, but some families are incomprehensible apart from the promise of grace and the hope of a final, healing resurrection.
F was unresponsive, or so I thought.
When I bent over and spoke loudly into her ear, reminding her of the church who remembered her in their prayers, of the God who loved her from before the foundation of the world, and of the Lamb whose red blood rendered her sins as white as snow— when I gave voice to the gospel in her ear, she reached out her hand as though grasping. Sure, it simply could’ve been the last blank, agitated jerks of the dying. I chose to think differently. I took her hand in my mind and, possibly imputing to her a memory that was no longer there, I prayed two prayers with her and for her and over her, the LORD’s Prayer followed by the twenty-third psalm.
It’s only fifty-five words, but after over two decades at this dismal part of my trade I’d wager Psalm 23 is the most beloved— certainly it’s the most familiar— text in the entire Bible. “We cling to life through it,” my former teacher says, “when the angel of death stalks our path.” The metaphor at the heart of psalm 23 is an image that recurs throughout scripture. Fully half of the books of the Bible liken God’s relationship to us to that of a shepherd and his flock. Jacob, who know better than most what it means to wander and stray, is the first person in scripture to call God his shepherd. John frames his Gospel around the metaphor, beginning with John the Baptist’s acclamation “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” and ending with the Risen Christ commissioning the formerly lost sheep, Peter, as a shepherd. The very reason the image of God as Shepherd is such a refrain in scripture perhaps makes its cherished status somewhat ironic. Sheep most often appear in scripture as hapless dolts. Even when they end up on the winning side of the divide, as in Jesus’s yarn in Matthew 25, they come off dumb as rocks, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you?” To profess God as your Shepherd is to confess that you are no more capable or impressive than an animal who is easily and happily domesticated for food.
Sheep need a shepherd. As Ellen Charry writes, the frequency of the shepherding motif in scripture owes less to Israel’s semi-nomadic origins and more to their lived experience that God’s people need to be led, cared for, and helped by someone more intelligent, able, and sophisticated than oneself. We love the parable where Jesus the Good but Irresponsible Shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to search out the lamb whose lostness will surely soon enough make him lunch for wolves. We seldom stop to appreciate what it says about us that we are all that single sheep. The only verb the sheep gets in Jesus’s parable is getting lost. All the other verbs belong to the Shepherd. The sheep doesn't search out the flock. The sheep doesn't scramble out of a thicket and wander back to the fold. The sheep doesn't even bah-bah-bah until its voice is heard by the Shepherd. And once it's found, the sheep doesn't even so much as repent of its getting lost.
The Shepherd gets all the verbs. The Shepherd takes care of the sheep’s every need. The Shepherd is the Intelligence who knows the sheep’s true need and the Power who is able to bring it to pass.
A year ago I visited F in the hospital. A dizzy spell in the narthex after worship one warm spring Sunday landed her in the ER where she learned she had cancer. A different caregiver was her only companion to chew on the news of inevitability. She talked. I prayed. We hugged. As I let go of her and turned to leave, she reiterated a point I’d heard her make several times, “If I didn’t have my church, I’d have no one.” To be honest, I didn’t think much of it at the time; people blow all kinds of pieties up a pastor’s ass. But I realized this week that she meant it. Indeed she was deadly serious. After I left her and drove home, certain she was soon leaving this side of the veil, it struck me that this was but another one of the verbs the Shepherd had worked for this particular member of his flock. Even more than a place in the House of the LORD in the life everlasting, the Good Shepherd had gifted her a community in this life— friends called saints (who are really sinners) and a family not of blood but by baptism.
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April 26, 2022
Simul Iustus et Dubium
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John 20.19-31
“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.”
Uh….
What’s that about?
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book!?!?!?!?
Did John’s first draft come back to him marked up with red ink? Did John have a word limit? Did inflation impact the price of papyrus? Should our response to scripture reading be: “This is most of the Word of God for the People of God. Thanks be to God”?
Think about it. Is it not remarkable? John believes he’s telling you the most important thing that’s ever been told— in the original Greek, John narrates the Gospel in the historical present tense. It almost sounds and feels like he’s breathless and exasperated, attempting to relay this news as quickly and widely as possible. John’s convinced and convicted that he’s got the most mind-bending, life-changing, world-altering, assumption-upsetting, status-quo upheaving announcement that ever before has been heard and he left stuff out. John believes he’s reporting news of the most important person ever delivered into this world— a person delivered back into this world whom Death could not hold. John believes he’s announcing an event of cosmic proportions, the hinge of history, the turning of the ages, and he decided to leave material on the cutting room floor?
Why would John leave anything out?
If the whole point of the Gospels is to convince beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ is Lord; if the whole point of the Gospels is to prove to us that the world responded to God’s love made flesh by crucifying him but that God vindicated him by raising him from the dead; if the whole point of the Gospels is to explain to us why he came and why he died and why God raised him from the dead and what that means for us today, then why would John not include every last detail?
Why would John not submit every possible piece of evidence? What kind of witness edits their own eyewitness testimony? If the whole point of the Gospel is to convince us, then shouldn’t John’s Gospel be Stephen King long not Ernest Hemingway brief?
“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.”
Of course, the operative phrase there is “…in the presence of his first disciples.” Because we weren’t there. Philosophers call it Lessing’s Ditch; that is, there is an uncrossable chasm separating us from the events of revelation that makes doubt unavoidable and certainty impossible. And is this not a problem if the Gospel is true that we are justified through faith alone?
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of those disciples. Not these disciples. Not you or me. We weren’t there. We weren’t there like John was. We weren’t there like Peter was. We weren’t there like Matthew or Andrew or Mary Magdalene. We didn’t get to see with our own eyes the things Jesus did. We didn’t get to sit at Jesus’s feet and listen to him with our own ears. Jesus didn’t wash our feet.
Trust me— I get it. I understand that just because you come to church doesn’t mean you don’t harbor serious doubts about God, in general, to say nothing of God raising a crucified, Galilean Jew from from the dead. I’ve also learned over the years that the Easter season is an occasion when many Christians think they need to hide their doubts.
And usually we hide our doubts by acting as though others shouldn’t have any doubts of their own. As my mentor and friend, Stanley Hauerwas, puts it:
“We try to assure ourselves that we really believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained.”
He means: Easter is an occasion for doubt as much as it is an occasion for faith. So why don’t we just admit it? This whole believing business would be a lot easier if it weren’t for Lessing’s Ditch, if we weren’t two plus centuries removed from the resurrection. This whole having faith thing would be a lot easier if we had just been there ourselves.
But then again— Thomas was there. With Jesus. Every step of the way. With his own two eyes, Thomas saw Jesus feed five thousand with just a few loaves and a couple of fish. When Jesus raised Lazarus, called him out of his tomb, stinking and four days dead, Christ’s word bringing “into existence the things that do not exist,” creating ex nihilo, Thomas was there.
And Thomas was there to hear for himself when Jesus identified himself as the one who appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush, telling Martha, the grief-stricken sister of Lazarus: “I AM the Resurrection and I AM Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, yet shall they live.”
I cannot imagine firmer grounds for certainty to stand upon than the soil in front of Lazarus’s tomb, yet all the first-hand evidence, all the eyewitness proof, all the personal experience wasn’t enough to convince Thomas.
Because on Easter night, after the women have run from the tomb terrified to tell the disciples that he is risen, the disciples run.
They too are terrified.
They’re hiding behind locked doors when the Risen Christ comes and stands among them— JUST AS HE’D PREDICTED HE WOULD— and he gives them the Gospel in just four short, beautiful words, “Peace be with you.”
But Thomas wasn’t there.
The Gospel doesn’t give even an inkling of Thomas’s whereabouts. John just says “Thomas was not there with them when Jesus came.”
“Seeing is believing” we say, but three years of seeing for himself, of hearing for himself, of being right there with him wasn’t enough to convince Thomas that Jesus really as advertised. It wasn’t enough for Thomas to take Jesus at his word.
Afterwards when the disciples tell Thomas what had happened, Thomas doesn’t respond by saying: All ten of you saw him? Alright, that’s good enough for me.
No.
Thomas insists with an honesty we should honestly admire. The shame of the cross was to great for him to believe God would redeem it. Resurrect it.
And it’s not fair that Thomas gets the moniker “Doubting Thomas.”
He wasn’t the only one. Luke reports in his Gospel that following the resurrection— WITH THE RISEN JESUS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF THEM— the disciples worshipped the Risen Christ but “some doubted.”
I will not believe unless, Thomas says.
Unless I see his hands and his feet.
Unless I can grab hold of him and touch his wounds.
Unless I can see for myself what Rome did to him.
I need proof.
I need facts.
I need evidence.
Before I will believe.
A few years ago, I was at the gym (does anyone remember gyms?) exercising this remarkable specimen of a body. My head was covered in a bandana. I was wearing running shorts and a ratty old t-shirt and sneakers and looked, I thought, unrecognizable from the robed reverend I play up here on Sundays. I was grunting and sweating and listening to a podcast so nerdy I’m embarrassed to name it now. I had the dumbbells halfway through a curl when a man, not a lot older than me, came up, tapped me on the shoulder and asked:
“Don’t I know you”
“I don’t think so,” I lied.
