How the Cross Works #2

Here is the second post I mentioned I would put up on how the cross works.

[[Dear Sister O'Neal, how does Jesus' suffering save us or the world? I mean how does it work?I just can't understand this. Does God need this for some reason?]]

Thanks for your question.  I want to deal only with the question of Jesus' suffering in this post. For more about how the cross works please check out other articles on the theology of the cross.

First, Jesus' sufering per se is NOT salvific; it does not "save". Neither of itself does it reveal God to us nor make God exhaustively present in our world. (Jesus' suffering does reveal something of what it means to be truly human and it also points to the self-emptying compassion of God, but by itself it does not make the Triune God present in power.) However, this is absolutely not to say his suffering is unimportant or dispensable. It is not. What is true and what I will focus on here is that suffering calls for something in Jesus and allows for that which IS salvific. Jesus' suffering is a critical part of the incarnational weakness in which God's power will be made perfect and exhaustively revealed. To understand this it helps to think about how suffering works usually and what it calls for from us; then we can look at how it actually functions in Jesus' life but especially at his passion and death.

All of us know suffering, some very great suffering, and we know as well therefore that it pulls us in two directions. The first is fairly instinctive. We try to defend against the pain. We attempt to make ourselves less vulnerable in whatever ways we can. For physical pain we may use analgesics --- and, I would add, this is ordinarily entirely legitimate, especially in cases of severe chronic pain or when we need relief to function in important ways the pain would prevent. At the same time we may short circuit the growth in courage, endurance, and openness suffering calls for. Finding a balance here is not always easy. Still, the point is the same, suffering per se is an evil in our world which can threaten our well-being, and, when severe, our very humanity as well.  (Severe pain dehumanizes or at least has the potential to do so.) Our first response is to try to ease it or end it in order to protect ourselves and the life we know and value. Prayer here (meaning in this case our own pleas to God), especially in the beginning, may actually be an expression of this tendency to self-protection and a resistance to being truly vulnerable. This entire response (or reaction) can itself, though in a different way, be dehumanizing,

The second response is NOT instinctive. It is an expression of something transcendent in us; it recognizes that to some extent suffering can be a source of growth and maturity, especially of our larger or true self. Significantly, suffering can help open us to our own weakness, helplessness, and poverty. Further it can open us to allowing ourselves to be more profoundly known by others, by ourselves, and ultimately by God. It calls for courage, endurance, a wider perspective than we usually entertain, and an openness to a meaning which is greater than we can even imagine. This response to suffering, this opening of ourselves to realities which lie beyond us and sustain and empower us beyond our own very real limitations allows the redemption of suffering and sometimes the healing of its causes. Prayer here may begin as a praying OUT OF our suffering, but when it reaches maturity and even fulfillment it becomes a praying OF our suffering --- that is our living out our suffering with and in the power and presence of God.

Jesus' Passion and Death:

Here we begin to understand why Jesus' suffering could be both essential and salvific. It is not, as you say, because God needs our suffering  --- for instance, in reparation for sin and offenses against his honor. It is not that there is some sort of cosmic quota of pain required, nor that some abstract notion of distributive or retributive justice requires it. (God's justice is neither of these.) Jesus is called to be the Incarnation of the Word of God in all of human life's moments and moods. He is called and commissioned to embody that Word exhaustively. He is called to be obedient, that is to hearken --- to listen and respond --- to that Word so completely that call and response cannot be teased apart in him. He is called therefore to be prayer and to implicate God fully in a world dominated by the powers of sin and death. Part of coming to this perfect incarnation is suffering and doing so in ways that allow God into that "space" of  ultimate weakness, emptiness, and helplessness so that he may transform it (and us) with his presence. In a sense, especially to the degree we allow it, suffering hollows us out and intensifies our openness to the reality which can redeem it and everything else.



But what happens if Jesus' cry of aban-donment and his own admission that it is finished are the last words of the event we call "the cross"? What happens if godlessness and the powers of godlessness are the real victors? What happens if Jesus's descent into hell in abject openness and vulnerability to the emptiness, meaninglessness, and inhumanity of his suffering are the last word, the thing allowed by God to stand? What happens if the universally dehumanizing effects of Jesus' suffering were the final word? (After all,  he was dehumanized and those that tortured him were also dehumanized by their actions; the same is true of those who called for such shameful torture, betrayed Jesus' friendship or as Religious leaders administering the "Law of God" were otherwise complicit in this)?

It should be clear that without the resurrection there is nothing redemptive or salvific in Jesus' suffering. It is necessary, essential in fact as a condition of possibility, but it must be done in obedience (meaning without closing oneself to it in any way nor attempting to save oneself even while one remains open) to the One who CAN save and redeem this suffering. Further, God must respond to this obedience, enter into the abyss created by sin, death, and by Jesus' personal vulnerability and continuing openness. God must,  as a result, bring life out of death, meaning out of absurdity, ordered, fruitful reality out of chaos and nothingness, and communion (reconciliation) out of ultimate isolation and alienation or Jesus' suffering witnesses not to victory over these things but instead to foolishness, failure, arrogance and man's inhumanity to his fellows.

We can speak of God "needing" this suffering because he needs to be able to enter the most godless depths of human life and death but we cannot speak of God needing this suffering to satisfy some sort of offense done against him. The godless depths I have referred to are depths and dimensions within us and our world created by our own choices to exclude God. God cannot simply enter into these spaces by fiat because they are personal spaces which God will not violate lest he violate us at the same time. God, who respects our choices, must be invited or allowed in here. However,  in speaking of Jesus' taking on our sin we say that Jesus died for ALL. His obedient suffering makes it possible for God to enter into the realm of sin and death (realms of godlessness) created by human acts of rejection without violating the freedom of human beings who (universally) choose these. That is, Jesus' passion and resurrection is God's answer to ALL human sin.  More and more you and I need to allow God into our own sinful lives, but the powers of sin and godless or eternal death themselves have been defeated through the cross of an obedient Jesus. It was suffering that assisted in the deepening of Jesus' obedience, but it was his obedience in conjunction with the will of God that actually brought redemption.

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...we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. (Romans 5:3-5)

Approaching Holy Week: How Does the Cross Work?

Recently I listened to a sedevacantist teaching about the Cross. In that presentation this priest said that the only reason for the resurrection from the dead was to prove that Jesus was God. In fact, this cleric asserted that Jesus proved himself to be God by raising himself from the dead! I admit I have heard the notion that Jesus raised himself from the dead before (though not for about 40 years or so) but I have never heard the meaning of the cross or the way it "saves" so thoroughly eviscerated. Let me say this very clearly: Had Jesus stayed good and dead, had there been no resurrection, sin and death would have had the last word and resulted in an ultimate silence. Jesus' death was NOT SALVIFIC apart from the resurrection. Similarly, had Jesus raised himself he would not have truly surrendered to the powers of sin and godless death in an exhaustive way as he actually did on Good Friday. He would not have shown us that the way to life in God is to open ourselves completely to his love so that it may even prove itself stronger than sin and godless death.

As we approach Holy Week and the Triduum I want to repost a couple of pieces on the Cross and how it works to redeem reality. The first was posted last year.

[[Dear Laurel, I feel sort of negative about the crucifix and communion. Here are the reasons: I know the church teaches that Christ died for our sins, but the crucifix also represents a very violent and bloody act. What kind of example is that to set in front of our already troubled youth? What can you say about this? Now that I have had my say, how are you and what is going on in your life? Love and Peace,]]

Hi there!
Regarding your questions: It is important to remember that in the events of the cross the violence and evil done were human acts (or, more accurately, literally inhuman acts unworthy of God or humankind). They tell us what happens when the sacred (and truly human) is put into our sinful hands. Part of the redemption God achieves on the cross is the redemption of our horrific treatment of one another and of God himself. Part of it is the redemption of our inhumanity and the making possible of authentic humanity in Christ.

