The Crucified God, Emmanuel Fully Revealed

Three months ago I did a reflection for my parish. I noted that all through Advent we sing Veni, Veni, Emmanuel and pray that God will really reveal Godself as Emmanuel, the God who is with us. I also noted that we may not always realize the depth of meaning captured in the name Emmanuel. We may not realize the degree of solidarity with us and the whole of creation it points to. There are several reasons here. First we tend to use Emmanuel only during Advent and Christmastide so we stop reflecting on the meaning or theological implications of the name. Secondly, we are used to thinking of a relatively impersonal God borrowed from Greek philosophy; he is omnipresent rather like air is present in our lives. He seems already to be "Emmanuel". And thirdly, we tend to forget that the word "reveal" does not only mean "to make known," but also "to make real in space and time." The God who is revealed in space and time as Emmanuel is the God who enters exhaustively into the circumstances and lives of his Creation and makes these part of his own life.

Thus, just as the Incarnation of the Word of God happens over the whole of Jesus' life and death and not merely with Jesus' conception or nativity, so too does God require the entire life and death of Jesus to achieve the degree of solidarity with us that makes him the Emmanuel he wills to be. There is a double "movement" involved here, the movement of descent and ascent, kenosis and theosis. Not only does God in Christ become implicated in the whole of human experience but in that same Christ God takes the whole of the human situation and experience into Godself. We talk about this by saying that through the Christ Event heaven and earth interpenetrate one another and one day will be all in all or, again, that "the Kingdom of God is at hand." John the Evangelist says it again and again with the language of mutual indwelling and union: "I am in him and he is in me," "he who sees me sees the one who sent me", "the Father and I are One." Paul affirms it in Romans 8 when he exults, "Nothing [at all in heaven or on earth] can separate us from the Love of God."

And so in Jesus' active ministry he companions us and heals us; he exorcises our demons, teaches, feeds, forgives and sanctifies us. He is mentor and brother and Lord. He bears our stupidities and fear, our misunderstandings, resistance, and even our hostility and betrayals. But the revelation of God as Emmanuel means much more besides; as we move into the Triduum we begin to celebrate the exhaustive revelation, the exhaustive realization of an eternally-willed solidarity with us whose extent we can hardly imagine. In Christ and especially in his passion and death God comes to us in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place. Three dimensions of the cross especially allow us to see the depth of solidarity with us our God embraces in Christ: failure, suffering unto death, and lostness or godforsakenness. Together they reveal our God as Emmanuel --- the one who is with us as the one from whom nothing can ever ultimately separate us because in Christ those things become part of God's own life.

Jesus comes to the cross having failed in his mission. Had he succeeded there would have been no betrayal, no trial, no torture and no crucifixion. But Jesus remains open to God and trusts in his capacity to redeem any failure; thus even failure can serve the Kingdom of God. Jesus suffers to the point of death and suffers more profoundly than any person in history we can name --- not because he hurt more profoundly than others but because he was more vulnerable to it and chose to embrace that vulnerability without mitigation. Suffering per se is not salvific, but Jesus' openness and responsiveness to God in the face of suffering is. Thus, suffering even unto death is transformed into a potential sacrament of God's presence. Finally, Jesus suffers the lostness of godforsakenness or abandonment by God --- the ultimate separation from God due to sin. This is the meaning of not just death but death on a cross. In this death Jesus again remains open to the God who reveals himself most exhaustively as Emmanuel and takes even the lostness of sin into himself and makes it his own. After all, as the NT reminds us, it is the sick and lost for whom God in Christ comes.

As I noted back in January, John C. Dwyer, my major Theology professor for BA and MA work back in the 1970's described God's revelation of self on the cross (God's making himself known and personally present even in those places from whence we exclude him) --- the exhaustive coming of God as Emmanuel --- in this way:

[[Through Jesus, the broken being of the world enters the personal life of the everlasting God, and this God shares in the broken being of the world. God is eternally committed to this world, and this commitment becomes full and final in his personal presence within this weak and broken man on the cross. In him the eternal one takes our destiny upon himself --- a destiny of estrangement, separation, meaninglessness, and despair. But at this moment the emptiness and alienation that mar and mark the human situation become once and for all, in time and eternity, the ways of God. God is with this broken man in suffering and in failure, in darkness and at the edge of despair, and for this reason suffering and failure, darkness and hopelessness will never again be signs of the separation of man from God. God identifies himself with the man on the cross, and for this reason everything we think of as manifesting the absence of God will, for the rest of time, be capable of manifesting his presence --- up to and including death itself.]]

He continues,

[[Jesus is rejected and his mission fails, but God participates in this failure, so that failure itself can become a vehicle of his presence, his being here for us. Jesus is weak, but his weakness is God's own, and so weakness itself can be something to glory in. Jesus' death exposes the weakness and insecurity of our situation, but God made them his own; at the end of the road, where abandonment is total and all the props are gone, he is there. At the moment when an abyss yawns beneath the shaken foundations of the world and self, God is there in the depths, and the abyss becomes a ground. Because God was in this broken man who died on the cross, although our hold on existence is fragile, and although we walk in the shadow of death all the days of our lives, and although we live under the spell of a nameless dread against which we can do nothing, the message of the cross is good news indeed: rejoice in your fragility and weakness; rejoice even in that nameless dread because God has been there and nothing can separate you from him. It has all been conquered, not by any power in the world or in yourself, but by God. When God takes death into himself it means not the end of God but the end of death.]] Dwyer, John C., Son of Man Son of God, a New Language for Faith, p 182-183.