“What do you do for a living?” he pressed.
“Me? Oh, I’m a…uh…a marine biologist.”
He chuckled.
“Yeah, I’ve seen that episode of Seinfeld too. You’re a priest aren’t you?”
I set the weights down and pulled out my earbuds and steeled myself to hear a litany of the Church’s many sins and transgressions. Instead he told me he’d met me at a funeral service— a funeral I had done just days earlier for a boy named Joshua, a little immigrant boy with brain cancer from my boy’s elementary school.
I pulled at my shirt and wiped the sweat from my hands on it and I shook his hand. And I suppose it was the mention of the boy’s name, his memory sneaking up on me like that, but neither one of us spoke for a few moments. We just stood there in the middle of the gym looking past each other, and probably we looked strange to anyone else might be looking at us.
“I couldn’t do what you do,” he said, shaking his head like an insurance adjustor. I assumed he meant funerals, couldn’t do funerals, couldn’t do funerals like that boy’s funeral.
“Couldn’t do what?” I asked.
“Believe,” he said, “as much as I’d like to have faith I just can’t. I have too many doubts and questions.”
Thinking especially of the boy, I replied: “What the hell makes you think I don’t have any doubts? The Bible says faith is a gift given to us. That means doubt is the default for all of us.” He nodded like he was thinking about what I’d said, but he wasn’t or he hadn’t understood because he then said, “I guess I’m just someone who needs proof.”
The first Easter wasn’t just a day.
The Risen Jesus hung around for fifty days, teaching and appearing to over five hundred people. Seven days after the first Easter Day, Jesus appears again in that same locked room— the Upper Room— as before and Jesus says, “Peace be with you.”
And this time, this time Thomas is there. Jesus offers Thomas his body: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” And Thomas reaches out to Jesus’ body. And Thomas touches Jesus. And Thomas grabs at the wounds of Jesus. He grasps Jesus’ wounded feet. He holds his hands against the holes. Puts his hand on Jesus’ pierced side to see the proof for himself…
Actually…no.
He doesn’t.
That’s the thing.
Read it again.
We assume that Thomas touches Jesus’s wounds. Artists have always depicted Thomas reaching out and touching the evidence with his own hands. Duccio drew it that way. Caravaggio illustrated it that way. Peter Paul Rubens painted it that way. Artists have always shown Thomas sticking his fingers in the proof he requires in order to believe. And that’s how we paint it in our own imaginations.
Yet, read it again, it’s not there.
The Gospel gives us no indication that Thomas actually touches the wounds in Jesus’s hands. John never says that Thomas peeked into Jesus’s side.
The Bible never says Thomas actually touches him.
No.
That’s got to be important, right?
The one thing Thomas says he needs in order to believe is the one thing John doesn’t bother to mention.
What Thomas insists he needs to see is the one thing John doesn’t give you the reader to see.
Instead John tells us that Jesus offers himself to Thomas and then the next thing we are told is that Thomas confesses: “My Lord and my God!” Which— pay attention— is the first time in John’s Gospel that anyone finally and fully and CORRECTLY identifies Jesus as the same Lord who made Heaven and Earth.
“Doubting” Thomas manages to make the climatic confession of faith in the Gospel.
After so many stories about the blind receiving sight and those with sight stubbornly remaining blind to the identity of Jesus, “Doubting” Thomas is the first person to see that the Jesus before him is the God who made him. And “Doubting” Thomas makes that confession of faith without the one thing he insists he needs before he can muster up faith.
St. Athanasius says that Christ, as our Great High Priest, not only mediates the things of God to man but Christ also mediates the things of man to God.
Including, especially, faith.
We think of faith as something we have, something we do. We think of belief as something we will, mustering it up in us in spite of us, despite our doubts. Believing is our activity, we think. Our act.
But—
If we think of faith as something we do or possess, as an autonomous act within us, we’re not speaking of faith as scripture speaks of it. In scripture, faith— our faith— is made possible only through the agency of God: “Lord, help my unbelief,” the father in Mark’s Gospel must beg Jesus, as we all must beg. Jesus doesn’t just put on our flesh and live the life we live. He puts on the belief, lives the faith and trust in God we owe God as creatures of God. Jesus doesn’t just stand in our place when it comes to our sin. He stands in our place when it comes to faith too. This is what we mean when we stand at the baptismal font and pray the words, “Cloth him in Christ’s righteousness…”
Baptism reckons to us the faith of Christ.
What holds Good Friday and Easter together, what makes cross and resurrection inseparable, is that Jesus never stops being a substitute for us, in our place, on our behalf. The Risen Christ remains, even here and now, every bit a substitute for us as the Crucified Christ.
It’s not simply that we’re at once justified and sinful. It’s that we’re simultaneously justified and doubting. Unbelieving. On account of Christ, God justifies not only sinners. God justifies doubters. His faith not our own is what God credits to us. And our faith, our belief, such as it is, is made possible by him.
It’s his work not ours, and like a parent’s hand grasping a little child’s, our faith, such as it is, is enfolded within his perfect faith; so that, in him, enclosed within his faith, our faith is mediated to God the Father.
That’s what the New Testament means by calling Christ “the author and the finisher of our faith.” The faith we possess is the work of the Son within us not our own, but the faith by which the Father measures us is the Son’s not our own. So often preachers make the point of our passage today a kind of permission for us to have our doubts, that its okay we’re all like Doubting Thomas, that “doubt is a part of faith” goes the cliche. But John would not have you see here simply Gospel approval for your doubts. This is the freaking climax of the Jesus story where someone finally and fully and correctly calls upon Jesus as his Lord and his God.
“…but its okay to have your doubts too.”
What kind of crappy whimper of an ending is that?!
That’s not the takeaway John intends Thomas to leave with you. No. John wants you to see Jesus, the Risen Lord. The same God who created from nothing. The same God who called Israel— who had been no people— to be his People. The same God who, Paul says, calls into existence the things that do not exist. John wants you see the Risen Christ bringing into existence in Thomas, who had insisted unless I can touch his hands and feet for myself, a faith that can confess Christ as Lord and God.
Doubts are okay, sure. I’ve got plenty of doubts. I’ve got incurable cancer. I’ve buried more kids than I care to count. I read the same stories out of Ukraine as you. You think my pandemic experience was magically easier than mine? No.
I’ve got as many reasons to doubt as you do.
Sure, you’ve got doubts.
But if faith is a gift, then doubt is natural.
So as far as your doubts go— big deal.
Your doubts are not very interesting.
If faith is Christ’s work in us then doubt is just our natural human disposition, like Adam and Eve wondering in the Garden “Did God really say?”
Thomas’s doubt is not what John would have see.
What John would have us see:
Is that Thomas’s faith— It’s the work of the Risen Christ.
The Good News is NOT that you are saved by faith. Think about it: that puts all the onus on you. It makes faith just another work. Your work. It empties the cross of its saving significance and it makes his substitution in your place partial. Imperfect because its incomplete with out your faith. The Good News is NOT that you are saved by faith. The Good News is that you are saved by faith by grace.
By the gifting of God.
By the agency of God.
By the mediating activity of the Risen Christ.
Who is every bit as present to us now as those ten disciples hiding behind locked doors.
You are saved by faith through the gracious work of the Risen Christ, who can compel you- against your natural disposition to doubt- to call upon him as your Lord and your God. Such that whatever has brought you here Whatever of the Gospel you are able to trust and believe Whatever Word from the Lord you can hear in this sermon Whether your faith is as meager as a mustard seed Or as mighty as a mountainside Your faith is NOT YOUR doing. It is a miracle. Grace. An act of the Risen Christ. In you and upon you and through you. And it makes you— even you! It makes you exactly what Thomas insisted he required. It makes you proof that he is risen. He is risen indeed.
You.
You’re why John ends his Gospel the way he does. You’re the reason John doesn’t need to write down everything Jesus did among those disciples. Because Jesus is neither dead nor disappeared from this world. He’s alive and still doing work among his disciples. And for proof you need look no further than your own faith, your own ability to call him your Lord and your God.
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April 17, 2022
A Matter of Death and Life
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Easter Sunday
Colossians 2.20-3.3 & Mark 16.1-8
You have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God!
What in the ______!?
You did not wake up at an inconvenient hour, put on uncomfortable clothes, and spend approximately seventy-five dollars worth of gas money to drive down here to attend a funeral— that’s precisely why so many skip Good Friday. You came here this morning to hear the announcement that Jesus Christ, whom we crucified, has been raised. He is not here. You showed up today to hear that Jesus is alive not that you are dead. Sure, with all these flowers it certainly looks like a funeral, but didn’t Jesus come to rescue us from death rather than do death to us?
You have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God!
No wonder the women run from the empty tomb, terrified at the angel’s message, and tell no other soul a word. How else are they to react to the untimely news of their own demise?
You have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God!