Secondly, it is important to remember that Jesus' physical and psychological suffering per se was not salvific. What was salvific was that in the midst of this terrible suffering, injustice, shame, failure of mission, and betrayal, he remained open to God (the One he called Abba) and to whatever God would bring out of it. The word we use for this openness and responsiveness is "obedience". It does NOT mean that God willed Jesus' torture by venal, cruel, ambitious, and frightened human beings. What God DID will, however, was to enter into all of the moments and moods of human life including sinfulness and death so that he could redeem and transform them with his presence. Jesus allows God to do that by remaining open (obedient) to him even in such extremity. (He does not shut down, nor does he try to assume control, for instance. He is open to whatever God can and will do with these events.)

Neither is Jesus' death by itself salvific. Again, even in death and beyond natural death in what the NT calls "godless" or "eternal death" Jesus remained open to what God would bring out of this. Because he did, God was able to enter into these godless realms and for that reason they no longer are signs of God's absence. Instead, because of Christ's obedience unto "death, even death on a cross" as Paul puts it, even in sin and death we will meet God face to face and God will bring life not only out of the unexpected place but the unacceptable place --- the place where human reason says God should never be found.

God never changes his mind about us. He loves us --- actively, passionately, without reserve. (He IS love-in-act; this creative, dynamic, unceasing love is God's very nature!) What God changes through the events of the cross is reality itself. Unless once we are face to face with God we actually choose eternity without God there is no longer sinful or godless death. Even should we choose this I think it will mean we choose an eternity facing  a Love we have been offered without reserve, but which we have definitively refused. (It is hard for me to think of a worse situation than to be locked inside one's own hatefulness while faced with a Love which frees and gives eternal life.)  What we have to teach our youth is exactly what Paul says in Romans 8: neither life nor death nor powers nor principalities, nor heights nor depths, etc etc will EVER separate us from the love of God. God has made sure that he is present in even the unacceptable place (in this case, the realms which were heretofore properly called godless); he has assured the truth of what Paul asserts in Romans 8 and it is Jesus' openness and responsiveness to God in the face of human evil of unimaginable lengths and depths that spurred Paul's profession of faith.

One other note: The NT speaks of divine wrath. This does not mean anger in the sense we know it ourselves. It means something akin to a tough love that allows the consequences of our choices to catch up to us. God respects our choices even if he does not respect WHAT we choose. He allows the consequences of our choices to catch up with us. However, at the same time, if we choose sin and death (knowing we cannot fully conceive what we are choosing in this way), he makes sure we will find him even there. 

The Church has never asserted a single interpretation of the cross nor a normative theology of the Cross. Unfortunately what we hear too often is Anselm's interpretation. Anselm's world was a feudal one where notions of shame and honor were driving forces. Thus he saw God as infinitely offended by human sin and wrote that an infinite price had to be paid for God's honor to be regained. Further, that price had to be paid by a human being since human beings had caused the infinite offense while only someone divine COULD do so. The biggest problem though was that he saw God as needing to be reconciled. This is exactly the opposite of what Paul says in 2 Cor 5:19: [[God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.]] In other words, it is the world which needs to be reconciled to God; in Christ God brings everything home to itself and to himself. He sets all things right. This is the nature of divine justice. He asserts his rights or sovereignty over a broken creation by letting nothing stand between us and his creative love (himself). It is not God's honor that needs to be appeased but a broken and estranged world that needs to be healed and made one with God (the ground of existence and meaning). That is what happens through Jesus' crucifixion, death, and resurrection. In Christ God takes the worst human beings can do and brings divine wholeness and life out of it.

On Developing a Spirituality of Discernment

Occasionally the daily lections can surprise us with their relevance. I found that happening recently. Two weeks ago the readings were, in one way and another, about being discerning people who open our entire selves to the Word and will of God in our lives. In some ways what was given to us was a spirituality of discernment, that is, a spirituality which takes seriously the first word of the Benedictine Rule, "LISTEN!" or, more fundamentally, the identity of Christ as the One who was defined as obedient (that is, whose mind and heart were open and responsive to God) unto death, even death on a cross. In other words discernment is a process undertaken by one who listens with the whole of themselves to the whole of reality for the Word and will of God present and active there. A spirituality of discernment is a spirituality permeated by this same process, a spirituality of which attentive listening and responsiveness  (hearkening) is the very heart and soul.

The Challenge of Discernment: Moving through the Second Week of Christmas

Throughout the week we moved from discerning good from evil, light from dark and that which was of Christ versus that which was anti-Christ, through the challenge of discerning more ambiguous reality, and finally, to the difficulty of an even more demanding spirituality of discernment when we are asked to choose between goods. The author of 1 John sees discernment as the core and foundation of all authentic discipleship. On Monday the first lection was about "testing the spirits." 1 John saw all of reality as either of Christ or of the antiChrist and he asked us to choose Christ in everything. Our own world is less literally but no less really inhabited by such "spirits" and it is certainly no less demanding of this discernment. We are asked to pay attention with and to our entire selves --- to our feelings, emotions, bodily sensations, our dreams, imaginations, thoughts, etc, and to choose that which is God's will. This requires practice, time, and effort. It means we work at developing the skills associated with such active listening in every situation in which we find ourselves so that we can hear the Word or will of God and act on it.


On Tuesday the author of 1 John continued his exploration of this spirituality of discernment by defining for us what real love is. Interestingly he is clear that before love involves us in preaching, teaching, healing the sick, feeding the hungry or otherwise ministering to the poor it means receiving the love of God. In other words we must first of all be persons who have allowed God to love us with an everlasting and entirely selfless love before we go out to the world around us and try to love others.

Our world is marked and marred by all kinds of fraudulent and distorted forms of love. We have each been touched by these and we often continue the cycle in ways we are not even aware of  -- but which surely need to be redeemed: children who have never felt loved and have children to fill the hole while those children too are often inadequately loved, those who have been wounded by what passed for love in their families, those sold into modern slavery by human traffickers, sex billed as love, and so forth --- all of these and so many more are prevalent today. Someone must break this cycle of fraudulent and inauthentic love and we Christians believe that Christ, the preeminent "receiver" and transparent mediator of God's love has done that. Only those who know THIS love and have been made into new creations by it are truly capable of ministering to others. Breaking the cycle of fraudulent  and distorted love in Christ is precisely what disciples of Christ are called to do --- but first of all, both foundationally and temporally, we do so as receivers of God's love in Christ.

On Wednesday the author of 1 John continued his exploration of the nature of love and the demands of discernment. He reminded us that we are to abide or remain in God and explains that love casts out fear. Here he provided us with one criterion of discernment but he also prepared us for engaging in genuine ministry. How do we know the cycle of fraudulent love has been broken in us? Love casts out fear. If we abide in God his love makes us capable of giving our lives for others without hedging our bets or compromising our gift out of concern for ourselves. It makes us compassionate and generous because we are secure in God's love and fearless in these things. Others come first, no matter how wounded or contagious, no matter how needy or broken. We are ready for ministry if we are first of all people who receive the Love of God as the utterly trustworthy foundation of our lives --- and do so on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, our ministry will be unwise or imprudent, presumptuous, and perhaps even dangerous to those who need this love so badly today.

Friday's Climax: Jesus shows us a spirituality of discernment

And then on Friday the Gospel gives us a portrait of Jesus in which all this comes together in a vivid and unforget-table way. Jesus heals a leper. In a world which was terrified of the contagion of illness and evil, a world which characterized everything from mold on the sheets to actual Hanson's disease as "leprosy" and then called it all unclean and unworthy of human and divine contact, Jesus reached out his hand and touched a man suffering from leprosy and made him whole in body, mind, spirit, and in his relation to others. He restored the man to physical health and to his rightful place in his family, in his relation to God and right to worship, and with his People. More, this healing lessened the fearfulness of the world as a whole for those who had hardened their own hearts in order to accomplish and deal with the ostracism of this man. It is a wonderful story in every way.

