Exalting the Cross: Another Look at the Theology of the Cross and its Timeliness

Yesterday, a bit late, but also just as it needed to be, a group of us from the parish got together for lunch at a local restaurant to celebrate my birthday (Sept 1st) and 18th anniversary of eremitical consecration (Sept 2nd). It was a terrific party with about 20 of us! Because it didn't happen on the long Labor Day weekend, one person noted it may have been a better occasion than had we tried to celebrate on my actual anniversaries. Given the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, I was not surprised that one of the guests present, wearing a Camino T-shirt, asked me how I understood the cross and what it reveals to us. (At the same time, this is exactly the kind of thing this person would ask about, given her interests and faith!!) Anyway, given the timeliness of the question, I thought I would reprise and enlarge on the answer I gave my friend yesterday afternoon. 

My essential answer was that the cross reveals God to us as the One who wills to be Emmanuel, God With Us, in every moment and mood of our lives, including sin, death, and even godless death. Paul says this in a couple of ways. Our God is revealed in Christ as the One who will allow nothing to separate us from his love (Rom 8). He is the God who, where sin abounds, will be certain his grace (that is, his powerful presence) abounds all the more (Rom 5). Or again, he is the God whose power is perfected in weakness (2 Cor 12:9). And finally, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19). To know Christ crucified, and thus, to understand the Cross, is to know God who comes to us in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place and dwells with us in unimaginable mercy and love.

There is another way of thinking about the Cross as revelatory, and that refers to the ways the Cross makes Human Existence known and also real in space and time (the term revelation has both of these meanings). The Cross of Christ not only reveals the nature of God, it also reveals (makes known and real in space and time) authentic humanity. Here Christ is the paradigm of what it means to be fully and truly human, allowing God to be God With Us even in the depths of that which we ordinarily consider godless, namely, sin and death --- even, as Paul says, death on a cross. Moreover, Jesus does this for our sake, for the sake of our reconciliation with God, leading us to human wholeness and fullness of life. To live life as those called to allow God to journey with us in every moment and mood of our lives, and to do so for God's sake, and for the sake of God's creation, is the essence of authentic humanity. All of this is symbolized by the phrases "Self-emptying" or "dying to self", where both of these imply our own incompleteness without God and the distortion we become whenever we try to go it alone or become a law unto ourselves.

A third way of seeing the Cross as revelatory has to do with the fact that it epitomizes our capacity for sin and inhumanity. God did not will Jesus' suffering and death, though I personally have no doubt he knew what he did will would entail Jesus' passion and death at the hands of godless men. God gives us innumerable gifts, and we trivialize, profane, idolize, and otherwise pervert and destroy them. When God gives his only begotten Son to us, the Cross reveals what, all too often, we do with such a precious gift, often in the name of religion! 

All of these forms of revelation depend upon human obedience or disobedience to God. That is, in the cases of Divinity and authentic humanity, Jesus reveals these by remaining open (attentive and responsive) to the will of God being Emmanuel at every moment of his life. This includes his passion and godless death on a Cross. It is because of this openness that God can be the God he wills to be. Because of Jesus' obedience unto death, even death on a cross, there is no moment or mood, no height nor depth from which God's merciful, loving, powerful presence is excluded any longer.  (This is nothing less than the will to reconcile all of creation and forgive sin!)  Jesus' openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness to God's will to be Emmanuel is the mark of authentic humanity and the measure of what it means to be God's own counterpart here in the created world. Its antithesis is disobedience, the refusal to remain open, attentive, and truly responsive to God in all of the surprising and even apparently offensive ways God wills to be present to and with us. 

The tragic irony here is that it is the religious leadership of Jesus' day that pretended to know and understand God, and that manifested the most destructive disobedience to God. When coupled with a civic authority capable of executing those who threaten their autonomy, the result is the torture and death of Jesus, the truly obedient and revelatory One --- a refusal to allow God to be Emmanuel, the one who, again, comes to us in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place. (In light of Christ's obedience even unto death on a cross, even this scandalous death no longer signals godlessness or its characterization as accursed. Instead, it is the exhaustive symbol of God's paradoxical will, mercy, and love, for it is the source of Romans 8's profound affirmation that nothing can separate us from the love of God, not sin, not death, not anything at all.)

Today, we are faced with religious (not faithful) approaches to life in this world that are truly allergic to the Cross of Christ and to the way God's power is perfected in weakness in Jesus' obedience to the One he called Abba. One of these is the movement in the US that goes by the name of "Christian Nationalism," with its roots in the so-called "prosperity Gospel" and its distorted reading of Matthew's criticism of those who, with a "violent or aggressive faith," try to take the Kingdom of God by force. But the Cross of Christ repudiates any such religion as anti-Christian. Instead, the feast of the Exaltation or Triumph of the Cross gives us a profoundly paradoxical power most truly revealed (made manifest or known and made real in space and time) in a love that allows an infinitely merciful and loving God to act in (his) own ways on (his) own terms. (This is also one of the reasons weakness (asthenia, ασθενια), and our acceptance of our limitations is such a powerful means to the revelation of God's sovereignty. Not only do they help make us aware of those profound needs we yearn for, but they can allow us to be open to God acting on God's own terms in God's own time.) Jesus, of course, shows us the way here, and it is the way of the Cross, not that of Caesar or Constantine, or a Nationalist ideological movement set on power and (in)human conquest!