O.M. Norlie was a Professor of Church History and a translator of the New Testament. Once, when he was about to preach a funeral sermon, as was his practice, he began by reading the deceased’s obituary in the local newspaper. So he read along to the very end of the clipping about how the deceased was survived by so many children, and “the funeral will be held tomorrow at 11:00 at First Church.” Befuddled, he stopped reading and looked up at the congregation and apologized. “No, no, I’m sorry, that’s today. We’re having the funeral now!”
And so it is with us this Easter. We’re having the funeral now. Look at the bright side. Many people spend much time and even more money wondering when their end will come and worrying how that end will come. We’ve organized the whole world around that particular fear. At least, you now know. According to the scriptures, your funeral is not tomorrow or next week or twenty years from now or even fifty years hence. No, it’s today. We’re having it now, for here stands the Word of God, “You have died!”
Talk about news still more shocking than an empty tomb. Try a church full of zombies. Evidently the dead can even live stream.
Christ is alive. You have died. What a terrible Easter surprise.No wonder the women flee from the empty tomb. And notice the headline to this unexpected news. It’s not, “You will die.” No, it’s already past tense, “You have died.”
As the formerly dead Jesus said three days ago, “It is accomplished.” “You have died.” It is finished. It’s past tense. It’s out of your hands. Indeed it was apparently never in your hands.
“You have died.” It’s past tense.
It’s already over and done. There’s nothing you can do now to undo it. And no— notice, the Word of God does not say today that you ought to die in some pious way. Who among us wouldn’t grab ahold of that as an alternative? Martin Luther said the Christian life is a daily dying to self— that sounds more appropriately spiritual. Unfortunately, this is not what the Word of God says.
You have died.
It’s not a religious project to undertake. It’s not a spiritual practice to adopt. It’s not a path of renunciation to embark upon. It’s an accomplished fact. And as it is with any death, there’s nothing to do now but announce it. So I have to tell you: You, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, have died.
But, come on!
Surely this is preposterous! The resurrection is one matter. I can make a straightforward, clear-eyed case that the crucified Jesus is alive. The fact is that I know Jesus is not dead because I’ve met him.
But what am I supposed to do with this correlative news that you have died?
None of you look as nice today as you would had an undertaker gotten a hold of you, but you do look your Easter best. I know appearances can be misleading, but you all appear to be among the living.
You have died.
And how on earth can we make this awkward news work with our annual habit of twisting the message of Easter into a harmless metaphor for springtime renewal? The Word that stands before us today does not say simply that God resurrected Jesus Christ from death. It says that God resurrected Jesus from death and that Christ’s new life is the death of you. The pattern is not death then life. The pattern is death then life then death.
You have died.
Maybe we can dismiss it, ignore it, bypass it. The Bible is very big book after all and this is but a single verse. Too bad for you that the apostle speaks much the same way to the churches at Corinth and Rome and Galatia and Ephesus. Ours is a death-denying culture so this is no easy news to break to you, but there’s no way around it, I’m afraid. It would be difficult to thumb through the New Testament at random and not come across your funeral announcement. As Martin Luther liked to say, “Here stands the Word of God.” And here it is. The stone cold reality goes beyond the fact that we’re all terminal cases. The Easter news is that you’ve already reached the terminus.
You have died.
The death done to you cannot be undone.
It’s the absolute finis.
And, you may have noticed, dead people don’t do much. Hardly anything— no— definitely not a thing. Therefore, your only obligation this Easter is auditory, which means there is nothing for me to do now but announce it.
You have died.
Paul says we all have the Law written on our hearts. That means we’re all hardwired to seek out prescriptions— steps we can take, spiritual exercises we can do, religion pills we can swallow— so that we can improve our condition, downgrading ourselves from critical to serious.
But I can’t help you with any of that. I’m a preacher. And contrary to what you may have been led to believe, preachers of the Gospel do not give out prescriptions. Preachers deliver news. Preachers tell the truth. And the truth is: It’s over.
You have died.
You’re through.
But what a pity to meet such a premature end— some of you just when you were reaching your earning potential. And to think— others of you, a good many of you I’d wager, maybe most of you, (let’s be honest, probably all of you) done in by death before you ever had the opportunity to make right that wrong you did, before you had the chance to pay back all the debts you still owed, before you took the time to do something, to do anything, to do enough good things for you to be reasonably sure that death will not have the last word for you.
You have died.
Death is behind you.
Some of us imagined Jesus came to save us from death but instead it turns out John the Baptist had it right all along. The axe did loom at the root of the tree. We’ve all been felled. Cut down. Not even our mask-wearing and social-distancing and vaccine-boosting could protect us.
You have died.
The deed has been done to you.
But how?
Did anyone see Jesus do death to us? Scripture does not seem to think there were any survivors; therefore, there are no witnesses. And Jesus doing us in? He seems an unlikely suspect. We’re supposed to believe the Prince of Peace of all people would do death on a mass scale?
When I was a student at Princeton, I took a course on the parables taught by Dr. Donald Juel, a tall, terribly thin professor with a Minnesota accent and an even more unfortunate resemblance to the actor who played Barney Fife. One afternoon in one of the first classes, Dr. Juel read the Parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Luke. A spoiled youngest son wishes his father dead and guilts the old man into cashing out half of his 401K and giving it to the punk who promptly burns through it on an online sports book and other activities on which I cannot elaborate in a worship service.
But you know the story.
The prodigal kid runs out of booze and blow and, while he’s waiting for a bed at the homeless shelter, reasons that he could always try his hand at manual labor back on the family farm. No sooner does the old man recognize the boy’s gait walking on the horizon than he runs like a fool to his son, tears streaming down his cheeks, and throws him arms around the loser before the kid could even get a worthwhile apology out of his mouth. Before you know it, the kid— who’s learned no actual lesson, mind you— is wearing the father’s robe and ring, a DJ has already been dispatched to the house, and somewhere a fatted calf is cursing the prodigal’s name. When the boy’s older brother comes back from work and hears all the happy chatting and china clinking, he’s outraged.
His father pleads with him.
The elder brother will have none of it.
He seethes with righteous anger, “All these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” The story ends with the elder brother, arms-crossed, outside, refusing to be a party to the party.
Dr. Juel had been reading the story in a flat, matter-of-fact way. He had no affect on his face or haste about his manner. When he got to the end of the parable, he closed his little leather Bible and paused for what felt like minutes. And then he bounced on knees like he was about to take off into the air, he gazed at us, wide-eyed, like he was about to say the most important thing of his life, and at the top of his lungs he hollered at us:
“HE’S RIGHT!
THE ELDER BROTHER— HE’S RIGHT!
HE’S ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! EVERY WORD, HE’S RIGHT!”
And then he smoothed the part in his hair that had come undone and in almost a whisper he said, “It would kill that boy to go into his brother’s party. Absolutely kill him. Everything he believes about God, everything about how he sees the world, everything about how he understands himself— there would be nothing left of that boy if he went into his brother’s party.” And then Dr. Juel paused again and smiled and said in a still, smaller voice, “Make no mistake, if we had to attend such a party, it would be the death of us too.”
That’s how he does it.
That’s how God does all of us in by vindicating Jesus from the grave.
A few years ago I preached from the Gospel of John, the story of the woman caught in adultery. You know the story, how Jesus practically begs the Pharisees to stone him when he says to the sinful woman, “Neither do I condemn you.”
“I just do what I see the Father doing,” Jesus says.
After the service, I was standing stood in the narthex when a man a bit older than me took my hand to shake it but then he didn’t let go. He wore a blue blazer and faded jeans and the red stood out on his otherwise fair cheeks. His eyes were wet and righteously angry.
“I’m the husband of a woman caught in adultery. I’m the husband of the woman in that story. Where’s my sermon? Do you have any idea how angry your sermon makes me? After everything I put up with— the humiliation, the shame, the learning that what I thought was my life was actually a facade, a fantasy! And then I come here looking for a little hope and peace and you’ve got the nerve (he didn’t say nerve) to tell me that God is gracious?! To her?!”
He looked outraged, like he was ready to murder me. No— no, he looked like I’d just done him in.
Contrary to popular misperceptions, Jesus did not die in order for God to forgive you of your sins.
Anyone who believes Jesus needed to die in order for God to be merciful has not read the scriptures.The cross is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the cross is what God in Christ endures even as he forgives.
Right from the start, in word and deed— in the very company he kept, tax collectors and prostitutes and invading army officers— Jesus showed up on the scene proclaiming the forgiveness and mercy of the Father.
Jesus did not die in order for the Father to forgive you.
Jesus died because he insisted the Father forgives you.
All your sins, even that one.
The idea of God’s unconditional grace and absolute mercy and zero strings-attached-forgiveness is one thing, but when God actually does it? When God did his grace and mercy and forgiveness to us in Jesus Christ we could not stand for it.
I mean—
What about the adulteress’s husband? What if the prodigal leeches still more money from his father and returns to the far country. He can’t come back home again, can he, to a father’s welcome and a fatted calf celebration? It’s one thing for us to talk about Jesus befriending a tax collector like Matthew, a collaborator with the Roman military invasion. It’s another thing to push that grace two thousand years into the present and think of Jesus partying with a participant in the Russian military invasion.