But the lection did not end here, nor with Jesus staying around to heal those who thronged to him upon hearing of his healing of the leper. Instead Jesus withdraws to the desert to pray; despite the unquestionable need of the multitude for his healing touch and the undoubted good of remaining to minister in this way, he returns in a solitary way to the foundation of his life --- the God who is the source of his life, his compassion, and his authority to heal --- the God whom he loves in the same way he himself is loved first. There are three reasons for this I think.

First, as important as individual healings are, Jesus' mission is different than this; it is deeper and more far-reaching or extensive as well. Jesus' real mission is the healing and freeing of reality itself --- the whole of reality. He is called to reconcile all things to God and bring all things to fullness in him. This will only be accomplished by remaining obedient (open and responsive) to God even to the depth and breadth of a godlessness which permeates and distorts reality --- not by individual healings even if these number in the hundreds of thousands -- indeed, even if they included every person that  ever existed. Reality itself is estranged from God and falls short of what it is meant to be in God; the illnesses with which Jesus is confronted  in us are merely symptoms of a more profound disorder and incompleteness. Jesus' mission is twofold, 1) to deal effectively with the actual disease, not merely with its symptoms, and 2) he is called and commissioned to bring all of creation to its fullest potential in God. (Had there been no sin, Jesus' call would still have involved this second prong of his mission.)

Secondly, Jesus reminds us of John's lesson at the beginning of the week: [[this is love: that you receive the Love of God. . .]] While every homily I have heard on this lection refers to Jesus taking "time out" to pray in order to recharge his spiritual batteries and draws the lesson that ministers need to do similarly, I am convinced that true as this is, it is not precisely what the lection is getting at. That is especially true given the context in which we heard it two weeks ago when it was coupled with a series of readings from 1 John. Instead, focusing on Jesus' withdrawal to pray reminds us that more fundamentally ministry must always flow from contemplation. This is the dynamic of Dominican spirituality,  the way in which the Camaldolese especially but all Benedictines experience their call to a Gospel-centered life requiring serious silence and solitude. It is the way St Francis of Assisi and Clare experienced their own vocations and lived out their calls to evangelical poverty and today it is the explicit standard of the LCWR (Leadership Conference of Women Religious). Authentic ministers of the Gospel are always those who receive God's love, live from and mediate it. As with Jesus this is primary both foundationally and temporally.

Thirdly, Jesus shows us clearly that what we rightly discerned to be good and the will of God yesterday might not be the good we are called to today. It is not enough to be people who can discern good from evil or even the less authentic and more ambiguous from the more authentic; we must also be people who can and do discern the specific good we are called to at this specific point in time. This discernment is much harder than determining or choosing good from evil. Our most difficult choices are always between what is good and what is (perhaps) better today in this new situation. For this reason, discernment must be a way of life for us  because the will of God comes to us freshly at every moment and in every new circumstance.

The relevance of all this:

As a hermit my greatest difficulty in discernment comes in determining when to say yes and when to say no to opportunities for active ministry. At first I thought this was a difficulty that would go away in time. (Maybe I just needed practice I thought!) Later I came to see it was something that would always be with me; I simply hoped discerning would become easier and be needed less frequently. But now I realize that this tension is not only going to be present for some time, but that it calls for me to see discernment not as a process I only pull out occasionally to resolve problems or make big decisions but instead as the very basis of any Christian spirituality. As I read this week in a talk by Richard Gaillardetz (Ecclesiologist), Pope Francis speaks of a "spirituality of discernment" --- which is probably typically Jesuitical of him, but also of course, profoundly Christian. I have come to see that Paul's statement about Jesus' obedience unto death could also be translated as a corollary (or its presupposition!): Jesus was discerning in all things even unto death, death on a cross.

Moreover of course, I find a lot of reassurance in what 1 John says about the nature of love: it is first of all about receiving God (Love-in-act) in our lives and only secondarily about active ministry. As contemplatives know, the command that we abide in God, that we remain in the love which is God, is the heart of our own vocations and the heart of all truly Christian life. Often the choice I have to make between active ministry and withdrawal (anachoresis) will mean withdrawal; of course that is hardly surprising. After all, this is the overarching reality and context I am called to by God and the Church, just as it is the call I have publicly (canonically) committed to for the sake of others. Thus, when the choice presents itself,  I may well have to say no to active ministry, not because it is an evil (it emphatically is not that!), but because I am called in a fundamental way to something else first.  Thus, I MUST repeatedly discern my response anew, for what was good and the will of God yesterday may be less good than the alternative and not the will of God today.

This choice will not disappear from my life anytime soon --- and that is not at all a bad thing --- for not only does it indicate new opportunities for serving God and loving others continue to come my way; it also means I must continue to develop a spirituality of discernment which itself is essentially contemplative and solitary in the best sense. The presence of this choice as part of the constant dynamic of the vowed hermit who belongs integrally to a parish and diocese  further establishes the diocesan eremitical life as one of fundamental importance in the Church. In fact, we hermits especially embody the Gospel lection from two Friday's ago in a way which witnesses to the lesson it holds for every Christian. Namely, good and imperative as active ministry is, something more fundamental in our world needs healing and that, even for those living primarily ministerial lives, requires and is truly empowered only by the habit and foundation of obedient withdrawal in prayer.

How Does Jesus' Suffering Save Us?

[[Dear Sister O'Neal, how does Jesus' suffering save us or the world? I mean how does it work?I just can't understand this. Does God need this for some reason?]]

Thanks for your question.  I want to deal only with the question of Jesus' suffering in this post. For more about how the cross works please check out other articles on the theology of the cross.

First, Jesus' suffering per se is NOT salvific; it does not "save". Neither of itself does it reveal God to us nor make God exhaustively present in our world. (Jesus' suffering does reveal something of what it means to be truly human and it also points to the self-emptying compassion of God, but by itself it does not make the Triune God present in power.) However, this is absolutely not to say his suffering is unimportant or dispensable. It is not. What is true and what I will focus on here is that suffering calls for something in Jesus and allows for that which IS salvific. Jesus' suffering is a critical part of the incarnational weakness in which God's power will be made perfect and exhaustively revealed. To understand this it helps to think about how suffering works usually and what it calls for from us; then we can look at how it actually functions in Jesus' life but especially at his passion and death.

All of us know suffering, some very great suffering, and we know as well therefore that it pulls us in two directions. The first is fairly instinctive. We try to defend against the pain. We attempt to make ourselves less vulnerable in whatever ways we can. For physical pain we may use analgesics --- and, I would add, this is ordinarily entirely legitimate, especially in cases of severe chronic pain or when we need relief to function in important ways the pain would prevent. At the same time we may short circuit the growth in courage, endurance and openness suffering calls for. Finding a balance here is not always easy. Still, the point is the same, suffering per se is an evil in our world which can threaten our well-being, and, when severe, our very humanity (severe pain dehumanizes or at least has the potential to do so). Our first response is to try to ease it or end it in order to protect ourselves and the life we know and value. Prayer here (meaning our own pleas to God), especially in the beginning, may actually be an expression of this tendency to self-protection and resistance to being truly vulnerable. This entire response (or reaction) can itself, though in a different way, be dehumanizing,

The second response is NOT instinctive. It is an expression of something transcendent in us; it recognizes that to some extent suffering can be a source of growth and maturity, especially of our larger or true self. Significantly, suffering can help open us to our own weakness, helplessness, and poverty. Further it can open us to allowing ourselves to be more profoundly known by others, by ourselves, and ultimately by God. It calls for courage, endurance, a wider perspective than we usually entertain, and an openness to a meaning which is greater than we can even imagine. This response to suffering, this opening of ourselves to realities which lie beyond us and sustain and empower us beyond our own very real limitations allows the redemption of suffering and sometimes the healing of its causes. Prayer here may begin as a praying OUT OF our suffering, but when it reaches maturity and even fulfillment it becomes a praying OF our suffering --- that is a living out our suffering with and in the power and presence of God.

