Thinking about the Triduum

Ecce Homo, Mark Walliger

This week I have revisited a number of theologians who have challenged me once more about the importance of the Cross in the Christian story. For all of them, the Cross never stands alone in the story, there is an emphasis on the broader narrative of the person of Jesus Christ. The cross is important because of the whole of who Jesus is and was for us.

In my theology class, we read the introduction to Moltmann's Theology of Hope. What really struck me when I re-read this great essay on hope was his vision of the Cross and Resurrection. Resurrection is foundational to his theology of hope. For Moltmann, the Resurrection is the divine protest and promise against suffering and death. It is not a mere consolation or salve for the soul. God has opened up the promises and the glory of heaven to all of creation through the work of Jesus. The world is transformed, and we are given a new identity as the one's who bear the wonder of this hope. Hope is not an emotion or a conviction. It is not a doctrinal surety or a lovely notion. Hope is about vision and action. As Moltmann argues,

Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. (Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 21)

Moltmann's theology, then, is a call to live into the ground-shaking events of the Cross and Resurrection. God is with us in Christ and laments the suffering of the world. We are to join Jesus in this lament and then join in the divine protest against the suffering and the injustice of the world. Hope is in the ever present promise of God in Jesus Christ and in the Spirit that there is much more to our stories.

But we cannot leave behind the work of Jesus on the Cross, regardless of our hesitations or fears of how this event has been taught (sometimes in oppressive and abusive ways). For Moltmann, there is no leaving out the story of the Cross for the Christian. Even more so, if we understand the cross as merely the place where our individual sins were forgiven so that we can go to heaven, then we are guilty of a reductionist vision of God's grace and love in the whole of the created order. Moltmann's vision is much more far reaching than than.

What I hear in Moltmann's call is to stop making distinctions between sacred and secular work. At one point in the essay, he argues that we must reintroduce hope in our "worldly thinking" (33). Our imaginations should be enriched and enlivened by a vision of hope that is so comprehensive and all-embracing that our every day should be filled with the wonder of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. The Spirit should be felt in our breathing, moving, doing, and being. There is no part of our lives and our vocations that is not transformed by God's outreaching love through the Spirit and in Christ.

And so, as we enter the Triduum this evening, I'm reminded that this story is not just for me or for my comfort, it is the very miracle of live and love itself.

(Tomorrow I'll write a bit about Kathryn Tanner, who has a call of her own for us in this Holy season...)

The Woman at the Well

I saw this video recently at a conference at our school. It made me stop and think a lot about those who feel unseen and unknown in our culture, and what it means that God stops and sees. 

This idea of seeing is very important in how we understand and practice lament. This is evident throughout the Old Testament, especially. There are two characters in particular that come to mind. The first is Hagar in Genesis 16:13: "She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her, 'You are the God who sees me,' for she said, 'I have now seen the One who sees me'" (NIV). The second is Daughter Zion in the book of Lamentations. She calls out for someone to see her and laments the depth of her sorrow, "'Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering that was inflicted upon me, that the Lord brought upon me in the day of his anger?'" (Lamentations 1:12, NIV). 

I believe that lament grows our emotional capacity to love and encounter others. The articulation of lament and complaint is a powerful instigator, which initiates and enables the ability to have empathy toward others in the face of extreme “narrative wreckage”[1] and collective trauma. Dissonance, here, facilitates a kind of emotional capacity to move toward others in their distress and bear witness to the tragedy of trauma. As biblical scholar Kathleen O’Connor argues,

To be witnesses to the suffering of others requires the gathering up of our passions, something that cannot be done by will-power alone. Only as our spirits find release from numbness, from their marbled protections, and from their passion-quenching denial can we relate to others in solidarity and compassion that does not make them objects of our own needs.[2]

Thus, our empathy and emotional heath are matured and broadened in this engagement.

And this brings me back to the Woman at the Well. She reawakens us to to see the suffering and the plight of those who are "of no reputation." Why should we pay attention? At the risk of a Sunday School answer, we should pay attention because Jesus paid attention. She was seen and known by Jesus. And so we are challenged and called to pay attention and to know others and to love them in the midst of their grief and sorrow. We know ourselves in the interchange, and our emotional capacity to understand our own grief and sorrow grows. 

Another version of the same text...

---

[1] Kathleen O’Connor, Lamentations & The Tears of the World, 7-8. She uses this phrase throughout her book.

[2] Ibid.,108.

"Only the body saves the soul"

     When we talk about word and sacrament, often what we mean is the how and the what of experiencing the divine in our lives. How do we think about access to God? Annie Dillard writes about encountering the divine in the world by turning to the Old Testament, specifically to the book of Exodus. In chapter 19, God calls the Hebrews to the foot of the mountain and declares that they will be God’s treasured possession and that they will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, who will represent (think image of God) the presence of God to the whole of the creation.[1] Thus, God draws close to the people and speaks, but the people respond by asking God to leave.

