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The lamb image reveals the lie of ignorant killing that has characterized most of human history—and, even more, it gives us a way out.
The way of fight is what I’ll call the way of Simon the zealot, and often the way of the cultural liberal. These folks want to change, fix, control, and reform other people and events.
It is a general rule that when we don’t transform our pain we will always transmit it. Zealots and contemporary liberals often have the right conclusion, but their tactics and motives are frequently filled with self, power, control, and the same righteousness that they hate in conservatives.
It gives us, strangely enough, a very false sense of control and superiority, because we’ve spotted the evil and, thank God, it’s over there. As long as they are the problem and we can keep our focus on changing them, correcting them, expelling them as the contaminating element, then we can sit in a reasonably comfortable position. But it’s a position that the saints called pax perniciosa, a dangerous and false peace.
This leads us to the second diversionary tactic: the way of flight. This is the common path of the Pharisee, the uninformed, the falsely innocent, and often the conservative type. They deny the pain altogether. They refuse to carry the shadow side of anything, in themselves or in their chosen groups. There will be no uncertainty, no ambiguity. There will be no problems. It is a form of narcotic, and sometimes probably necessary to get through the day.
We sit on a pedestal of purity and false innocence. Who would want to leave—if not for a major humiliation that forces us into the pain? Paul had to be thrown to the ground and have scales fall from his eyes in order to admit that he was a self-serving Pharisee.
That is the Third Way, beyond fight and beyond flight—and yet, in a certain sense, including both. It’s fighting in a new way from within, and fleeing from the quick, egocentric response. Only God can hold such an act together within us. The small self is always too small. Only the True Self, to which we will return later in this book, can live the gospel.
Maybe our greatest disservice has been that we have given the Law and the Gospel to the fragile self that is incapable of understanding either. We ended up condemning people to subterfuge, denial, mental gymnastics, and trivialization— by preaching the Law without also offering people that “identity transplant” that we call the Gospel.
Paul took most of his Letter to the Romans to struggle with this dilemma. Law without Gospel actually paralyzes and condemns us to failure.
We want to get rid of that anxiety as quickly as we can. Yet, to be a good leader of anything today—to be a good pastor, a good bishop, or, I’m sure, a good father or mother—we have to be able to contain, to hold patiently, a certain degree of anxiety. Probably the higher the level of leader someone is, the more anxiety he or she must be capable of holding. Leaders who cannot hold anxiety will never lead us to anyplace new.
Expelling what we can’t embrace gives us an identity, but it’s a negative identity. It’s not life energy, it’s death energy. Formulating what we are against gives us a very quick, clear, and clean sense of ourselves.
People more easily define themselves by what they are against, by who they hate, by who else is wrong, instead of by what they believe in and whom they love.
We might catch anew the radical and scary nature of faith, because faith only builds on that totally positive place within, however small. It needs an interior “Yes” to begin, just as the “Yes” of Mary began the entire process of salvation. God needs just a mustard-seed-sized place that is in love, that is open to grace, that is thrilled, that has found something wonderful. We’ve got to go back and build from that “Yes” place—or faith is not faith.
It’s much easier to build our identity on our group, our wounds, our angers, our agenda, our fear; that’s the more normal way, unless we’ve been taught the way of Jesus.
The wonder of the resurrection stories in the Gospels is that Jesus has no punitive attitude toward the authorities or his cowardly followers, and that the followers themselves never call for any kind of holy war against those who killed their leader. Something new has clearly transpired in history. This is not the common and expected story line. All Jesus does is breathe forgiveness.
It’s interesting that Jesus identifies forgiveness with breathing, the one thing that we have done constantly since we were born and will do until we die. He says God’s forgiveness is like breathing. Forgiveness is not apparently something God does; it is who God is. God can do no other.
Now I believe that forgiveness, in the teaching of Jesus, is not for the sake of moral purity; it’s quite simply for the sake of a future.
Without the mystery of forgiveness and healing, we are on a straight and rather quick road toward mutual and justified destruction.
Education, of itself, does not ensure we will not scapegoat. Many highly educated people still hate others, including the rich, immigrants, people of color, Jews, and Muslims, to name a few.
Anthropologically, I am told that religion begins with a distinction: the dividing of the world into the pure and the impure. On that lie, the whole structure builds. Jesus consistently undoes historic religion by touching and consorting with and doing the “impure” things. He’s not much of a founder for a self-respecting religion!
We don’t know what to do with our paranoia and hatred when there are no Communists, so now we have school violence and conspiracy theories of every sort. Look at the clear hatred between liberals and conservatives in our own churches and congress! The anger that used to safely go toward Nazis and Communists now goes toward homosexuals and abortionists in our own hometowns.
When we know we’re not really transforming culture, we’re not really changing the world, we’re not really having a great deal of influence at the higher levels, we move to the level of micromanagement. We find some little tiny world where we can be in control and right, where we can be pure and clean.
The reason people do evil—why they hate, sin, or make mistakes—is because at some point they have been hurt, rejected, excluded, or wounded. They just keep passing it on, and the cycle repeats and spreads. Jesus, you could say, came to break, and even stop, the cycle.