Jesus' Passion and Death:

Here we begin to understand why Jesus' suffering could be both essential and salvific. It is not, as you say, because God needs our suffering  --- for instance, in reparation for sin and offenses against his honor. It is not that there is some sort of cosmic quota of pain required, nor that some abstract notion of distributive or retributive justice requires it. Jesus is called to be the Incarnation of the Word of God in all of human life's moments and moods. He is called and commissioned to embody that Word exhaustively. He is called to be obedient, that is to hearken and respond to that Word so completely that call and response cannot be teased apart in him. He is called therefore to be prayer and to implicate God fully in a world dominated by the powers of sin and death. Part of coming to this perfect incarnation is suffering and doing so in ways that allow God into that "space" of  ultimate weakness, emptiness, and helplessness so that he may transform it (and us) with his presence. In a sense, especially to the degree we allow it, suffering hollows us out and intensifies our openness to the reality which can redeem it and everything else.



But what happens if Jesus' cry of aban-donment and his own admission that it is finished are the last words of the event we call "the cross"? What happens if godlessness and the powers of godlessness are the real victors? What happens if Jesus's descent into hell in abject openness and vulnerability to the emptiness, meaninglessness, and inhumanity of his suffering are the last word, the thing allowed by God to stand? What happens if the universally dehumanizing effects of Jesus' suffering were the final word? (After all,  he was dehumanized and those that tortured him were also dehumanized by their actions; the same is true of those who called for such shameful torture, betrayed Jesus' friendship or as Religious leaders administering the "Law of God" were otherwise complicit in this)?

It should be clear that without the resurrection there is nothing redemptive or salvific in Jesus' suffering. It is necessary, essential in fact as a condition of possibility, but it must be done in obedience (meaning without closing oneself to it in any way nor attempting to save oneself even while one remains open) to the One who CAN save and redeem this suffering. Further, God must respond to this obedience, enter into the abyss created by sin, death, and by Jesus' personal vulnerability and continuing openness. God must,  as a result, bring life out of death, meaning out of absurdity, ordered, fruitful reality out of chaos and nothingness, and communion (reconciliation) out of ultimate isolation and alienation or Jesus' suffering witnesses not to victory over these things but instead to foolishness, failure, arrogance and man's inhumanity to his fellows.

We can speak of God "needing" this suffering because he needs to be able to enter the most godless depths of human life and death but we cannot speak of God needing this suffering to satisfy some sort of offense done against him. The godless depths I have referred to are depths and dimensions within us and our world created by our own choices to exclude God. God cannot simply enter into these spaces by fiat because they are personal spaces which God will not violate lest he violate us at the same time. God, who respects our choices, must be invited or allowed in here. However,  in speaking of Jesus' taking on our sin we say that Jesus died for ALL. His obedient suffering makes it possible for God to enter into the realm of sin and death (realms of godlessness) created by human acts of rejection without violating the freedom of human beings who (universally) choose these. That is, Jesus' passion and resurrection is God's answer to ALL human sin.  More and more you and I need to allow God into our own sinful lives, but the powers of sin and godless or eternal death themselves have been defeated through the cross of an obedient Jesus. It was suffering that assisted in the deepening of Jesus' obedience, but it was his obedience in conjunction with the will of God that actually brought redemption.

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...we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. (Romans 5:3-5)

Who Will Save Me from this Body of Death?

I received a question yesterday regarding someone (a Catholic) who felt he was such a terrible sinner that he could not be forgiven by God. He felt abandoned by God and by Mary. The person who sent me this email had suggested the person offer up his sufferings and this person replied that they were the result of his sin; he could not offer them to God. He is entirely correct in this --- at least if this offering was meant to make the situation better in some propitiatory way. Such an offering could only make things worse. The ONLY solution to such a situation, and indeed to any of our situations of sinfulness is the mercy of God freely given and humbly received as wholly undeserved. I had already been writing a reflection on the first reading from Friday (Paul's letter to the Romans) so I decided to combine the two here.  Bearing in mind Paul's anguished and jubilant cry from Friday: "Who can save me from this body of death? Praise be to Jesus Christ!" my own response was as follows:

 If there is anything the Scriptures tell us again and again it is that God does not abandon ANYONE. (Even his abandonment of Christ was unique and more complex than simple much less absolute abandonment. Still, it was an expression of the abandonment we each deserve but which God in Christ also redeems.) In Christ, and especially in Christ's passion, God embraced the complete scope of sin and death so that we might be redeemed from these; in Christ he journeyed to the depths of hell to rescue those who were there. Israel failed again and again, committed idolatry, apostasy, etc etc, and NEVER did God abandon her.

It is prideful to believe the sins we commit are too big for God to forgive or the state of sin from which these come is too great for God to reconcile and heal. The only thing more dangerous is to refuse that forgiveness when it is offered; THAT is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin against the power of the Spirit working in us that says, "Let me forgive you and change your life." Your correspondent has not committed that sin, nor does he need to. The Holy Spirit will continue to prompt him to repent and to allow God to heal him. Even at the moment of death he will be asked to make a decision for or against God. In part this is what death is, the moment when we make a final choice which ratifies or denies the choices of our life.
 

This person need not offer his sufferings but he does need to trust in Christ's, especially in his obedience in his suffering and the sufficiency of these things together. There, Paul tells us, is nothing he can do on his own but get farther and farther from God. That was the point of Friday's first reading from Romans. If you recall Paul calls out, "Who will save me from this body of death (meaning this whole self under the sway of sin). Law can't do it, good works cannot do it, offering up our own puny sufferings cannot do it (even those which are not the fruit of our own sin!). Only God in Christ can do it. While you say you pray that God might act on this person's behalf, there is no might about Jesus or God doing so or acting to free him from his sin.He has already done so in Jesus' passion, death, and resurrection. The Church mediates that to us in innumerable ways. But this person must allow that to be true in his own life. Again, as the reading from Friday and today make clear, there is simply NOTHING we can do on our own. We are enslaved by sin Unless and Until we allow grace to work in us. Grace is unmerited always and everywhere. God offers us the grace of the victory already achieved by Christ time after time every day of our lives. We have to admit, with Paul, that the only answer to our enslavement is to accept that forgiveness, mercy, acceptance, etc on God's own terms, that is, without ANY sense that we have merited or earned it.

 The temptation to do something religious (including offering up our sufferings) to earn God's forgiveness is the most pernicious and dangerous temptation people face. I would argue it is far more dangerous than the temptation to sexual sins, etc precisely because we mistakenly believe it is unequivocally good at all times. Paul knew this well. He knew that the Law acted as temptation in peoples' lives and so, he came to see it as a school master --- not to teach us what was good, but to instruct us about our weakness and incapacity to do anything salvific -- or even anything good --- on our own. In fact, Paul actually says that God gave us the Law for this very purpose and even so that our own state of sin might be intensified in such a way as to make us ready to cry out for a redeemer. That redeemer has been given to us. His death, resurrection and ascension have accomplished that redemption. We simply have to receive him and the new life he offers us as Paul himself did --- with cries of both abject helplessness and gratitude. 

Paul teaches emphatically: [[You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.]] While we were entirely powerless, while we were godless sinners estranged from God, from our deepest selves, and from the whole of creation, while, that is, we were wholly incapable of acting in a way which would resolve the situation but instead made things ever worse, God acted out of an unfathomable love to reconcile us to our truest selves, to Godself, others and to creation.  This is the GOOD NEWS from which we live and which we proclaim --- nothing other and nothing less.

I hope this is helpful.

