Paying Attention To The Sky

Sinai Icon

If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8: 32-39 

The New Testament insists that Jesus both shows us that we are sinners (He is judge) and offers us the way out of sin (He is savior). When one or the other of these emphases is lost, the walking of the path of holiness is decisively compromised, either through overconfidence or through terror. When they are both adequately stressed, the path opens up, because we know we must walk it and we can walk it. Let us look first at Jesus the judge.

C. S. Lewis said that Jesus came into this world like a soldier slipping clandestinely behind enemy lines. He arrived, not as a conquering prince, but as the son of poor parents barely making their way in a distant outpost of the Roman Empire, and the very silence and obscurity of his coming operated as a cloak. For the world that he entered was in the grip of alien forces — the “powers and principalities” that Paul spoke of — and they brooked no opposition. Indeed, when the cover of the newborn prince was blown, the enemy revealed himself ferociously: Herod and with him all of Jerusalem trembled, and then the desperate king ordered the slaughter of all male children under the age of two in the town of Bethlehem. This is a terrible foreshadowing of the violence that would stalk Jesus his entire life.

And when, after thirty years of silence, he burst onto the public scene, Jesus awakened an opposition that was personal, societal, even cosmic in scope. The scribes and Pharisees schemed against him, his own disciples were confounded by him or at cross-purposes to him, and the demons howled in anger when he approached:

“What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” (Mark 1:24). John Courtney Murray reads the Gospel of John as the story of an ever-increasing agon (struggle) between Jesus and his various opponents. From the relatively benign opposition of Nicodemus and the Woman at the Well, through the intellectual and verbal warfare of the Pharisees, to the explicit and brutally violent hatred of those who crucified him, Jesus faced an unrelenting battle. All of this witnesses to the judgment that was central to his life and work.

In Jesus of Nazareth, God’s own mind became flesh, that is to say, the pattern of God’s being appeared in time and space. Colossians tells us that Jesus is the “perfect image,” the eikon, of the Father (Colossians 1: 15). And thus his arrival was in itself a challenge to all that is not in conformity with the divine pattern. In his very person is the kingdom, the divine ordo, and therefore his presence is the light in which the disorder of all the earthly kingdoms be comes apparent. In this sense, his every move, his every word, his every gesture, constituted God’s judgment on the world, for in the measure that he was opposed he clarified the dysfunctional nature of his opponents. When John the Baptist spoke of the coming of the Messiah, he used an edgy image: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:17). The farmer in first century Palestine would place the newly harvested wheat on the floor of the barn and then, using a sort of pitchfork would toss the grain in the air, forcing the lighter chaff to separate itself from the usable wheat. Thus Jesus’ presence would be a winnowing fan, an agent of separation and clarification.

And nowhere is this judgment more evident than in his violent death. Jesus did not simply pass away; he was killed, executed by command of the Roman governor and with the approval of the religious establishment. As Peter put it in the earliest kerygmatic preaching in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘And you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 3:15). The implication of Peter’s speech, of course, is that you, the killers, have been revealed as the enemies of life. And the “you,” as Peter himself knew with special insight, included not simply the Roman and Jewish ruling classes, but everyone, even Jesus’ most intimate followers. In On Being a Christian, Hans Kung pointed out that all the social groups of Jesus’ time — Pharisees, Saducees, Zealots, Essenes, Temple priests, Roman occupiers, Christian disciples — all had this in common: they were, at the end of the day, opposed to Jesus. At the moment of truth, “they all fled.” Bob Dylan said, “the enemy I see I wears the cloak of decency.”  A favorite ruse of sinners is to wrap themselves in the mantle of respectability. Jesus the judge is the one who rips away the cloak, literally unveiling, “revealing” the truth of things. Whenever we are tempted to think that all is well with us, we hold up the cross of Jesus and let our illusions die.

But the death of Jesus is not the whole story. If it were, Christianity would be nothing more than a social movement and Jesus no more than a romantic and fondly remembered revolutionary. On the third day after his execution, Jesus appeared alive again to his followers. Luke’s account of the risen Christ’s appearance to the eleven is especially instructive; he tells us that, upon seeing him, “they were startled and terrified” (Luke 24:37). This reaction is not, I submit, simply the result of seeing something unusual. In accord with the plot of most ghost stories, they are terrified because the one they abandoned and betrayed and left for dead is back — undoubtedly for revenge! As in almost all of the other accounts of the post resurrection appearances, Luke’s risen Jesus does two things in the presence of his shocked followers. First, he shows them his wounds. This move is a reiteration of the judgment of the cross: don’t forget, he tells them, what the world did when the Author of Life appeared. A woundless Christ is embraced much more readily by his executioners, since he doesn’t remind them of their crime. But the Jesus who stubbornly “shows them his hands and his side” will not permit this exculpating forgetfulness.

But then he does something else: he says, “Shalom,” peace be with you (Luke 24:36). In this, he opens up a new spiritual world and thereby becomes our savior. From ancient creation myths to the Rambo and Dirty Harry movies, the principle is the same: order, destroyed through violence, is restored through a righteous exercise of greater violence. Some agent of chaos is corralled and conquered by fighting him (or it) on his own terms and overpowering him, If domination is the problem (as in the ancient stories), then a counter domination is the solution; if gun violence is the problem (as in most cop movies), then a bigger and more skillfully handled gun is the solution. And in these myths, God or the gods are customarily invoked as the sanction for the process.