A Contemplative Moment: Loneliness

by

David Whyte

Loneliness

is

the doorway to unspoken and yet unspecified desire. 

In the bodily pain of aloneness is the first step to understanding how far we are from a real friendship, from a proper work or a long-sought love. Loneliness can be a prison, a place from which we look out at a world we cannot inhabit; loneliness can be a bodily ache and penance, but loneliness fully inhabited also becomes the voice that asks and calls for that great unknown someone or something we want to call our own.

Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue calling, and when fully lived can undergo its own beautiful reversal, becoming in its consummation the far horizon that answers back.

In the grand scale of things, loneliness is a privilege. Human beings may have the ability to feel aloneness as no other creature can, with a power magnified by intelligence and imagination. Animals may feel alone in an instinctual way, moving naturally and affectionately toward others of their kind, but human beings may be the only beings that can articulate, imagine, or call for a specific life they feel they might be missing.

Loneliness is the substrate and foundation of belonging, the gravitational field that draws us home, and in the beautiful essence of its isolation, the hand reaching out for togetherness. To allow ourselves to feel fully alone is to allow ourselves to understand the particular nature of our solitary incarnation; to make aloneness a friend is to apprentice ourselves to the foundation from which we make our invitation to others. To feel alone is to face the truth of our irremediable and unutterable singularity, but a singularity that can kiss, create a conversation, make a vow or forge a shared life. In the world or community, this essential singularity joins with others through vision, intellect, and ideas to make a society.

Loneliness is not a concept, it is the body constellating, attempting to become proximate and even just with other bodies, through physical touch, through conversation or the mediation of the intellect and the imagination.

Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power of the other. The shortest line in the briefest e-mail can heal, embolden, welcome home and enliven the most isolated identity. Lonely human beings are lonely because they are made to belong. Loneliness is a single malt taste of the very essentiality that makes conscious belonging possible. The doorway is closer than we think. I am alone; therefore, I belong.

in

Consolations, the Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning

of Everyday Words. pp 99-101

Reappraising the Disciples' Failure to "Get it"

 I've been teaching a class on the Gospel of Mark and in many ways it has been a marvelous experience.  Though this gospel was the first I ever studied, and while I have always loved it, it is simply amazing to come away with a greater appreciation of the brilliance of Mark's literary and theological ability. One aspect of the story is the disciples' well-known and oft-ridiculed failure to "get it". Again and again they fail to understand the truth which stands right in front of them. Even after numerous private sessions with Jesus re his mentoring on the nature of the Kingdom, the reason for teaching in parables, his eschewing the usual titles associated with the Messiah in preference for  the "Son of Man" (the Human Being), and his explanations re his need to suffer, still his disciples fail to understand; they resist, reject, argue, and are sometimes simply mute in response to this Jesus who is a riddle as puzzling (and sometimes as intimidating) to them as his parables are.

I can't say how many times I have heard homilists poking fun at the disciples for their failure to "get it". I have done it myself. Peter especially comes in for such treatment. But what I have never heard is a homily which points out their failure to get it is, in some ways, an essential part of their discipleship. After all, when we look at how radically countercultural Jesus is and how he differs from the messianic expectations of the Judaisms of his day how can we be surprised by his disciples' "obtuseness"? 

Moreover, when we remember that Jesus is revealing (i.e., not only making known but making real in space and time) the Mystery of a Creator God whose very nature is Love-in-Act, a paradoxical God whose justice is realized in mercy, whose power is revealed in human weakness and subjection to death, whose sovereignty finds its truest counterpart in human freedom, and who is truly loved when we allow Him to love us unreservedly, how can we be surprised that Jesus' disciples just "don't get it?" Most of the time we don't either --- loath though we are to admit this!! I suspect we sometimes point fingers at the disciples' failures and incomprehension to distract us from having to admit our own --- though perhaps doing so also encourages us to humility instead!

What I have come to appreciate over these past weeks is that the disciples' failure to understand the mystery Jesus represents and mediates is intrinsic to discipleship itself --- at least it is if we are disciples of the real God. It finds its counterpart in the disciples' commitment to keep on following Jesus despite their confusion, doubt, and even the failures that constantly attend their journeys of faith. Both pieces are essential to genuine discipleship, 1) the struggle to understand and embrace the mystery Jesus mediates, and 2) the commitment to persevere in following Jesus in the midst of one's inability to see things clearly! 

I think this is the same dynamic at work in the father of the epileptic boy's reply, "Lord I believe, help my unbelief!" --- an act of faith some consider the finest or "most perfect" in the NT. It is when we reduce Jesus' question which is the very center of his Gospel, "Who do you say that I am?" to a kind of pro forma catechism question which is matched by an equally bloodless doctrinal or catechism answer that we also opt out of the demanding call to follow Jesus. If we take this question seriously, however, it is one we will never finish answering; similarly, it is one we can never answer adequately, much less exhaustively except by persevering in a faithful life which is itself the only fitting response.

                                             

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I am probably not done with this piece, and I know it is not done with me (that is, God is certainly not done with me nor is Mark!), However, I have heard from several people who have worried a bit that I have not written much in the last month so I will at least put this much up this morning and redact it as I need to. In the meantime, please know I am very well.  Please stay safe and keep others safe as well. For all in the US, Happy Thanksgiving; in some ways we have new reasons to cherish this fragile but very real democratic republic. May all of us, from whatever country, accept the need for solitude and the possibility of celebrating "together alone" during this pandemic. That is certainly something eremitical life witnesses to!!