A note on translations. Some versions of last Friday's first lection read "Who will save me from this mortal body?" I prefer, "Who will save me from this body of death?" because it more clearly connotes a self enslaved by the powers of sin and death. "Mortal body" is too easy to hear as simply referring to a material body which is finite and will die. Body of death refers more powerfully to a self in whom death is actively at work, not only in ourselves but in the world around us, a body (self) which makes death present as a sort of awful and active "contagion". In Paul's theology human beings find themselves to be either a whole self under the sway (enslavement) of sin (for which Paul uses the terms, "flesh body", "flesh" or "body of death") or under the sway (enslavement) of grace (for which he uses the term "Spiritual body", etc.).

Moving from Fear to Love: Ours is not a God Who Punishes Evil!

Today's readings speak to us in profound and very challenging ways I think. The first, which I am going to focus on here, is from Genesis 18 and recounts a dialogue between Abraham (the Father of Faith and one whose faith is counted as righteousness) and God over whether God will indeed destroy Sodom if a number of righteous people can be found there. You remember it no doubt: God has heard rumors of the tremendous evil of this city and determines he will find out for himself. If things are as bad as he has heard, then he will destroy the city and everyone therein.

Abraham, the representative of true faith, in a remarkably frank conversation with God, asks a series of questions: What if you find fifty righteous persons, will you destroy everyone? "Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?" (Remember that when God destroys evil innocence is also destroyed; the world, after all, is ambiguous and that is true of each and all of us as well.) How about 45? What about 30? 20? and so forth. In each case, God answers that he would not destroy the whole city if x or y righteous men were found therein, and even only 10 righteous persons are found there. But what is the author of Genesis really trying to say here? Is he revealing a God of vengeance whose justice is retributive and who punishes us for our evil? Is he revealing a God with whom we are called to bargain or remonstrate, a God who will be swayed by our superior reason,  or who may be cajoled into changing his mind if the case made is eloquent enough? Is he revealing a fickle and capricious God who is moved hither and yon like a reed blowing in the wind?

I think reading the text in this way would be a profound mistake. It would then become a variation on the idea that the God of Israel revealed in the OT is essentially different than the God of Christians, that, in fact, he is a God of vengeance where the God revealed by Jesus Christ is a God of mercy. But this story is not an attempt to paint a picture of a God of vengeance or retributive justice being reminded by a reasonable and faithful human being of “the bigger picture”! Instead I think the author is recounting the history of Israel and her own coming to know and reveal the real God; this history is captured or personified in Abraham's dialogue with God as more and more clearly he establishes that Yahweh is not the God who punishes evil (evil is its own punishment and carries its own consequences) nor the one who is wed to an abstract notion of justice which he upholds at the expense of the innocent. Instead Abraham's dialogue gradually reveals to us a God Israel herself slowly comes to know more fully only through her repeated experiences of God's faithfulness, mercy, and compassion. In this dialogue it is not God’s mind that is changed, but Abraham’s (Israel's) as, with questions of increasing wonder and disbelief, he tries to establish and plumb the depths of God’s mercy. It is a God for whom the concrete life of the least and the lost is more important than the most common and convincing principle of justice while the presence of the slightest bit of good is more compelling than a world full of evil. It is the God we come to know in authentic faith.

When we compare the OT and NT side by side what we really see are not two essentially different Gods, but many stories of the movement in history from distorted, inadequate, or partial images and faith to more adequate and fuller images of God and forms of faith; it is the movement from fragmentary, distorted, and partial revelations of a punitive God to the exhaustive revelation of the God of mercy in the Christ Event. The OT is the record of a People coming to be from members of many different cultures and religions --- and doing so as its members outgrow their original theologies and related anthropologies under the influence of repeated experiences of Yahweh's faithfulness, mercy, and compassion. The OT is a history of the progressive (and often inconsistent) purification of Israel's minds and hearts regarding who God is and what constitutes true religion. It is through this purification that they mature as God's own People and persons of true faith. In today's story especially we are listening to Israel slowly relinquish belief in the God who punishes evil and evil doers, the God whose justice is at war with (his) mercy and whose compassion conflicts with his need for retribution or vindication; she does this only in so far as she affirms her own deepest experiences of God and, in an attempt to resolve it, pushes the tension between these two "theological worlds" to the limits of her imagination and narrative capacity.

She has done this in other stories too. There is the story of the flood where retributive justice wars with compassion and eventually in an act of radical humility and self-emptying God "repents" and promises never to destroy the world in this way again. There is the story of the sacrifice of Isaac where Abraham's hand is stayed by God just as he is ready to plunge the knife into Isaac's chest, and where a different and acceptable sacrifice is provided by God. While this story foreshadows God's own gift of Jesus and Jesus' own sacrifice, it also originally served to proclaim an end to human sacrifice because the God of Israel was NOT a God who required retribution for evil. The God of Israel was different and had a different way of doing justice. He called for Israel to embrace a different religious practice so that they could know and serve him intimately as a light to the Nations. It is no wonder that idolatry looms so large in the failures outlined by Israel. The struggle between false gods and ideas of god and Israel's most profound experience of God's own actions in her life characterized her on every level of her existence --- personal, historical, individual, corporate.

In many ways this struggle and story reprises our own as well. After getting his disciples in touch with who OTHERS say that he is, it is not surprising that Jesus' most critical question to them is, "And you, who do YOU say that I am?" This tension and movement between what we have been told of God and who we actually know in light of our own experiences of his faithfulness, compassion, and mercy is a dominant thread in our own spiritual journeys as well.

In particular, letting go of our belief in the God who punishes evil (or sends evil to punish us!!!), our belief in the God who is the focus of a theology of fear in order to exhaustively embrace the God revealed on the Cross, the God who asserts his rights (i.e., does justice) by loving unconditionally, who sets everything right and fulfills it through forgiveness and mercy, is not an easy task. Everything militates against this; whether it is family history, grade school catechetics, punitive nuns, theologically unsophisticated preaching and writing on hell, judgment, or our own super egos, this is one bit of idolatry, one bit of "worldliness" or pagan theology that is hard to shake.

Our inability to really believe in the power of the love of God may be the real face of unbelief in our own lives and in our Church today. Like Israel however (and, through the exhaustive revelation of God in Christ) we can do it only by allowing  the non-punitive God who is Love-in-Act to truly be our Lord and Master. Each day we are called on to discern both who others say that God is, and who we ourselves say that he is. Each day we are called on to allow our own hearts and minds to be purified by the God of Jesus Christ as we experience him. Each day we are called on to become Christians who believe more and more firmly and completely in the loving God he reveals and no other --- not the God who punishes evil but the One who submits entirely to it himself, transforms and redeems it with his presence, and thus (in time) loves the world into wholeness.

Thomas Called Didymus, What's his "Doubt" REALLY all about?

Today's Gospel focuses on the appearances of Jesus to the disciples, and one of the lessons one should draw from these stories is that we are indeed dealing with bodily resurrection, but therefore, with a kind of bodiliness which transcends the corporeality we know here and now. It is very clear that Jesus' presence among his disciples is not simply a spiritual one, in other words, and that part of Christian hope is the hope that we as embodied persons will come to perfection beyond the limits of death. It is not just our souls which are meant to be part of the new heaven and earth, but our whole selves, body and soul.

The scenario with Thomas continues this theme, but is contextualized (or de-contextualized and taken out of the early community's intense struggle to accept a crucified messiah!) in a way which most often leads homilists to focus on the whole dynamic of faith with seeing, and faith despite not having seen. It also makes doubt the same as unbelief and plays these off against faith, as though faith cannot also be served by doubt. But doubt and unbelief are decidedly NOT the same things. We rarely see Thomas as the one whose doubt (or, I think more accurately, whose demands!) SERVES true faith, and yet, that is what today's Gospel is about. Meanwhile, Thomas also tends to get a bad rap as the one who was separated from the community and doubted what he had not seen with his own eyes. The corollary here is the belief that Thomas will not simply listen to his brother and sister disciples and believe that the Lord has appeared to or visited them. But I think there is something far more significant going on in Thomas' proclamation that unless he sees the wounds inflicted on Jesus in the crucifixion and even puts his fingers in the very nail holes, he will not believe.

