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the courage and capacity that makes kenosis possible—the inoculation of the ego that is required to endure shame, loss, perceived failure, and all other forms of “emptying”—is the foundational conviction that we count and matter, that we are the beloved children of God.
And what this suggests is that there is no qualitative distinction between the martyr and the Christian in everyday life. The distinction is only quantitative, a difference not of kind but of degree.
Martyrdom, according to Hovey, is best displayed in small acts of asceticism, moments of self-denial in which I say no to the self in order to say yes to the needs and claims of others.
Jesus’ courage here is framed as a victory over neurotic anxieties. What Jesus scorns is not the physical pain of the cross but the shame, the humiliation of the cross. The writer of Hebrews uses the cross of Jesus to encourage his readers to endure their own “opposition from sinners,” their own social shaming and humiliation.
By this act, Christians register a dissent that implicitly indicts how everyone else is choosing to live their lives. And we can’t kick out the props of everyone else’s self-esteem without expecting a negative response. When we scorn the blue ribbons that make everyone else feel important, we are going to face some backlash.
Death has been defeated in the midst of our lives and Jesus’ resurrected life becomes tangibly present within our own. Slavery to the fear of death has been exchanged for the freedom and capacity to love.
But why? For Augustine faith isn’t really faith until it has wrestled with the fear of death across the life span. That is, a lack of concern about death isn’t a sign of faith. Rather, faith is manifested in the daily wrestling with death, which is what perfects faith over time. As Augustine says, our faith doesn’t mean “that death had turned into a good thing.”83 No, he contends, “the death of the body . . . is not good for anyone.”84 So the goal of the Christian life is not to seek out death or to treat life cheaply. Death is evil and we are to struggle against death and resist all of its
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In short, the way of the cross isn’t about eradicating our biological instincts, but about learning to master them and creating the capacity to love without having our existence reduced to a Darwinian matrix.
As biological creatures, we are not saved from the fear of death—that would be an impossible, foolish goal. We are, rather, saved from a slavery to the fear of death. When perfect love casts out fear, it does not fully eradicate the fear of death, but it empowers us to deny the dominion of death and gain victory over the moral power and influence of death in our lives. Across the great spectrum of fear—from merely feeling foolish in the eyes of others, all the way to mortal terror—the cross grants us the ability to choose love instead of death.
But upon inspection, and particularly when the powers treat us as disposable, we come to see that our survival fears contaminate any significance we gain from the powers, as well as our identities.
To borrow the words of Stringfellow, we become “free from the most elementary and universal bondage of humanity: the struggle to maintain and preserve, whatever the cost, our own existence against that of all others.”
To follow Jesus, therefore, is to undergo a training that refuses to let death, even death at the hands of enemies, determine the shape of our living.
“The virtues necessary to be a martyr are no different from the virtues necessary to be a faithful Christian.”
Basically, we become petty tyrants focused on protecting our homes, neighborhoods, reputations, statuses, nations, and egos from the needs and encroachments of others.
Empirically speaking, this makes sense. Psychologists know that gratitude is one of the strongest predictors of happiness. To feel grateful is to experience life as a gift, as an experience of grace and joy.
Why? They sang, as all fearful people do, to find and rekindle their courage. I am put in mind here of how central and vital singing was to those involved in the American civil rights movement. Singing is what drove the movement. People would gather in churches and sing freedom songs before going out to face angry mobs ready to curse at them, spit on them, even violently beat them. And then, after they had been arrested, they would sing on the way to jail. And then they sang in jail. These civil rights activists never stopped singing.
At root, the practices of doxological gratitude are practices aimed at battling fear. Singing is a practice of casting out fear. Singing is the exorcism of fear. Singing is the practice of creating, cultivating, and sustaining the courage we require to engage in acts of resistance as we face down the principalities and powers and—like Paul and Silas and those civil rights workers—even death itself.