What we call Original Sin in Genesis perhaps could, in a sense, be better called Original Shame, because Adam and Eve describe themselves as feeling naked.
This must name something that is fundamental within us. We live, not just in an age of anxiety, but also in a time of primal shame.
Guilt, I am told, is about things we have done or not done, but our shame is about the primal emptiness of our very being—not what we have done, but who we are and who we are not. Guilt is a moral question. Shame—foundational shame, at least—is an ontological question.
Nine out of ten people start with this premise: “If I behave correctly, I will one day see God clearly.” Yet the biblical tradition is saying the exact opposite: If we see God clearly, we will behave in a good and human way. Our right behavior does not cumulatively lead to our true being; our true being leads to eventual right behavior.
The greatest surprise is that, sometimes, a bad moral response is the very collapsing of the ego that leads to our falling into the hands of the living God (see Hebrews 10:31).
Christians indeed have a strange image of God: a naked, bleeding man dying on a cross. Let’s be honest. If we were going to create a religion, would we ever have thought up this image of God?
What question is God trying to answer by giving us a crucified man for a God? What human problem is God trying to reveal and from what is God trying to save us on the cross? We’ve always said that Jesus was trying to save us from our sin and, of course, that’s exactly right. As Paul says, Jesus “became sin” to free us from our sin (Romans 8:3–8). What then is our “sin”? I think it might be called “ignorant killing.”
He does not use his suffering and death as power over others, to punish them, but as power for others, to transform them.
The risen Jesus is the victory fully personified. As the forgiving victim of history, he is himself transformed/resurrected and transforms/ resurrects the other. He includes and forgives the sinner instead of hating the sinner and thereby continuing the pattern of hate. He gives us a history and a future beyond the predictable violence. He stops the dance toward inevitable death. He destroys death forever, as we say at Easter.
Instead of our spilling blood to get to God, we have God spilling blood to get to us!
God is always the initiator. God is always the Hound of Heaven,15 going out after us because God knows our primordial shame. God is always sewing garments to cover our immense and intense sense of unworthiness.
In a very true sense, Jesus undid religion forever. He was not the founder of a religion as much as he re-grounded religion in the very sin and stuff’ of life.
It’s just something Jesus did once to resolve some necessary heavenly metaphysical transaction, but it wasn’t really an agenda for us or for now.
The cross is about being the victory instead of just winning the victory over somebody else.
The gospel is not about winners over losers; the gospel really is about win/win—but very few get the message!
Jesus is, in some ways, the only true revolutionary. Most revolutions merely rearrange the furniture on the deck of the Titanic. Jesus built a new boat.
The cross is finally about how to stand against hate without becoming hate ourselves.
The human capacity to hate and kill is the sin of the world and it took a Lamb (see John 1:29) to dismantle what the lions of history could only perpetuate.
Reality is not meaningless and absurd (chaos/no patterns/nihilism), but neither is it perfect consistency (rationalism/scientism/fundamentalism). Reality, rather, is filled with contradictions.
We are so hesitant to live with the scandal of particularity, which is the primary pattern in the biblical revelation. As soon as we start to discern a clear pattern, the Bible makes an exception to it. I’m not talking about compromising on issues, because I do think society has to decide what is acceptable behavior and what is not. I’m talking about compromising on ego, which nobody wants to do. People say they do not want to give way on important moral issues, but far too often they don’t want to give way on the ego’s need to be right, superior, and in control. This mimics that original sin,
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Who among us can say with total certitude that we know we’re doing God’s will? I can’t, any day of my life, and it’s very unsatisfying. That’s what it means to bear the mystery, to hang with Jesus on the horns of the human dilemma, to agree to find God in a clearly imperfect world.
The more progressive and liberal type of person tends to avoid what I’ll call the vertical claims of the gospel. They tend to be afraid to talk about transcendence and God. They tend to be uncomfortable talking about the wisdom and the importance of the past and of tradition, to know that the truth has always been with us and God has always been with us. Progressive and educated people often love right ideas more than reality in its wounded state.
Conservative people tend to avoid the horizontal claims of the gospel. They tend to be afraid of breadth and inclusiveness. They tend to be afraid of mercy and compassion, or any breaking of the rules, particularly rules for group coherence. It’s almost as if letting the sinner get in will take away their purity and their worthiness or the identity of their group.
The liberal types fight structures, authority, and self-serving ideologies, not realizing that they usually become very individualistic and heady as a result.
The conservative types fight as soon as they have targeted the appropriate sinner, or anyone who threatens their strong control needs. These people expel and reject rather readily, very often creating scapegoats, which take away their own self-doubt.
The cross calls all of us to a mystery of transformation. On the cross, none of us is in charge, none of us is in control, and none of us can possibly understand, just like Jesus himself. On the cross, someone else is in control. Someone else is in charge. Someone else understands. Someone else is obviously a much more patient lover than we are.
The United States has seen three spiritual awakenings. These were widespread religious awakenings, or revivals. These awakenings can be criticized on some levels, but they produced a model of social justice and human rights that is still copied worldwide. The first, which historians call The Great Awakening, carried the seeds of the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and, ultimately, the French Revolution.