Put Matthew in Mariupol and see how well you think this Jesus guy speaks for God the Father.“You’re wrong, Jesus,” we said as we hammered into a tree. “You don’t speak for the Father, Jesus. You’ve got God all wrong. Of course, God shows partiality between people— that’s the whole point of the commandments. You don’t understand the world, Jesus. Your message is irresponsible, Jesus. When it comes to sinners like Matthew, Jesus, your message is immoral even. There’s got to be a limit. There’s got to be lines. There’s got to be exceptions and conditions. We’ve got to make distinctions, between good and bad, saint and sinner, righteous and unrighteous, forgivable and not. Otherwise, the world could not survive,” we insisted, between noon and three on a Friday afternoon.
Jesus did not die in order for God to forgive you.
Jesus came into the world declaring that God forgives you. Full stop.
And we were so absolutely certain he was wrong that we put a stop to him.
We nailed him to a tree and shut him up in a tomb.
But on the third day…
God gives him back.
Never forget—If God wanted, God could resurrect someone from the dead today.Or tomorrow.In Jerusalem or right outside in our cemetery.Never forget—The resurrection of Jesus is the resurrection of Jesus, the one who came among us preaching the grace and pardon of God.And we were so wrong about everything we think and believe, about ourselves and the world and God; we were so ultimately incorrect that we crucified him.
How does God respond to his message?
God plucks him up from the grave where we put him.
The empty tomb is Exhibit A, evidence of how wrong we got God, so wrong— so absolutely, utterly, nullifyingly wrong— that there is no language to express it other than the language of death.
You have died.
Scripture says the Old Adam, the Old Humanity, meets its end in the empty tomb of the Crucified Christ. All the convictions and certitudes, all the morals and laws, all the righteousness and piety, all the worldly wisdom and political savvy that led us to put him there— in the end, they all added up to nothing more than the murder of our Maker. Therefore, there’s nothing left of them.
You have died.
I was standing in the narthex staring at the fury on the face of the man who had introduced himself to me as the husband of the woman caught in adultery. Normally, I’ve got my go-to responses for people who complain about my sermons. But with Dan— his name is Dan— I did an odd thing.
I apologized.
“I’m sorry.”
He dropped my hand from his grip like it was garbage and he straightened his entire posture.
“Sorry? What in the hell are you sorry for? I said it made me angry. I didn’t say I don’t accept it. Don’t apologize. Why would you apologize— it’s all true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s true,” I said.
Which is to say, the tomb is empty.
The vacancy in Jesus’s grave is the vindication of Jesus’s message.He was right about God all along. His Heavenly Father is like that prodigal’s father. Admit it, that just kills you. It kills us because even if we’ve spent time of our own in the far country, when it comes to how the world should run and how our standing before God should work, we are all elder brothers who want a father who operates according to ought and should, a father who doesn’t toss the ledger book into the fire for the fatted calf.
It kills us.
Indeed, it has killed us.
You have died.
I realize the Word of God today says you’re dead, and I know dead people don’t do a thing, but just imagine for a moment.
Imagine living your life believing that our Father is like that prodigal’s father, who never stops looking down the driveway and is always ready to say “I don’t care what the rotten kid did. He’s here. We’ve no choice but to party.”
Imagine putting your whole trust in the message that God never gives us what we deserve and always gives us more than we deserve, that God forgives even when you know exactly what you’re doing.
Imagine grabbing hold for dear life onto the the promise that there is nothing you can do to make God love you less and there is nothing you can do to make God love you more.
Imagine betting your entire life on the news that you are more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe, yet more accepted and loved than you ever dared hope.
Imagine living your life confident that no matter what you do or leave undone the Lord will never leave you or forsake you.
Imagine silencing all the accusing voices in your head, imagine putting down all the ways you try to justify yourself, prove your enoughness— imagine being able to rest in the word that you are just for Jesus’s sake.
If you could trust that good news— grab ahold of it like you do bread or wine— if you could live your life taking Jesus at his word, then it would be a miracle.
It would be like getting born all over again.
No small feat for a stiff.
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April 15, 2022
Good Friday: Retroactive Grace
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The First Word — Retroactive Grace
Richard Price’s acclaimed crime novel Freedomland is based loosely on the disquieting and heartbreaking story of Susan Smith, who falsely claimed that her two children had been abducted by a black carjacker. In truth, Smith drove to the edge of a lake, put the car in neutral, and exited as the car rolled into the water with her young boys strapped into the backseat. The main character in Freedomland is a black police detective, Lorenzo. He is assigned to the case of a young woman, Brenda. Lorenzo is suspicious of the story but has no proof. He befriends Brenda and spends countless hours with her visiting the site, canvassing the neighborhood, and just chatting with the guilty woman. As the story unfolds, we discover that this likable detective is a recovering alcoholic, and one of his sons is doing time in prison. Lorenzo’s other son, a good citizen and schoolteacher, won’t have anything to do with him. So we can see that Lorenzo is talking about himself as well as Brenda when he says, “Let me tell you something…With kids? No matter what you did, how badly you messed up, God will find some way of letting you get up to bat again. You see, Brenda, God’s grace? It’s, like, retroactive.”
God’s grace— it’s like, retroactive.
That is, it reaches backwards in time.
In two days time, fresh from his new hewn grave, the resurrected but incognito Jesus will make a similar point to two Passover pilgrims on the road to Emmaus. As Cleopas and his unnamed companion journey beyond Jerusalem they gossip about how the Kingdom campaign of the mighty prophet from Galilee ended in murder— an accursed, godforsaken murder.
Or so they believed.
Jesus responds to their shock at the news of an empty tomb guarded by angels by preaching. The Risen Christ cracks open Cleopas’s Bible and goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis. “All of scripture is about me,” Jesus informs them, “I’m, like, retroactive.” And ever since the first Easter afternoon, the Church calls Mary’s boy the Second Adam. We identify Christ as the ram in the bush that stills the blade in Abraham’s hand, the Father’s only Son not spared. He’s, like retroactive. His body is the ark that bears us through the wrath and judgment God promised never to exact on anyone else again. His cross closes Jacob’s ladder; on it, God comes down the up staircase.
“All of scripture augurs about me,” Jesus reveals to us on the road to Emmaus, “They’re all Christophanies.” The prophetic portents might seem inescapably obvious to us now. Of course, Jesus is the Father’s favored son whose brothers leave him for dead only to meet their own end in his absolving word. But the point Jesus makes on the road from Jerusalem— a road, mind you, whose entire distance was dotted with crucifixes and carcasses picked at by carrion— is a lesson we could not possibly have grasped until after God had contradicted every last one of us by raising Jesus from the dead. To see Christ in all the scriptures we need to look through an empty tomb. Without resurrection, there is no more reason to look for Jesus in Genesis than there was to find God in Jesus. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” John’s Gospel tells us.
Not in him it wasn’t, we reply with a tree.
In the Garden, as soon as Adam and Eve sin, they discover their nakedness and respond by running to hide from God. On Golgotha, suffering the sins we sin against him, God is nailed to a cross, naked before us yet still hidden from us. We call the first Adam’s sin original, but, truthfully, it’s only by what we do to Jesus that we begin to understand what it means for us to be in Adam. It’s only by what we do to God in Jesus that we learn what we mean by the term original sin.
No one saw God in Jesus. Even Mary, who had born God in her womb, did not see God in her boy. She thought he was crazy. Prior to Easter, no one had discovered Christ in Genesis because no one saw God in Jesus. When Caiaphas, the chief priest, hears the handcuffed Jesus identify himself as the Christ, the Son of Man, he tears his own robes in outrage and sorrow and shouts, “Blasphemy!” It’s no phony gesture. Caiaphas and King Herod, Peter and Judas— each of them has their own reasons, but every one of us insisted that Jesus had nothing whatsoever to do with the true and living God. Jesus offended our moral sensibilities. Jesus confuted our religious convictions. He absolutely negated our image of the Almighty.
This is why we murder him and then, after the fact— retroactively, we look to pin the blame on someone other than ourselves. Christ died so a payment could be made, we offer as our favorite alibi. We didn’t kill him. He sacrificed himself. He dies not by our hand but by divine necessity. He’s tortured and mocked and spit upon and asphyxiated. His head is crowned with thorns. His hands and feet are pierced with hammer and nails. His side is speared. His legs are broken. He’s crucified, we say; so that, God can forgive us.
But like Detective Lorenzo, it shouldn’t take us long before we grow suspicious of this alibi. It’s all right there in the evidence. Jesus doesn’t meet this end so that God can forgive us. Jesus comes to us preaching the pardon of God. His first word from the cross is the same tired old sermon he’s been preaching from the very beginning, “I forgive you, for you know not what you do.” Who the hell are you to forgive sins, Jesus? Only God can forgive sins. And her sins? Do you know what she did to her kids? God would never forgive…
Jesus is the one in whom God did God to us. He did God’s mercy and forgiveness to us. He bore relentless witness to it. He offered it gratuitously to people who did not deserve it. We want no such God; therefore, Jesus had to die.