What I think the story about Thomas wants to make very clear is that we Christians believe in a crucified Christ, and that the resurrection was God's act of validation of Jesus as scandalously and ignominiously Crucified. I think Thomas knows on some level anyway, that insofar as the resurrection really occurred, it does not nullify what was achieved on the cross. Instead it renders permanently valid what was revealed (made manifest and made real) there. In other words, Thomas knows if the resurrection is really God's validation of Jesus' life and establishes him as God's Christ, the Lord he will meet is the one permanently established and marked as the crucified One. The crucifixion was not some great misunderstanding which could be wiped away by resurrection. Instead it was an integral part of the revelation of the nature of truly human and truly divine existence. Whether it is the Divine life, authentic human existence, or sinful human life --- all are marked and revealed in one way or another by the signs of Jesus' cross. For instance, ours is a God who has journeyed to the very darkest, godless places or realms human sin produces, and has become Lord of even those places. He does not disdain them even now but is marked by them and will journey with us there --- whether we are open to him doing so or not --- because Jesus has implicated God there and through his passion he has allowed God to be eternally marked with the wounds of an exhaustive kenosis.

Another piece of this is that Jesus is, as Paul tells us, the end of the Law and it was Law that crucified him. The nail holes and wounds in Jesus' side and head -- indeed every laceration which marked him -- are a sign of legal execution -- both in terms of Jewish and Roman law. We cannot forget this, and Thomas' insistence that he really be dealing with the Crucified One reminds us vividly of this fact as well. The Jewish and Roman leaders did not crucify Jesus because they misunderstood him, but because they understood all-too-clearly both Jesus and the immense power he wielded in his weakness and poverty. They understood that he could turn the values of this world, its notions of power, authority, and more, on their heads. They knew that he could foment profound revolution (religious and otherwise) wherever he had followers. They chose to crucify him not only to put an end to his life, but to demonstrate he was a fraud who could not possibly have come from God; they chose to crucify him to terrify those who might follow him into all the places discipleship might really lead them --- especially those places of human power and influence associated with religion and politics. The marks of the cross are a judgment (krisis) on this whole reality.

There are many gods and even partial or fragmentary manifestations of the real God available to us today, and so there were to Thomas and his brethren in those first days and weeks following the crucifixion of Jesus. When Thomas made his declaration about what he would and would not believe, none but one of these were crucified Gods or would be worthy of being believed in if they were associated with such shame and godlessness. Thomas knew how very easy it would be for his brother and sister disciples to latch onto one of these, or even to fall back on entirely traditional notions in reaction to the terribly devastating disappointment and shame of Jesus' crucifixion. He knew, I think, how easy it might be to call the crucifixion and all it symbolized a terrible misunderstanding which God simply reversed or wiped away with the resurrection -- a distasteful chapter on which God has simply turned the page. Thomas knew that false prophets showed up all the time. He knew that a God who is distant and all-powerful is much easier to believe in (and follow) than one who walks with us even in our sinfulness or who empties himself to become subject to the powers of sin and death --- especially in the awful scandal and ignominy of the cross --- and one who expects us to do essentially the same.

In other words, Thomas' doubt (or, what is sometimes seen as outright unbelief) may have had less to do with the FACT of a resurrection, than it was a profound insight that had to do with his concern that the disciples, in their desperation, guilt, and the immense social pressure they faced, had truly met and clung to the real Lord, the crucified One. In this way their own discipleship will come to be marked by the signs of the cross as they preach, suffer, and serve in the name (and so, in the paradoxical power) of THIS crucified Lord and no other. Only he could inspire them; only he could sustain them; only he could accompany them wherever true discipleship led them.

Paul said, "I want to know Christ crucified and only Christ crucified" because only this Christ had transformed sinful, godless reality with his presence, only this Christ had redeemed even the realms of sin and death by remaining open to God even within these realities. Only this Christ would journey with us to the unexpected and unacceptable places, and in fact, only he would meet us there with the promise and presence of a God who would bring life out of them. Thomas, I believe, knew precisely what Paul would soon proclaim himself, and it is this, I think, which stands behind his insistence to see the wounds and put his fingers in the very nail holes. He wanted to be sure his brethren were putting their faith in the crucified One, the one who turned everything upside down and relativized every other picture of God we might believe in. He became the great doubter because of this, but I suspect instead, he was the most astute theologian among the original Apostles. He, like Paul, wanted to know Christ Crucified and ONLY Christ Crucified.

We should not trivialize Thomas' witness by transforming him into a run of the mill empiricist and doubter (though doubting is an important piece of growth in faith) much less into one who actually refused to believe!! Instead we should imitate his insistence on "seeing the wounds" of Jesus in every version of him proclaimed to us; we are called upon to be followers of the Crucified Lord, and no other. Every version of God we meet should be closely examined for nail holes, and the lance wound. Every one should be checked for signs that this God is capable of and generous enough to assume such suffering on behalf of a creation he would reconcile and make whole. Only then do we know this IS the God proclaimed in the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, the only one worthy of being followed even into the darkest reaches of human sin and death, the only One who meets us in the unexpected and even unacceptable place, the only one who loves us with an eternal love from which nothing can separate us.

Alleluia!! Christ is Risen! Indeed he is Risen! Alleluia, Alleluia!

Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!!! All good wishes for a wonderful Easter Season!!

For the next 50 days we have time to attend to what Jesus' death and resurrection changed. In light of these events we live in a different world than existed before them, and we ourselves, by virtue of our Baptism into Christ's death, are new creations as well. While all this makes beautiful poetry, and although as John Ciardi once reminded us poetry can save us in dark alleys, we do not base our lives on poetry alone. Objective reality was transformed with Jesus' passion and death; something astounding, universal, even cosmic in scope, happened in these events which had not only to do with our own salvation but with the recreation of all of reality. One of Paul's shorthand phrases for this transformation was "the death of death," something I hope to be able to look at a bit more as these 50 days unfold. We have already begun to see what happens in our Church as Christ's own life begins to shine forth more brightly in a myriad of small but significant ways. Not least is the figure of Francis who has many of us singing a heartfelt alleluia in gratitude to the Holy Spirit.

But, it is probably good to recall that the early Church struggled to make sense of the cross, and that faith in resurrection took some time to take hold. Surprisingly, no single theology of the cross is held as official, and variations --- many quite destructive --- exist throughout the Church. Even today a number of these mistakenly affirm that in various ways God was reconciled to us rather than the other way around. Only in time did the Church come to terms with the scandalous death of Jesus and embrace him as risen, and so, as the Christ who reveals God's power in weakness. Only in time did she come to understand how different the world was for those who had been baptized into Jesus' death. The Church offers us a period of time to come to understand and embrace all of this as well; the time from Easter Sunday through Pentecost is, in part, geared to this.

But, today is a day of celebration, and a day to simply allow the shock and sadness of the cross to be completely relieved for the moment. Lent is over, the Triduum has reached a joyful climax, the season of Easter has begun and we once again sing alleluia at our liturgies. Though it will take time to fully understand and embrace all this means, through the Church's liturgies and the readings we have heard we do sense that we now live in a world where death has a different character and meaning than it did before Christ's resurrection and so does life. On this day darkness has given way to light, and senselessness to meaning -- even though we may not really be able to explain to ourselves or others exactly why or how. On this day we proclaim that Christ is risen! Sinful death could not hold him and it cannot hold us as a result. Alleluia! Alleluia!!

We Wait in the Darkness

In trying to explain the Cross, Paul once said, "Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more." During this last week, the Gospel readings focus us on the first part of Paul's statement.

In the Gospel for last Tuesday we heard John's version of the story of Judas' betrayal of Jesus and the prediction of Peter's denials as well. For weeks before this we had been hearing stories of a growing darkness and threat centered on the person of Jesus. Pharisees and Scribes were irritated and angry with Jesus at the facile way he broke Sabbath rules or his easy communion with and forgiveness of sinners. That he spoke with an authority the people recognized as new and surpassing theirs was also problematical. Family and disciples failed to understand him, thought him crazy, urged him to go to Jerusalem to work wonders and become famous.