Nothing captures the posture of doxological gratitude—physically and spiritually—as well as prayer. If kenosis—letting go and emptying the self—is the concept, then prayer is the ritual, embodied enactment. In prayer we (quite literally) kneel and open our hands to God, eccentrically receiving from God our lives, identities, and everything we presume to “possess.” Prayer is letting go, surrendering, opening up. Prayer is that posture—in action, word, or silence—where we do not possess anything but receive our lives as gift. The eccentric identity of Jesus is practiced and enacted when we open
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When the Roman archons (magistrates) ordered the early Christians to worship the imperial spirit or genius, they refused, kneeling instead and offering prayers on the emperor’s behalf to God. This seemingly innocuous act was far more exasperating and revolutionary than outright rebellion would have been. Rebellion simply acknowledges the absoluteness and ultimacy of the emperor’s power, and attempts to seize it.
We don’t take the last place at the table because we fear being small, unnoticed, and insignificant in the face of death. We resist death, then, by inserting either resources or a heroic identity between ourselves and death. Both of these attempts produce sin: the buffer of resources makes us selfish and stingy, and the buffer of self-esteem makes us rivalrous, prideful, and violent: rivalrous toward in-group members doing better than we are; prideful toward in-group members doing worse than we are;
There will always be sacrifices to be made, but we should make them only as far as our joy can carry us. If we want to do more, that’s alright, but the first work must be joy, the fruit of doxological gratitude. The renunciations of the cross are, at root, prompted by joy; thus we need to practice joy and allow it to carry us forward.
A collection of self-sustaining and self-reliant people—people who are all pretending to be fine—is not the Kingdom of God.
Specifically, a church where everyone is “fine” is a group of humans refusing to be human beings and pretending to be gods.
In loving others and being loved in return, we move, in the words of St. John, “from death to life” (1 John 3:14 NIV).
Life consisted of daily chores and duties and getting along with the sisters she was living with. I expect most of us can identify. How are we going to express our emancipation from our slavery to death in radical self-expenditure for others? We have bills to pay, a lawn to mow, kids to pick up, a boss to please.
The Little Way is about “bearing with” people. The dying to self here is less about heroic martyrdom than it is about holding your tongue, refusing to gossip, waiting patiently, mastering your irritation, avoiding the spotlight, refusing to respond to insults, allowing others to cut in line, being first to apologize, and not seeking to win every argument.
What this means is that “God” and religious institutions can become as enslaved to the fear of death as everything else in the culture. The church can become as much a principality and power as any other cultural institution. And if this is so, service to “God” and “the church” can produce satanic outcomes as much as, if not more so, any other form of service to the power of death in our world.
According to Brueggemann, the primal taproot of all prophetic utterance was the declaration of Moses that YHWH was free—free enough to be against Pharaoh. This proclamation of “againstness” is the wellspring of all prophetic judgment. The prophet proclaims that God cannot be identified with the status quo—however shiny, powerful, immortal, or divine that status quo may appear.
The principalities and powers will always seek to capture and enslave God in an attempt to use the name of God to underwrite current power arrangements.
Consequently, before proclamation to human captives can be made—freedom to those being oppressed by current power arrangements—the prophet must dare to proclaim that God is not the spokesperson for the status quo, but rather stands outside the system—free—to speak a word of judgment.
the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality and is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes.
This capacity for prophetic imagination, that God is free to be against us, is the great weapon against idolatry.
When we can hear the voice of God crying out against us in the voices of those we ignore, marginalize, victimize, exclude, ostracize, harm, and kill, we know that God has been set free.
The radical, prophetic freedom of God is fully realized when we see the face of God in our victims and our enemies. In that moment our slavery to the fear of death is fully overcome. In that moment the sacrificial love of Christ becomes fully manifest. In that moment the Kingdom comes, on earth as it is in heaven.
Wow.wow.wow
We know that we have left death and come over into life; we know it because we love others