And not just die, we thought, his reckless message had to be hammered into oblivion. The explanation for the death of the incarnate God by the most ungodly of means is simple. The explanation is not eternal but it is every bit as mysterious. The reason for the death of Jesus is that, in him, God came preaching the unconditional forgiveness of sins for sinners who do not deserve it, and we killed him for it. He bears our sins in his body— actually.
Medieval paintings always depict Adam leaving the Garden of Eden, naked and in tears, but that’s not what happens in the story. No sooner has Adam failed to trust God’s word, usurped God’s role for himself, and hidden from God and God clothes Adam in animal skins. Like bread and wine, like an empty tomb, God gives Adam a tangible, visible sign of the forgiveness of sins. In other words, it’s not simply that Christ is the Second Adam. By receiving the pardon of God, Adam is the first Christian. It works the other way too. Whatever is in your past, his word of forgiveness from the cross can reach backwards in time. God’s grace— it’s, like, retroactive. God’s grace— it’s, like, retroactive.
The Second Word — Slain from the Foundation of the World
Last week, looking at the godawful images from Bachu of children piled upon the corpses of other children and the bodies of civilians with their hands tied behind them and their heads shot through, I thought of Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men. It’s an account of a police battalion of German men— middle-class, church-going, educated, ordinary men. They could be you or me. Almost none of those who comprised Police Battalion 101 had previous military experience. Once dispatched on a “Jew hunt” to Poland in 1942, however, with shocking and galling rapidity, they devolved into an efficient, evil machine. The battalion consisted of fewer than five hundred men, yet they packaged nearly fifty thousand Jews onto cattle cars bound for the death camp in Treblinka. Those they did not load onto trains they shot at point blank range— almost forty thousand, including children and babies— as they roamed from village to village, farm to farm, tree to tree, in order to render the Polish district “Jew free.”
In his review of the book, the conservative columnist George Will quotes the philosopher Eric Vogelin: “The simple man …is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order, but he then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere and the society is no longer holding together.” George Will then concludes: “Why [did the ordinary men of Police Battalion 101] murder their neighbors? Because it was permitted. Because they could.”
Because—
Our civilization is not nearly as good and well-ordered as those of us well-served by it kid ourselves.
In 2011, Steven Pinker, a psychologist at MIT, wrote a bestselling book in which he argued that civilization has made great strides. We’ve evolved, Pinker argued, to build not only better societies but to produce less violent, more virtuous human beings. We’re different than those ordinary men in Police Battalion 101. To such assertions about the better angels of our nature, the Church points in the present day to places like Bachu and Mariupol and backwards in time to Cain, the first child of Adam, whose name means humanity. According to the Bible, the “foundation of the world” is not when God spoke the stars into the sky or worded the beasts of the field into existence. The founding of the world is the beginning of human civilization. And in scripture, Cain is more than the first murderer. He’s the world’s first urban planner. The first city is built on top of the blood of Abel. The stone that the builder rejected became the cornerstone.
For the foundation of the world.
And for the preservation of that world, in the name of law and order, to keep the pax in the Romana, we litter the ground around Golgotha with the blood of another brother, who, with his second taut, suffocated word, manages to utter the promise of paradise to the two thieves bleeding beside him.
“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Luke admits that one of the thieves, the first bold enough to speak, does not have the promise of paradise at the top of his list of wishes. The thief thinks the crowd’s taunts and jeers are the more attractive option. If you are what the sign above your crown of thorns says you are, then why don’t you hop down off your cross and get us off of ours too. “Thieves” is likely a euphemism chosen by translators in the service of a simpler tale. Like Barabbas, the insurrectionist spared by the crowd instead of Jesus, the two thieves are zealots. They’re revolutionaries or terrorists, depending on your perspective.
And the man in the middle is Jesus.
Never forget—
Jesus could have been stoned to death. The Jewish leaders had the authority to stone transgressors of the Law. They’d already attempted twice during the course of Jesus’s ministry to stone him to death. Stoning is what they do to Stephen after Pentecost. If Jesus died for religious reasons, to satisfy God’s wrath or pay the wages of sin, then Jesus’s thorn-crowned head would’ve been crushed with rocks rather than his chest stretched across a tree. The question to ask on Good Friday is not “Why did Jesus die?” The question for every Christian always to ponder is “Why was Jesus crucified?”
Crucifixion was a punishment reserved for insurrectionists, revolutionaries, and political agitators. Jesus dies a manner of death designed to keep the status of the city of Cain quo. To those at the top of civilization, Christ’s Kingdom is a threat to quell with a cross. To those at the bottom of civilization, Barabbas appears the better option. To those of us somewhere in the soft middle of civilization, in the end, we have no more use for him than the “thief” has for his promise of Paradise.
He dies alone.
Just six days ago, the followers of Jesus had hurled songs of enthronement upon him. “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” they’d shouted, “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” When the Pharisees bristled at the acclaim and demanded he rebuke his disciples, Jesus replied, “If they shut up, the stones themselves would cry out.” But he was wrong. Even his followers are silent now. They’ve all vanished. He’s the lone voice crying out, not in glory but in defeat and despair.
His dies with his Kingdom teaching handed down to no one. Scholars and skeptics like to distinguish between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith, but just look around Calvary. The historical Jesus has no disciples. His Kingdom teaching is passed down to no one precisely because Jesus refused the fundamental building block of every kingdom going all the way back to the city of Nod, East of Eden. Jesus refuses to kill his brother in the name of constructing a better world. Jesus our Brother, though he’s strong, he’s good. For him, the end will never justify violent means so, in the end, we have no use for him. Our cities, marked by mourning and crying and pain, may be less spectacular than his Kingdom, but in the cities of Cain at least some of us get to play God.
John calls Jesus the logos— the logic, the blueprints— of the universe. Paul calls Jesus the eikon— the archetype— of creation. We call him useless. We reject him. We don’t stone him. We crucify him.
Yet!
Nevertheless!
This stone we spit upon and shame, mock and torture and nail to a tree in a garbage dump called Golgotha, this brother we murder for the sake of the city, God reclaims him from the blood-soaked earth and makes him the cornerstone of a New Jerusalem, a City of God whose welcome is so wide we’d kill him all over again just shut its gates, for it is a Kingdom that, like him, ignores the fundamental distinctions the righteous and sinners, between good and bad, victims and victimizers, the hunted and the hunters. The stone we reject God makes the cornerstone for a City whose gates swing wide by grace, which means it’s doors are always open to every ordinary man and every Russian soldier and all of us who ignore what our own chosen leaders do for the sake of keeping the pax in our own Romana.
It’s outrageous. It’s offensive. It’s shocking that God takes the Jesus for whom we have no use and use him to build a City open to the very worst sinners, open not just to the Abels but to the Cains. Shocking but not surprising. It’s, like, retroactive. If you go back to the Book of Genesis, before the first murderer founds the world, God marks Cain. To protect Abel’s brother. Cain lives in the city of Nod bearing on his body a mercy he does not deserve. For all of us who make our lives east of Eden, this is good news.
The Third Word — Ghastly to Behold
On the Monday before Palm Sunday, at the United Nations Security Council meeting, representatives from the Ukrainian Security Service presented text messages they’d captured from the smartphones of Russian soldiers killed in action. In one thread, a soldier had written to his mother, describing how Putin’s invading army is “hitting everyone, even civilians.” The soldier continues, informing his mother that he is no longer in Crimea doing training exercises, as she’d been told. When his mother responded in the thread by asking if she can send her boy a package, he replied, “Mother, the only thing I want now is to hang myself...this is real war, mom. I’m scared, we’re hitting everyone, even civilians. We had been told that people would welcome us here but they jump under our vehicles, not letting us pass. They call us fascists. Mom, it’s so hard.”
Adam in the Garden shows us that the fundamental nature of sin is a failure to trust God’s words, “Did God say you will die if you eat of the fruit? Not only will you not die, you will become like God.” If sin is refusing to take God at his word, then surely we repeat that sin by insisting that Jesus really means something more noble and serene— something less than human— when he cries out to his mother from his cross, “Woman, behold your son.” Why do we suppose that utterance is anything but awful for both of them?
In a New Yorker article entitled “The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris probes the atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq. “Of course,” he writes, “the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death — or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold.”
“Woman, behold your son.”
The essay continues, “Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?”
I think not— certainly not his mother.
“He must have been ghastly to behold.”
Errol Morris writes better than Jesus can manage to compose from his cross. He saves the most important verb for the end of his sentence, “He must have been ghastly to behold.” In Hebrew and in Greek the word “Behold!” means far more than simply “See!” or “Look!” You don’t have to speak antiquated English to recognize that the word “behold” means something special. In both Testaments, the word translated “behold” conveys a sense of extraordinary disclosure, a pulling back of the curtain. In other words, something is being revealed to the beholder on Golgotha. What exactly? What does Jesus think is being revealed to his mother? An act of his Heavenly Father? A payment for sin? An appeasement of divine wrath? The solving of some eternal equation that equals atonement? 1 cross + 3 nails = 4giveness?