Even his miracles were disquieting, not only because they increased the negative reaction of the religious leadership and the fear of the Romans as the darkness and threat continued to grow alongside them, but because Jesus himself seems to give us the sense that they are insufficient  and lead to misunderstandings and distortions of who he is or what he is really about. "Be silent!" we often hear him say. "Tell no one about this!" he instructs in the face of the increasing threat to his life. Futile instructions, of course, and, as those healed proclaim the wonders of God's grace in their lives, the darkness and threat to Jesus grows; The night comes ever nearer and we know that if evil is to be defeated, it must occur on a deeper level than even thousands of such miracles.

In the last two weeks, the readings give us the sense that the last nine months of Jesus' life of ministry was punctuated by retreat to a variety of safe houses as the priestly aristocracy actively looked for ways to kill him. He attended festivals in secret and the threat of stoning recurred again and again. Yet, inexplicably "He slipped away" we are told or, "They were unable to find an opening." The darkness is held at bay, barely. It is held in check by the love of the people surrounding Jesus. Barely. And in the last safe house on the eve of Passover as darkness closes in on every side Jesus celebrated a final Eucharist with his friends and disciples. He washed their feet, reclined at table with them like free men did. And yet, profoundly troubled, Jesus spoke of his impending betrayal by Judas. None of the disciples, not even the beloved disciple understood what was happening. There is one last chance for Judas to change his mind as Jesus hands him a morsel of bread in friendship and love. God's covenant faithfulness is maintained.

But Satan enters Judas' heart and a friend of Jesus becomes his accuser --- the meaning of the term Satan here. And the darkness enters this last safe house of light and friendship, faith and fellowship. It was night, John says. It was night. Judas' heart is the opening needed for the threatening darkness to engulf this place and Jesus as well. The prediction of Peter's denials tells us this "night" will get darker and colder and more empty yet.  But in John's story, when everything is at its darkest and lowest, Jesus exclaims in a kind of victory cry: [[ Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him!]] Here as darkness envelopes everything, Jesus exults that authentically human being is revealed, made known and made real in space and time; here, in the midst of  the deepening "Night" God too is revealed and made fully known and real in space and time. It is either the cry of a messiah who will overcome evil right at its heart --- or it is the cry of a madman who cannot recognize or admit the victory of evil as it swallows him up. We do not really know which.

In the next three days we will see what the answer is. Today, the day we call "Good," the darkness intensifies. During the night Jesus was arrested and "tried" by the Sanhedrin with the help of false witnesses, desertion by his disciples, and Judas' betrayal. Today he will be brought before the Romans, tried, found innocent, flogged and then handed over anyway by a fearful self-absorbed leader to those who would kill him. There is betrayal, of consciences, of friendships, of discipleship on every side. The night continues to deepen and the threat could not be greater.  Jesus will be crucified and eventually cry out his experience of abandonment even by God. He will descend into the ultimate godlessness, loneliness, and powerlessness we call hell. The darkness will become almost total. We ourselves can see nothing else. That is where Good Friday and Holy Saturday leave us. Messiah or madman? Is Jesus simply another person crushed by the cold, emptiness, and darkness of evil --- good and wondrous though his own works were? We Christians wait in the darkness today and tomorrow. We fast and pray and try to hold onto hope that the one we called messiah, teacher, friend, beloved, and Lord, was not simply deluded --- or worse --- and that we Christians are not the greatest fools of all.

We have seen sin increase to immeasurable degrees; and though we do not see how it is possible we would like to think that Paul was right and that grace will abound all the more. And so, we wait. Bereft, but hopeful, we wait.

Jesus' Descent into Hell (Reprise)

The following piece was written for my parish bulletin for Palm Sunday 2012. It is, therefore, necessarily brief but I hope it captures the heart of the credal article re Jesus' descent into Hell.

During Holy week we recall and celebrate the central events of our faith which reveal just how deep and incontrovertible is God's love for us. It is the climax of a story of "self-emptying" on God's part begun in creation and completed in the events of the cross. In Christ, and especially through his openness and responsiveness (i.e., his obedience) to the One he calls Abba, God enters exhaustively into every aspect of our human existence and in no way spares himself the cost of such solidarity. Here God is revealed as an unremitting Love which pursues us without pause or limit. Even our sinfulness cannot diminish or ultimately confound this love. Nothing, the gospel proclaims, will keep God from embracing and bringing us “home” to Himself. As the Scriptures remind us, our God loves us with a love that is “stronger than death." It is a love from which, “Neither death nor life, nor powers nor principalities, nor heights nor depths, nor anything at all” can ultimately separate us!

It is only against this Scriptural background that we make sense of the article of the Apostles’ Creed known as Jesus’ “descent into hell”. Hell is, after all, not the creation of an offended God designed to punish us; it is a state of ultimate emptiness, inhumanity, loneliness, and lovelessness which is created, sustained, and exacerbated (made worse) by every choice we make to shut God out --- to live, and therefore to die, without Love itself. Hell is the fullest expression of the alienation which exists between human beings and God. As Benedict XVI writes, it is that “abyss of absolute loneliness” which “can no longer be penetrated by the word of another” and“into which love can no longer advance.” And yet, in Christ God himself will advance into this abyss and transform it with his presence. Through the sinful death of God’s Son, Love will become present even here.

To say that Christ died what the New Testament refers to as sinful, godless, “eternal”, or “second death” is to say that through his passion Jesus entered this abyss and bore the full weight of human isolation and Divine abandonment. In this abject loneliness and hopelessness --- a hell deeper than anyone has ever known before or will ever know again --- Christ, though completely powerless to act on his own, remains open and potentially responsive to God. This openness provides God with a way into this state or place from which he is otherwise excluded. In Christ godforsakenness becomes the good soil out of which the fullness of resurrection life springs. As a result, neither sin nor death will ever have the final word, or be a final silence! God will not and has not permitted it!

The credal article affirming Jesus’ descent into hell was born not from the church’s concern with the punishing wrath of God, but from her profound appreciation of the depth of God’s love for us and the lengths to which God would go to redeem us. What seems at first to be an unreservedly dark affirmation, meant mainly to terrify and chasten with foreboding, is instead the church's most paradoxical statement of the gospel of God’s prodigal love. It is a stark symbol of what it costs God to destroy that which separates us from Love and bring us to abundant Life. It says that forgiveness is not about God changing his mind about us – much less having his anger appeased or his honor restored through his Son’s suffering and death. Instead, it is God’s steadfast refusal to let the alienation of sin stand eternally. In reconciling us to himself, God asserts his Lordship precisely in refusing to allow enmity and alienation to remain as lasting realities in our lives or world.

You do Not Know God; Naturally You do Not Know Me!

Today's Gospel gives me a lot to think about. In particular it makes me recall one of the most surprising (stunning!) moments of my theological education. It came during one of the first classes I ever had with Prof John Dwyer when he asked us generally, "Who is Jesus?" We gave a number of answers but the best one we thought was, "Jesus is the Son of God!" John followed up with another question, an extremely logical question: "And who, then, is God?" We were stunned to silence. John went on to explain, "You see, you thought that calling Jesus the Son of God was the best thing you could say about him, the most meaningful, the greatest content, etc; but really it says nothing at all about Jesus because apart from Jesus, we do not know God; Jesus is the One who reveals the real God to us. It is important to say that Jesus is God's Son, but first of all, we must recognize that he is the One who reveals God to us; he is the One who makes God real in space and time." Everything in the rest of the course had to do with Jesus and the One he makes known and real to us in space and time (the two main meanings of the term "reveal").