And then there is Jesus. The terrible disorder of the cross (the killing of the Son of God) is addressed, not through an explosion of divine vengeance, but through a radiation of divine love. When Christ confronts those who contributed to his death, he speaks words, not of retribution, but of reconciliation and compassion. Mind you, the awful texture of the disorder is not for a moment overlooked — that is the integrity of the judgment — but the problem is resolved through nonviolence and forgiveness. What appeared rhetorically in the Sermon on the Mount (“Turn the other cheek,” “Love your enemies”) and more concretely on the cross (“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”) now shines in all of its transfigured glory (“Shalom”). The gods who sanctioned scapegoating and the restoration of order through violence are now revealed to be phony gods, idols, projections of a sinful consciousness, and the true God comes fully into the light.

It is in this way that Jesus “Takes away the sins of the world.” The old schemas of handling disorder through vengeance restored a tentative and very unreliable “peace,” which was really nothing but a pause between conflicts. Evil met with evil only intensifies, just as fire met with fire only increases the heat, and an “Eye for an eye,” as Gandhi noted, succeeds only in eventually making everyone blind. But what takes away violence is a courageous and compassionate nonviolence, just as water, the “opposite” of fire, puts out the flames. On the cross, the Son of God took on the hatred of all of us sinners, and in his forgiving love, he took that hatred away. By creating a way out of the net of our sinfulness, by doing what no mere philosopher, poet, politician, or social reformer could possibly do, Jesus saved us.

Psychologists tell us that a true friend is someone who has seen us at our worst and still loves us. If you have encountered me only on my best days, when all is going well and I am in top form, and you like me, I have no guarantee that you are my friend, But when you have dealt with me when I am most obnoxious, most self-absorbed, most afraid and unpleasant, and you still love me, then I am sure that you are my friend. The old Gospel song says, “What a friend we have in Jesus!” This is not pious sentimentalism; it is the heart of the matter. What the first Christians saw in the dying and rising of Jesus is that we killed God, and God returned in forgiving love. We murdered the Lord of Life, and he answered us, not with hatred, but with compassion. He saw us at our very worst, and loved us anyway. Thus they saw confirmed in flesh and blood what Jesus had said the night before he died: “I do not call you servants any longer, but I have called you friends” (John 14:15). They realized, in the drama of the Paschal Mystery, that we have not only been shown a new way; we have been drawn into a new life, a life of friendship with God.

The author of Psalm 139 wrote:

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
(Psalm 139:7-10)

These words take on a new resonance and reveal their deepest significance in light of Easter, No matter where we run from God — no matter how weary to flee — God tracks us down and will not let us go. Paul Tillich read Psalm 139 as the sinner’s lament, the cry of the soul who just wants to escape from the press of God:

“How can I get away from you?” The answer fully disclosed in the dying and rising of Jesus is: “You can’t; so stop trying.” Because the Son of God has gone to the very limits of godforsakenness, we find that even as we run away from the Father, we are running directly into the arms of the Son. Unlike most contemporary New Age spiritualities which emphasize the human quest for God, the biblical spirituality is the story of God’s relentless search for us. And this narrative comes to its fulfillment in the recounting of God’s journey into the darkest and coldest corner of human sinfulness — even into death itself — in order to find us. This divine finding, this friendship with God despite all of our efforts to avoid it, is salvation.

Pope Benedict in Jesus of Nazareth wrote that the decision we make to believe in God is both intellectual and existential: “Thinking and living are no longer separable when man confronts the ultimate questions. The decision for God is simultaneously an intellectual and an existential decision – each determines the other reciprocally. Augustine portrayed this connection dramatically in the story of his conversion. He speaks of the misguided patterns of a life that is completely oriented to material things – patterns that become habits, habits that become necessities and finally fetters; indeed, they bring about a blinding of the heart. He speaks about his attempts to break loose and to clear a path to God, to the God who acts, and he compares this with the situation of someone who is dreaming, who is trapped in his dream, who tries to wake up and break loose and yet sinks back again and again into the world of dreams. He describes how he hid himself behind his own back , so to speak and how God brought himself out of his hiding place through the word of a friend so that he had to look himself in the face. [Confessions 8, 5, 12 and 8, 7, 16].”

It is a song of salvation that Paul sings in the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Given God’s heartbroken embrace of us at our worst, what in the entire universe could ever make us fall out of friendship with God? Paul’s answer: neither time, nor space, neither the greatest nor the least, neither powers above the earth or on it or below it. This feeling of being “safe” in the divine embrace is salvation.

Thus, the wounds of Jesus, the reminders of our dysfunction, compel us to walk the path of holiness, but the Shalom of the risen Christ, the assurance of divine friendship despite our sin, gives us the courage to walk it.

Emphasis is mine, adapted in the main from Fr. Robert Barron’s And Now I See.   A wonderful book; you can find it and more at Fr. Barron’s website wordonfire.org.