Perhaps we can skirt any squeamishness we might feel over the idea of a loving God meting out such a ghastly punishment on anyone— perhaps we can skirt that unpleasant thought by reminding ourselves that the crucified one is also the incarnate one, the pre-existent Son, true God from true God, as much God as the Father and the Spirit. The crucifixion, at least of the man in the middle, is the willing, cooperative work of the three-personn’d God. There, you see, we can let the doctrine of the Trinity settle our stomachs and quiet our consciences.
Except—
The Father’s eternal Son is also Mary’s quite real and very human boy.
Surely Mary loves Jesus as much as that Russian mother loves her son. It’s one thing to say that the one on whom God metes out such a ghastly punishment is also God, but it’s another matter altogether to say that God would apportion such a horror upon Mary. You need not be a parent to know that to see her child suffer so would be as great a suffering. Is God’s wrath towards the wickedness of men so great that he would torture this woman?
No.
God’s decision is retroactive.
If Mary could sing Hannah’s song from memory, then she certainly knew the story from the Book of Genesis. After the flood, after Noah offers a sacrifice and the aroma is pleasing to the Lord, God sets in the clouds a rainbow. Literally, God hangs up his anger. He retires his wrath. He locks his guns in the cabinet and throws away the key. The rainbow is a sign, God declares, of God’s promise never again to destroy his creatures because of their sins. He would never again flood the earth out of his wrath nor would he flood Mary’s heart with sorrow.
So, back to that word: “Woman, behold your son!”
What’s the extraordinary disclosure that warrants a word like “behold.” What’s being revealed on Calvary in the son of Mary? We are. The cross is pulling the curtain back on us. Woman, look what they’ve done to your son! See what they’ve done to God. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Mary in order to forgive; the cross is what God in Christ endures even as he forgives! The death of Jesus Christ discloses not the work of God but the nature of his creatures. We are, like that Russian mother’s son, capable of unspeakable acts— Abu Ghraib, even silencing the Word made flesh.
That’s why twenty centuries of believers have hung the cross over our altars and in our homes. As if to say, Behold! Discover! See— don’t forget— the ghastly truth! The God who hung the rainbow in the sky is a God who wills only to be gracious to us, and we will his murder. As the Confession in the Book of Common Prayer once put it, “There is no health in us.”
Behold!
Peer behind the curtain on Calvary.
The only person who can heal whatever evil afflicts us we will leave dead, forsaken and shut up in a tomb, another civilian casualty killed by an authoritarian’s cruel tool.
The boy of yet another mother.
Our only hope is that God wonʼt leave him there.
The Fourth Word — The Binding of Jesus
Every year at Passover, to intimidate any pilgrims with insurrectionist aspirations, Pontius Pilate would travel with his Roman triumph from his seaside home at Caesarea Maritima into Jerusalem. There Pilate would spend the week in the palace of Caiphas, whose title was Chief Priest but whose role was more like Mayor. So it’s not surprising that Caiphas’s spacious palace came equipped with a prison in the dungeon.
In the dark hours after Passover, Caiphas’s municipal guard bring the bound and bleeding Jesus from Gethsemane on the Mt of Olives to the jail cell in Caiphas’s basement. I visited it last month. The guardroom contains wall fixtures to attach prisoners’s chains. There are holes in the stone pillars to fasten a prisoner’s hands and feet when he was flogged. Bowls carved in the floor to hold salt and vinegar in order to aggravate the pain of the prisoner’s the wounds. The prison cell itself is a pit carved out of bedrock, about twenty-five feet deep. The only access to the bottle-necked cell is through a shaft cut in the bedrock above. Having been beaten and flogged, on the morning of Good Friday Jesus was bound and then lowered through the hole in the rock by means of a rope harness. Once down there, there is no way out. There is no hope. There is no one. Just outside the palace is where Peter stands by a charcoal fire and says, “Jesus? Jesus of Nazareth, you say? Never heard of him.” For all Peter knew, Jesus may as well have been dead already, hidden like diamond deep in the dirt.
Jesus prays Psalm 22 from the cross.
It’s hard not to wonder if he prayed Psalm 88 in the dark stone hole of Caiphas’s basement,
“O lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength: Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.”
If not earlier, there in the pit, that’s surely where Jesus began to cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
In Mark’s Gospel, the fourth word from the cross is Christ’s only word from the cross. As if, in the end, all that Jesus has to say from the cross is all we can say about the crucified Jesus. He’s been forsaken. No angel of the Lord will appear to stay the blade in hand. This time the Father will not spare his only beloved Son.
Only—
As often as the Church has looked backwards in time and drawn analogies between the Virgin Mary’s child and the elderly Sarah’s unlikely son Isaac, the parallel is one that requires similitude between Father Abraham and the Almighty Father. But Father Abraham does not resemble the one of whom Jesus said, “Thus, says the Lord: I desire mercy not sacrifice.” Father Abraham resembles not our Heavenly Father; Father Abraham resembles us. Isn’t that what we teach our children to sing, “Father Abraham had seven sons and seven sons had Father Abraham?” We’re the children of Abraham; he is us. We’re the ones who think God desires sacrifice instead of mercy. We’re the ones with so many false images of God that God must take flesh and dwell among us. We’re the ones who will not spare even the Father’s only beloved Son.
Abraham is us.
Why wouldn’t Abraham be us— Caiphas surely is us. So too Herod and Pilate and Peter who denies him and Judas who betrays him.
Abraham is us.
And today, a short walk from Mt. Moriah, where Abraham took his son Isaac to murder him to honor the Lord, we push our Lord up a hill called Golgotha, carrying not a blade and wood for a fire but a cross and a hammer and nails.
Golgotha is Mt. Moriah without the ram in the bush or the angel to the rescue. Calvary is where the children of Abraham provide the innocent lamb for slaughter, another Father’s Son. Good Friday is Abraham going through with it.
My God, my God, why do we forsake him?
Why do we cast him into the pit and then crush him on a cross?
The misguided madness that nearly leads Abraham to murder his child is an affliction that yet ails us.
Here’s a better analogy. It’s, like, retroactive:
Imagine that Abraham went through with the deed on Mt. Moriah. Imagine he did it. Imagine Abraham closing his eyes and raising his arm and plunging the knife. Imagine Isaac’s scream and the silence that would follow it, save for the bleating of a lost and forgotten ram amid the bushes. Imagine Abraham making his three day trek back down the mountain path to Isaac’s mother. And imagine a stranger approaching Abraham’s campfire that first night and, in the comfort of the darkness, Abraham confesses to this stranger his story about what he had believed god required, how it led him to violence and murder, how in his grief he knew now that heaven wept with him, how he had been blind and deaf, his faith had been unfaith, how as he plunged the knife he realized he had mistaken the gods for the true God. Imagine Abraham spilling out his shame, and then realizing he’d not even asked for the stranger’s name.
“Tell me your name,” Abraham asks. And the stranger lifts up his bowed head and pulls back his hood and replies, “Isaac.”
And then imagine Isaac showing Abraham his hands and his side.
The Fifth Word — Stairway from Heaven
Before Elon Musk was leading an army of amateur Game Stop investors or driving up the share price of Twitter, Ted Turner’s off-color, rail-grabbing rants about religion made the cable news CEO a household name. One Ash Wednesday in Atlanta, Ted Turner referred to his CNN employees who came to work that day with a soot-colored cross on their foreheads as Jesus Freaks. “Why the @#$% are they working here?” he asked a corporate vice-president, “They should be working at FOX.” Despite his many marriages and mistresses, Ted Turner blamed the unraveling of his relationship with Jane Fonda on the actress’s conversion to Christianity. Famously, he chided his fellow Georgian, Jimmy Carter, that “Christianity is a religion for losers.” Like a stopped clock, Turner was right. It is. Christianity is a religion for losers. Which is to say, Christ— Jesus— is a loser.
How else do you describe him as he is today, nothing but “a suspended carcass, dripping with his own blood and other people’s spit.” Despite all the titles the texts confidently ascribe to him after the fact (King, Son of Man, Logos), today he’s naked and shamed and forsaken and parched. As he dies, the lips of the Word are dry. Between noon and three, the firstborn of creation, the eternal Son whose inheritance is literally everything, hangs hammered into the most shameful of deaths. Turns out, “the first will be last” was a kind prophetic lament about his own particular, pathetic end. No CEO of any Fortune 500 company would choose this path. And all of Jesus’s initial investors have pulled out. His Kingdom movement, which began with the waving of palm fronds in the street and the cracking of a whip at the Temple, ends with no buying. There’s no filter available on Instagram to put a lie to this picture. Ted Turner was right. He’s a loser.