When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”[2]

Moses then becomes a mediator between God and the Hebrew people. Their fear did not lead them to wisdom before God, but to inaugurate their relationship to Yahweh in silence. The people told God to leave and be silent, and then they retreated to their tents. Annie Dillard contemplates how we might recover from such a horrible mistake:

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree … What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we’re blue.[3]

Thus, Dillard concludes, we feel alienated from the divine, but in the book of Exodus, Yahweh meets Moses, the elders, and the whole of the Hebrew people on the mountain. However, Yahweh was not a God that was limited to the mountain top. Yahweh wanted to show this group of people that he had set aside as holy that he was a God who dwells with his people. Yahweh is the God comes down off of the mountain and tabernacles (sets up his tent and settles down) with his people. But the people back away and ask for God to stop speaking. It seems that the moral of this story from Exodus is that God never remains on the mountain top, God always comes down off of the mountain to meet us where we live, even in the midst of our fear.

     

     Similarly to Dillard, Belden Lane talks of the liminal space of the "fierce landscapes of the soul":

There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer the soul. They heal as well as mirror the brokenness we find within. Moving apprehensively into the desert’s emptiness … you discover in wild terrain a metaphor of your deepest fears. If the danger is sufficient, you experience a loss of competence, a crisis of knowing that brings you to the end of yourself, to the only true place where God is met.[4] 

We want to limit our exposure to the divine. We want to contain our experience of God’s holiness, so that we might have categories to explain the overwhelming experience of God’s presence. Even Peter at the Transfiguration stumbles and wants to build tents. But Jesus never intended to stay on the mountain. Jesus wanted to share his glory. 

     

     In Paul’s words, Jesus shares his inheritance with us, we are adopted as co-heirs with Christ. In this context, it is no mistake that Paul’s vision of the consummation of our spirituality is a face to face encounter with God.[5] Our spiritual journeys are a preparation, through the mediation of the Spirit, for this face to face encounter with God. And this brings us to Colin Gunton:

the distinctive work of the Spirit is eschatological. One way of expending such an insight theologically would be to say that the Spirit’s peculiar office is to realize the true being of each created thing by bringing it, through Christ, into saving relation with God the Father.[6]

One barrier that we might have to this kind of active and eschatological pneumatology is an idea, which is deeply embedded within Western Culture. When we think of the divine we often think in terms of competition—it is either God or us; God’s will or our will; God’s freedom or our freedom. I think this is one of the reasons that struggling or recovering evangelicals recoil at the thought of the authority of scripture. It is a text meant to tame our desires and our carnal passions. We are to be beat down in to repentance and subservience by the Word, especially the preached Word.

     

     We rarely think in terms of our "sanctification" as God working with us in our bodies and our desires. Instead, we think of our bodies as the battleground of spirituality: the flesh battles against the spirit rather than our bodies and our experiences being the very ground where God meets us and sanctifies us. We are holy ground. As Rowan Williams puts it:

Only the body saves the soul. It sounds rather shocking put like that, but the point is that the soul (whatever exactly that is) left to itself, the inner life or whatever you want to call it, is not capable of transforming itself. It needs the gifts that only the external life can deliver: the actual events of God’s action in history, heard by physical ears, the actual material fact of the meeting of believers where bread and wine are shared, the actual wonderful, disagreeable, impossible, unpredictable human beings we encounter daily, in and out of church. Only in this setting do we become holy—in a way unique to each one of us.[7]

     British theologian, John Webster, can help us here. He uses three categories to help us understand scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Sanctification.[8] It is his concept of sanctification that most captures my imagination. At the core of his understanding of sanctification is that God works with creation, not against it. God graciously turns toward humanity and works with the stuffness of our culture, language, relationships, hang-ups, pathologies, addictions. God makes holy that which is categorically secular and not inherently "spiritual." The purpose is to take what is creaturely and set it aside for the purpose of God’s self communication, and it is the Holy Spirit that works through these creaturely processes and realities: 

“the rule is: sanctification establishes and does not abolish creatureliness.”[9]

---

[1] Ex. 19:5-6 (NIV).

[2] ‘Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was’ (Ex. 20:18-21).

[3] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, 88-89.

[4] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Oxford University Press, 2007, 216.

[5] 1 Cor. 13:12. See also 2 Cor. 3:17-18.

[6] Colin Gunton, The One, The Three, and the Many, 189.

[7] Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, 94-95.

[8] John Webster, Holy Scripture, 8-9.

[9] John Webster, Holy Scripture, 30.

Thinking about the Imagination: Wendell Berry

Last April, Wendell Berry gave the 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. His title is, "It All Turns on Affection." I'm still in the process of thinking about the lecture, but thought I would share it here. His lecture proper starts about 11 minutes in...

So, here is Berry on the importance of imagination (or the failure thereof) and economy, land, families, connection, America, sustainability, ... 

Favorite quote about imagination:

The term ‘imagination’ in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb ‘to imagine’ contains the full richness of the verb ‘to see.’ To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly and understandingly with the eyes. But also, to see inwardly with the mind’s eye. It is to see not passively, but with a force of vision, and even with a visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with ‘dreaming up.’ It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

Favorite quote from the lecture, from about 70 minutes in:

...truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. These words are hard to keep still within their definitions. They make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance, within their histories, and in their associations with one another we find our indispensable humanity without which we are lost and in danger.