More on Story (Myth) and the Tower of Babel, Friday of Week Six in Ordinary Time

Just this morning I wrote a reflection on the ways stories function especially in regard to yesterday's readings. I had not been to Mass yet, nor had I prepared today's reading ahead of time when I wrote that piece. Otherwise I might have saved my comments, or written about the first readings from yesterday and today. The story of the building of the city, the construction of the Tower of Babel, the coming down of God from heaven to scatter people and confuse their language is without a doubt one of the best examples of what I spoke about in the last post: stories create spaces in which we can explore complex realities by suspending disbelief, etc. What I barely mentioned in that post but which is made even clearer in today's is the fact that stories give profound explanations to or analyses of deep and complex realities it would take thousands and thousands of words to even attempt otherwise.



Dissertations could well be written on the nature of human sinfulness, the problem of pride and the need to make a name for ourselves at the expense of our own humanity, the insatiable, almost innate drive for control and power human beings seem to evidence, the reasons for diverse languages, the power of united peoples speaking the same language, the fact of tribal and national divisions and enmities which have plagued us from the beginning of mankind are still with us despite the sense that we are a global community (not really a new insight according to today's first reading!), the fact that beneath our external differences we are really one, or the idea that our very creativity, initiative, and inventiveness --- indeed, even our very religion --- becomes our downfall time and again which God must save or protect us from. And yet, in the space of two paragraphs or so, the authors of Genesis have captured all of this from a theological perspective which is insightful and compelling --- so long as we do not read the story literally, but let it function precisely as stories are wont to do.

Read literally, the story would be ridiculous: A people, in an attempt to secure and make a name for themselves, build a city and a tower which truly reaches to heaven. God, apparently threatened by this act of hubris, and after coming down to earth to examine the whole project, throws down the tower and city, confuses the language so that a concerted effort at some greater project cannot be made, scatters the people, etc in what is an attempt to save them from even worse pride and presumption. Towers which reach to heaven? A God who comes down to survey the project only to return to heaven and cast the whole human reality in disarray? The notion that all spoke one language only to have God turn it into relative babble because he was threatened by their unity? None of this makes much sense to us, but again, stories function on levels deeper than the literal facts. When we are dealing with stories that do this in the precise way this one does, we are dealing with myth, that is, we are dealing not with a fictional story, but with a story that tells us profound truths that can really be told in no other way. The literal truth is relatively unimportant, and if we insist on this (the literal truth) we can actually miss the profound truths we are being asked to consider and embrace.

Today's first reading is the story of sin, not the story of a particular sin (though pride is dominant) so much as the story of all sin. Human beings are made for more than they have here. We are really made for nothing less than communion with God, and --- through his grace and our own inspired assistance --- for the participation in the perfection or fulfillment of the world. We are created capable of this, capable of cooperating with (receiving) grace, which accounts for our own great giftedness, our abilities to dream, love, create, build, compose, order, etc. These are the undistorted verbs of stewardship. Of course, unfortunately, our very made-for quality also testifies to incompleteness and separation from God, and our very separation from what we are meant for makes us long for more, just as it makes us insecure in our world. And, when we try to achieve what we are made for through our own efforts, those undistorted verbs of stewardship are rapidly transformed into the distorted verbs of domination and destruction.

Instead of allowing God to be the source of any name (i.e., any personal reality and presence) we have --- instead, that is, of glorifying (revealing) God in all we do --- we seek to make a name for ourselves. We seek to build a way to heaven, to rejoin (bind back to) God on our own terms, and of course, to stand higher and dominate the rest of creation in the process. We seek to secure ourselves atthe word literally means those who bind back) rather than faithful people, people who receive all they have as gift. And, as today's story tells us, it is pride which is at the heart of this whole process, a kind of forgetfulness about the source of our giftedness and capacities and the misconstrual of these things as our very own.

Of course, the story in today's first reading deals with more than I have dealt with here, and more effectively as well, precisely because it IS narrrative, it IS story, it is myth in the proper sense of that word. If you noticed your responses to my own analysis of the theology of this story you might have found yourself saying, "No, you can't use the term religion like that!" or "How can she play faith off against religion like that?!" or any number of other things. You were likely unwilling to suspend disbelief long enough to explore these things (though I hope some will think about them over time!). My comments may have challenged you in one way and another, but the story in today's first reading more easily allowed as well as challenged you to locate yourself in the story, to suspend judgment and to feel these people's insecurity, to comment on the validity or invalidity of their efforts at building their cities and towers for your own edification, to dream of a world where everyone speaks the same language and tribal, religious, and national protectiveness, distinction, and isolation is at an end. It allowed you to recognize your own pride, the times you have acted in ways which might have "made God take a second, closer look (or come right down from heaven to check out the situation)," and perhaps even yearn for God to intervene in a way which protected you from yourself. In short, it allowed you to envision and even make a choice for the Kingdom of God and the fulfillment of creation therein without even necessarily knowing (in these terms, anyway) that was precisely what you were doing.

The stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are primordial history, not history as we use that term today, and certainly not science! They are mythical, not so much merely fictional or untrue as profoundly and powerfully true in ways which are often ineffable apart from narrative. Again, they create shared space in which we can suspend disbelief, bias, etc, and enter in to explore, reflect, pray over, etc. But we will miss all this unless we take the time to consider how it is that such stories work. In the last couple of days we have gotten a terrific lesson in this with the stories of Noah and the flood, the post-flood actions of God, and the story of the tower of Babel. Given all the recent stuff out on atheism and creationism (both of which read these narratives literally, and so, superficially and tendentiously!) it is a timely lesson, I think.