“I’m thirsty,” he begs on a spot along the road called the “Skull.” Rome pins him up along a highway as a cautionary tale— the true purpose of Caesar’s grisly practice: “Watch out or you’ll end up like this loser.” Tradition tells us, triumphantly, that Jesus’s fifth word from the cross fulfills the psalms. Regardless, his dying thirst is no less human. Nor is he the only one to leave this life with such a banal muttering, “God, I’m so thirsty.” I’ve been at the bedsides. I know— nearly all the dying feel like losers for coming up short on the meaningful last words they’d always imagined speaking to their loved ones. The primary reason we fear and deny death is because life almost always ends in all too human a fashion; death is rarely experienced as the sort of holy moment that meets Isaac’s son in the Book of Genesis.
On the run from the brother whose inheritance he’s stolen, Jacob stops for the night on his way out of Beersheba. He rests his head against a smooth stone and falls into a dream. “Behold,” Genesis reports, “there was a ladder set up on the earth, and top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, ‘I am the Lord your God.” When Jacob wakes from the dream, he’s afraid. He takes the stone on which he’d slept and erects an altar with it and anoints it with oil. To mark the spot. As if to warn others, “Watch out!” Why would he not? You wouldn’t want to stumble across such a place unawares. It’s not difficult to misinterpret a dream. Jacob wakes up, afraid, because he thinks the God at the end of the ladder is Almighty and Powerful, Jealous and and Fearsome— a Winner, a God for winners.
Esau’s lying, grifting brother is nothing but a loser so he marks the spot to steer clear of it next time. But ever since Jacob named that place Bethel, just the second generation of humanity, we have told ourselves that the journey of faith is a climb up that ladder, working our way up to God one rung of spiritual achievement, religious ascent, and moral advancement at a time. In the middle ages Jacob’s Ladder was popular, especially among mystics, as a symbol of the struggle the Christian must undertake to achieve sanctification. Led Zeppelin didn’t invent the idea of a stairway to heaven; they inherited it. The Jesus at the top of the medieval mystics’s ladder is no different from the Jesus whose cross the crusaders painted on shields and mail. It’s the same Jesus we drape in the red, white, and blue. It’s the same Jesus athletes credit with home runs and touchdowns. It’s the Jesus who endorses our candidate or backs our cause. “Stand for the flag. Kneel for Jesus,” a Jeep’s spare tire cover exhorted me yesterday in traffic.
The Jesus at the top of Jacob’s Ladder is a Winner.
Jesus the Vicarious Substitute who pays our debt of sin.
Jesus the Great Moral Teacher who gives us the greatest example of love.
Jesus the Victor who defeats the Devil.
These are all ways we take this parched and naked loser and try to turn him into a winner. Again and again, we misinterpret the dream. He’s come into this world where we are all bent on winning at all costs, where we all go the way of the First Adam, heeding the tempter’s voice to become like god and fighting and scratching our way to climb to the top, no matter whom we hurt, what line we cross, or how many convictions we compromise. He stubbornly, steadfastly refuses to go the way of the First Adam, to be like God. He’s determined to be human, truly human, and he has stuck with it until the end. He’s been obedient to it, even to the point of death— even death on a cross— as though he aims for his death to be the death of all those who would storm heaven one rung at a time.
The lips that are now dry and thirsty will soon turn a blueish gray. The chest that constricts against the cross will move no more. And while every other winner and would-be prepares to practice their Passover piety, Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and, like Jacob at Bethel, marks the spot with a stone.
At the very beginning of his ministry, when Nathanael wondered aloud “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Jesus had promised that those who followed him to the end would, in the end, see the God of Jacob’s ladder. But he didn’t specify which end of the ladder. Up in glory? Or down in the muck and mire, below even the bottom rung, like the prodigal son yet to come to his senses? We should’ve suspected the answer earlier, back when he upended everything by drinking with prostitutes and partying with tax collectors and forgiving everyone’s sins without their expending the slightest effort or earning an ounce of it.
Now, as his nightmare nears its end, we know the answer. Or rather, we can see his wager. Only by looking back on today— like, retroactively— will we know if the loser wins.
The Sixth Word — It’s Done
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men opens with theologizing by Sheriff Tom Bell, a character portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in the Coen Brothers’s film of the novel, “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” No Country for Old Men reads like a chase story but it’s really an eschatological allegory; that is, it’s about a creation that has been turned upside down, where truth is lost and life is worthless. Reading the horrific stories in the newspaper and seeing the senseless violence on his police beat, Sheriff Bell— the old man of the story’s title— no longer recognizes the country in which he was raised.
The fact frightens him.
The Oscar-wining screenplay omits the scene which closes the novel— and makes it intelligible. Sheriff Bell is at the supper table with his wife and observes, “ she told me she’d been readin St. John. The Revelations. Any time I get to talkin about how things are she’ll find somethin in the bible so I asked her if Revelations had anything to say about the shape things was takin and she said she’d let me know.” But before she comes back to him, Sheriff Bell reasons his way from the depraved, hopeless condition of humanity to his own biblical judgment. He says, ““I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train.”
Sheriff Bell’s wife need not turn to the end of the Bible to address her husband’s question. Just as easily, she could consult the first book of the Bible, chapter thirty-four. Jacob has reconciled with the brother he cheated and now he and his family are living in Canaan. In another world, Jacob’s story would end there, happily ever after. But in this world that’s gone mad since the times of Genesis, Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, goes out “to visit the women of the land.” What follows next happens in a single verse but surely is suffered over a lifetime and has been the story of the world ever thus. Shechem, the prince of the land, saw Dinah and…Well, let’s agree that the phrase translated into English as “seized her and lay with her” is far worse than a euphemism. Jacob and his sons react with the patient, slow boil revenge of an rated R thriller.
It’s done, Jacob says to Dinah’s mother when he returns home.
Jacob and his two sons— they do away with Shechem and his gang.
But they cannot undo what was done to Dinah.
It was already accomplished.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus gets up from his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane and makes his way to Calvary almost like a fighter emerging from the locker room and climbing into the ring. Jesus in John’s Gospel appears nonplussed, unbothered by his fate, already victorious. If his dying is the supreme example of how to die then today this new Moses hands down from on high his most strenuous law of all. Even the Latin, the language in which the liturgy often renders Christ’s sixth word, has the ring of triumph to it, “Consummatum est.” Nonetheless, it’s also true that, like a hit man in a gangster movie who calls the boss after his dirty deed is done, this is the same word the centurion carries back from Golgotha to Pontius Pilate, “It’s finished.”
Many modern theologians interpret the crucifixion in terms of identification. The death of Jesus Christ upon the cross is a death he dies in solidarity with all the innocent victims of injustice and brutality, from Dinah to Bucha. In his suffering, other victims of the wickedness of the world can know their pain is a pain born by God. The cross is a sacrament that signals to the world’s sufferers that, like Bill Clinton, God feels your pain. But a God whose only power is empathy and whose only promise is solidarity is a God of cold comfort not good news. Take Dinah, for example, or, for that matter, the mother of Jesus. I’m sure that rather than a God who feels their pain, they’d prefer a God who promised to rectify the world, a God who possessed the power to consummate that promise. Moreover, those who interpret the cross in terms of identification forget (or ignore) the embarrassing fact that today Jesus is one with whom no one identifies in the end. The hosannas turned to cries of “Crucify him!” His disciples— the ones who didn’t deny him outright or betray him for blood money— forsook him and fled. Even the women who weep for him are told to weep instead for themselves and their children. Conspicuously missing from most interpretations of the crucifixion of Jesus is the brute fact that we murdered him in a relatively quick if terrible miscarriage of justice. To attach a more mysterious, divinely necessary explanation to the cross of Mary’s son is on par with the euphemism that elides the crime against Dinah, “Shechem seized her and lay with her.”
Rome crucified hundreds of thousands of dissidents across the empire. The odds are good that Jesus is not even the only innocent man crucified today. And they have it even worse. No rich man like Joseph of Arimathea is coming to take down their bodies and bury them with dignity. Christ’s suffering is neither unique nor for the sake of solidarity.
Jesus doesn’t die with other sufferers like Dinah.
Jesus dies as other sufferers like Dinah.
He’s another victim in a long line of victims in a world that feels stalked by a prophet of destruction. The one who is now nearly finished by a cross is another statistic. And his weeping mother is a reminder that people, as Francis Spufford says, don’t die statistically, they die in ones, and for each person and for those who loved them, the loss is complete and incomparable. It is the erasure of the entire sum of things. At least, almost always— like, 99.999999% of the time— it ends in erasure.
If Jesus is fully human, as human as you or me or a Ukrainian child, then we should avoid saying anything about him on the cross that we would not dare say to Dinah. Only a moral monster would attempt to salve her wounds by attempting an explanation behind it or positing a reason for it or offering theory of it. There’s nothing we can learn that can retroactively justify the harm that was done Dinah. All we can say to her is what he’s just said. It’s done. An unrectified world has finished him. And the only promise worthy of her pain is the truth that rouses Sheriff Bell from his sleep. As certain as death, nothing short of God coming back can slow this train.