Everything about that moment when I realized that doing theology with Jesus at the center of things would turn everything I thought and believed and understood on their head came back to me as I was praying with today's Gospel. I could well imagine how the folks in Jerusalem would have felt about Jesus' confrontation with them when he says essentially, "It is not that you know God and simply can't make up your mind about me and whether I am from him or not; it is really that you do NOT know God!!" If I were looking for reasons Jesus was crucified, that would certainly be a very large nail in his Cross! But, let's look at the readings yesterday and see how they move us closer to Holy Week and the way the Cross saves as well.

Brothers, Leadership, Romans, Disciples --- No one really gets Jesus

It is Autumn and time for the Feast of Booths or Taber-nacles, one of three Feasts of Pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  The booths are the place where Jews meet God and offer sacrifice. Jesus' brothers are encouraging him to come with them so that he can work more miracles and become famous and influential. "No one becomes famous if they do their work in secret!", they remind him. Of course, we all know that the REAL work will be done in secret --- in the secret darkness of the sin and death and hell Jesus takes on. But Jesus' brothers do not get what he is about yet. They may entertain the idea of his messiahship, but it is one marked by wonder working and, as appropriate to the Feast of Booths, to freeing Israel from the oppression of Rome. It is not marked by failure, ignominy, shame or a power made perfect in weakness. No, this Feast is not the One Jesus will "celebrate"; his comes later, in the Spring. He will go openly to Jerusalem for the Passover where the real sacrifice will be celebrated and the real victory over oppression will be won.

And of course Jesus' brothers aren't alone in their doubt about Jesus. The Jerusalem leaders are out to kill Jesus --- though they are very clear about the threat he poses to the Temple system with his preferential option for the poor and marginalized, his freely given forgiveness and notions of repentance which bypass the Temple sacrificial system. They don't know who he is but they do understand him better than Jesus' disciples! The disciples who are in Jerusalem waiting for more powerful works also don't ever quite get it nor do the the pilgrims to Jerusalem --- some of whom think he is a good man, some of whom think he is deluding the people, and some of whom  just don't know. All of these folks are in the City to celebrate the God they know as Creator and Law Giver and the One who brought them out of Egypt. Imagine how they must have felt when Jesus says, [[You know who I am and where I am from; but the One who sent me is true and you do NOT know him!]] In other words, [[It is not that you know God and merely cannot decide if I am from him; rather, you do NOT know God and so, naturally you do not associate me with him.]] Like some of us in that theology class, I would guess they were stunned, and angered too. I am sure they knew why the Jewish leadership (and especially the priestly aristocracy) wanted to put Jesus to death!

A Key to How the Cross Saves:

The most difficult piece of Christian Theology is the question of how the cross works. I wrote a few days ago about Christ entering into the godless depths of human existence and, through his openness and responsiveness, his dependence upon God to bring life out of death and meaning out of senselessness, he was able to implicate God into not only the unanticipated places, but the unacceptable ones as well. A related piece needed to clarify how the Cross saves is pointed to by Jesus' assertion that no one questioning or persecuting him knows God.

Jesus reveals God to us. Not only does he show us who God is but he makes God present in space and time, and we learn that he is the One Paul extols in Romans 8. The One Jesus allows to be exhaustively present is the God who allows neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depths, nor anything else in all creation to separate us from his love. [[No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.]] Through obedience unto death, and more, to (shameful, godless) death on a cross, Jesus opens every moment and mood of creation to the one he calls Abba, and nothing will ever be the same again.

But Jesus' death and resurrection reveals (makes known and real in history) one more thing that has been missing from the fallen creation: viz, authentic humanity. The portraits of inauthentic humanity abound during Holy Week and especially on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. The arrogant, frightened, self-assertive, cowardly, betrayers and abandoners, liars, torturers, thieves, self-absorbed and merely duty-bound are ever-present. But Jesus is truly human and shows us the depths of what this means. He loves God with his whole heart and mind and soul and depends on him even when he feels abandoned. He loves himself, and acts with integrity, even when he is terrified, shamed beyond belief, tortured beyond all physical limits and is incapable of any action whatever as death leads to his descent into hell. In spite of everything he remains open and responsive to God in trust that even though he does not see how, God will bring his Reign out of even the depths of sinful death and hell. He gives his entire life for others and shows them his own love for them in the process.

We call Jesus Emmanuel, God with us, for apart from him we truly do not know God. Oh, we can reason to a Creator God, and we can do the same with a Lawgiver God. We can reason to One who is the ground of being and meaning and truth and beauty and mystery and one who hates sin and will judge us for that; but we cannot reason to a God who loves us as unreservedly as is revealed on the cross. We cannot reason to a God who allows absolutely nothing to stand between us and his love. Neither can we reason to an authentic humanity. That is something that can only be revealed and which we need to be initiated into as we are in Baptism. Thus, the cross saves by 1) making God present in even the godless places of our lives and destroying those by transforming them with his presence; 2) by making truly human existence possible for the first time in Christ and initiating us into it through our baptism into his death; 3) by reconciling the entire creation to himself in a preparation for the day when God will be all in all. In each of these ways God changes not only reality per se, but our hearts and the way we see reality as well. In each of these ways God establishes his sovereignty, his Reign over creation.

Followup Questions, Theology of the Cross

[[Dear Sister, thank you for your post on the cross. When I was growing up we heard the idea that  our salvation was bought with every stroke of the whip and every stroke of the hammer. We also heard that our sins were like adding strokes to those. It is confusing to think that Jesus' suffering per se does not save us but that it is his obedience that does. Can you help me understand this? . . .]]

Thanks for the chance to clarify what I have already written. When we think of the extremity of what Jesus suffered, not just physically, but in terms of failure (because his project did look to end in failure) and shame as well, I think we begin to see more clearly how difficult obedience (openness and responsiveness to God) really was for him --- and also how critical. The temptation to close ourselves off from suffering, to shut down physically, mentally, emotionally, psychically, etc is never stronger than when we are in pain. This will usually include the kind of shockiness we experience when we are betrayed or treated with incredible insensitivity and cruelty. It can include all the mental gymnastics or defense mechanisms we "naturally" fall into regarding blame, justification, defensiveness, refusal to stay in the present moment, etc.

The problem here is that when we start to shut down, or when we act in ways which seem to allow us (ourselves) to regain some control, we shut down to other things as well and we will not be WHOLLY dependent on God to bring what he can both within and out of the situation. (We may open to God afterward and ordinarily this seems to be the reasonable thing to do, but we do not usually remain open to God during such situations. In other words, we may pray AFTER the situation is over, and we may call out to God to take us out of the situation, but we tend not to pray the situation itself.) Obedience in the NT sense is very difficult for us because we really are sinners, we really are estranged from God. Jesus, who was not estranged from God, prayed the whole situation and what he found was human betrayal, desertion, and divine abandonment! Even then he remained faithful and trusted in God. Even then he remained open to whatever God would do with him and with this situation.

Because of his openness every bit of Jesus' suffering was unmitigated --- including his experience of God's absence. We see this symbolized in his refusal of the gall-laced-wine; we see it in his refusal to speak in front of Pilate (no defenses, no explanations, no mitigation), we see it in his experience in Gethsemane and his cry of abandonment on the cross (surely the very worst thing Jesus himself experienced!). And yet, this unreserved openness to suffering was the measure of his openness to God's will as well.

Still, unless God enters into the situation it speaks mainly of sin's victory over God's anointed one. If Jesus had merely remained good and dead, his suffering would have been for nothing. More, it would have proven the God he believed in so exhaustively does NOT have the power to definitively overcome sin and godless death and human cruelty, ambition, etc, etc will have the last word. The Kingdom Jesus proclaimed would have been a fraud --- or perhaps Jesus' delusion. As Paul says so tellingly, [[If Jesus is not risen from the dead we (Christians) are the greatest fools of all.]] So, while I am not saying that his suffering was unimportant (it was critical in deepening and extending his obedience to God) it was not his suffering per se that was salvific.