The Seventh Word — Ex Nihilo
The Bible’s first book ends with Joseph offering absolution to the brothers who had betrayed him in the most absolute manner. Like Jesus earlier this morning, Joseph had been cast into a pit and left for dead. “Come now,” they’d conspired, “let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” As Joseph sits with his dying father, Jacob issues his favorite son a final wish. “Please forgive the sin of your brothers because they did evil to you.” And so the last scene in the first book of the Bible is an assurance of pardon. The pardon has been a long time coming. Joseph reunited with his father and brothers as far back as chapter forty-five. The family their sin had torn asunder has been joined back together for seventeen years. For nearly two decades, his brothers have feared their brother’s retribution. Year after year, they’ve been carrying a burden of shame and guilt across. For seventeen years, their past has determined their present and threatened their future. All this time, they’ve been waiting for the forgiveness of their sins. Well, probably they weren’t even waiting for it. They likely didn’t believe it was a possibility. Odds are, it never occurred to them that an absolving word could retroactively rectify their transgressions.
After we’re finished with Jesus, we leave him, like Joseph’s brothers, waiting. He’s waiting not on his brothers but on his Father to receive the only part of that’s left. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Just as his agonized cry of dereliction is a question only God can answer (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) Jesus dies waiting on God. If sin is the refusal to let God be God, if the First Adam sinned by grasping after God, then the true human can only wait on God here.
Hearing his last word in life, we discover finally what it means for the Son to have emptied himself in Jesus. His self-emptying doesn’t mean that he divests himself of certain divine attributes. It doesn’t mean he’s poured out his Almightiness or shaken all the Omniscience out of his pockets. It means he pours himself out into that last, lonely cry on the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?” Beyond the “Why?” there is only God. And therefore, there is no more human way to die than to die asking the question to which only God can reply.
He dies, in other words, like the rest of us.
There is no way for him to transcend the fate to which we’ve dispatched him. It’s not a bad dream like the ones Joseph has unpacked for Pharaoh. The truly human will soon be really dead. And by his death he puts us all to death. In the end, the one who turned the other cheek all the way to the cross, who forgave the ones who nailed him there, who preached peace to point we did him violence, the one in whom God has done God to us does death to us all.
We finish him off.
And by it, he does us all in.
Easter is a shock, sure. But we should’ve seen it coming. It’s, like, retroactive. We should’ve suspected that the way God has chosen to kill us in order to make us new and newly alive is by an absolving word that cuts even as it frees, a promise of pardon from a brother we cast in the pit and left for dead, a word that tonight we can only wait on.
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” With this final word Jesus breathes his last. The Second Adam is dead. Soon the Old Adam will die. The Old Adam in us is slain when our brother Jesus returns to us, saying what Joseph said to his brothers, “Do not fear…As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about it that many people should be saved.” And just like that, like in the very beginning, God begins creating out of nothing.
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April 11, 2022
Every Easter is an Advent
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In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, the protagonist, Sheriff Bell, struggles to make sense of believing in a Living God in a world that seems overrun with darkness and demons. Fighting a losing war with drug dealers along the border, all Sheriff Bell can do is clean up the carnage, nurse its innocent victims, and wonder if there’s a God at all in this suffering world. In one scene towards the end, Sheriff Bell stops in a diner for lunch and spreads out the newspaper on the table in front of him.
A waitress brings him coffee and says to him, “I quit readin it.”
“I don’t blame you. I would if I could...”
“I don’t know why they call it a newspaper. I don’t call that stuff news.”
“No.”
“When was the last time you read somethin about Jesus Christ in the newspaper?”
And Sheriff Bell shakes his head, “I don’t know. I guess I’d have to say it would be a while.”
“I guess it would too,” the waitress says, “A long while.”
Jesus Christ— that’s the only new thing in this world.
And then the sheriff thinks of an old man he knows, a man who desperately wants the Living God to speak to him, to move in his life, to do something discernible in the world. “You’d think a man that had waited eighty some odd years on God to come into his life, well, you’d think God would come, say or do something. If he didn’t, you’d still have to figure that God knew what he was doin.”
Even when all the available evidence in the newspaper would suggest otherwise, God, being God, knows what he’s doing. “I don’t know what other description of God you could have,” Sheriff Bell concludes to himself.
“Woman, behold thy son.”
“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
“My God, my God...”
We’re all familiar with the Son’s seven last words from the cross— a tree which John in his Gospel tells us is, actually, His throne. Less familiar to us is how the evangelists also show us the Father, the Living and Loquacious God, speaking on Calvary. The noonday sky puts on mourning clothes as Jesus breathes his last breath. The velvet rope in the Temple is torn in two. The earth quakes. Like Lazarus, the dead are called out of their tombs. Even the stones cry out. And for the first of these seven signs on Calvary, Christ’s Heavenly Father speaks to the wife of Pontius Pilate in a dream.
She’s the reason Pilate washes his hands and declares to us, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” A few verses before Pilate absolves himself, his wife comes to him while he’s seated where Christ alone belongs, in the judgment seat, and she warns him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous one, for today I suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.” Perhaps the Lord said to her something similar to what he uttered in a dream to King Abimelek when the King of Gerar tried to take Sarah, Abraham’s wife, as his own. In that dream, the Lord said, “You are as good as dead, Abimelek, because of the woman you have taken. If you do not return her, you may be certain that you and all who belong to you will die.”
The Gospel according to Matthew begins with the God of Israel speaking to non-Israelites, that is, to Gentiles, in a dream. God speaks to the magi, telling them of King Herod’s murderous plot and summoning them home by another route. And the Gospel ends with God speaking to another Gentile and afflicting her with the Gospel truth that none are righteous save this righteous one, Jesus Christ. What Matthew would have us see in these dreams is that Almighty God is at work in the world even when and even where God’s faithful people cannot discern it. We’re meant to see in this sign, this dream, that the Living God has a purpose in the world, across all peoples— a purpose that is mysteriously and providentially taking shape in people’s lives despite all appearances to the contrary.
I don’t know about you, but Sheriff Bell isn’t alone. Whether we call it “crucifixion” or COVID-19, it can be hard to believe that God is at work in the Golgothas of our world. “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down right now,” the prophet Isaiah pleads with the God who commandeered him. All too often, Isaiah goes on to say, God is a God who hides his face from us.
Sometimes it feels like God is the floor boss of a cruel casino, watching idly from a distance as we lose hand after hand after hand to the house. Sometimes it seems grace comes by faith not because grace is a gift that cannot be earned, but because the gracious work of God in our world is so imperceptible it can only be taken on trust. Often times, faith feels no more concrete or certain than, well, a dream. And we all know how difficult it can be to hold onto a dream once you’ve woken up to the real world.
Sigmund Freud famously attributed dreams to sexual impulses not to God. Of course, Freud also believed that God is an illusion and that faith is a form of wish fulfillment, a dream we wish were true. It’s a serious critique. After all, the conviction that God is up to something in the world, the belief that God, being God, knows what he’s doing, such faith is surely more attractive to us than the nightmares to which we’re accustomed to lately. In a world seemingly overrun with darkness and devils, our faith can seem an unlikely dream, yet it’s just as surely true that in just such a world, as W.H. Auden wrote, “Nothing that is possible can save us.”
Here it is, Good Friday, almost Easter, the hinge between the Old Age and the New, and it feels for all of us shut-ins like it’s the season of Advent. Contrary to popular misperception, Advent does not look back to Christ’s first coming. Advent looks ahead to— Advent longs for— His coming again. Advent is the season when Christians celebrate that the specter of the End is good news not bad news. Advent, says Fleming Rutledge, is a season that forbids denial; that is, Advent is when we hunker down and take stock of the world as it really is, in all its brokenness and brutality, and, in doing so, we long for the return of our King to complete His promised work of redemption.
Good Friday, says the Apostle Paul, closes the Old Age of Sin and Death and, with it, all the weapons with which the Power of Death afflicts us. But Easter, Paul says, God raising Jesus from the dead, it’s only the first fruit of what God is determined to do for all of Creation, which makes this time between the first fruit of Christ’s resurrection and the full bloom of God’s final redemption— this in between time is a single, long season of Advent. This is what Karl Barth means when he writes, “What other time or season can or will the Church ever have but that of Advent.”
Whether the calendar says it’s Good Friday or Easter, every day is Advent.
Every day of the Christian life is a life of waiting, calling due the IOU sworn by the One who promises, “Behold, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, I am coming to you very soon.”
Coming finally to free his Good Creation from the Power of Death that afflicts it.
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I do not know why the Lord seems to tarry.
Nor do I know why, in the meantime, the Lord chooses to go about his work in unseen ways that can only be perceived by faith and can always be dismissed as dreams and illusions.
I can only offer you the promise spoken to the prophet Isaiah and shown to us on Golgotha that the Lord who sometimes hides himself from us does not do so to no purpose. We can only trust, with Sheriff Bell that God, being God, knows what he’s doing.
We can only trust.
And wait.
Wait for the crucified one to return.
Return not from the grave but return to us.
There’s more God’s going to do.
Which is to say, there’s a better world on the way.
It is NOT finished.
— If you liked this, check out the Good Friday collection whence it comes.
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