Doctrine – Page 3 – Peculiar Faith

Shameless Living and the Sign of the Serpent

John does something very strange in the otherwise very familiar third chapter of his account of the Gospel. What John does is so strange that most people just skip right over it on their way to what is likely the most well-known verse in the entire Bible—John 3:16 (which we can still see people holding up on placards in football stadiums).

For God does indeed love the world, as the sixteenth verse declares, and yet in the two verses before that one, John’s Jesus refers to his own death on a cross by comparing himself favorably to a serpent, and for the sake of life.

The research I did on this strange passage more than fifteen years ago turned out to be life-changing for me. It shaped my second book (Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy), and I am convinced that this passage holds the key to the kind of healing love the world today so desperately needs.

Some textual sleuthing is in order to get to the heart of the matter here, and that involves taking some steps back into the Hebrew Bible—back to the equally strange story of Moses in the desert that many Christians heard this past Sunday in concert with the passage from John. And then back further still to the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

That’s the textual trail I tried to map from the pulpit this past Sunday, the fourth in Lent. And the image that ties all of it together is of course the serpent.

In ancient Mediterranean societies, the symbol of a serpent enjoyed multiple and interwoven meanings. A serpent sometimes symbolized eternity, with depictions of a snake eating its own tail to signal the circularity of infinite time. Serpents could also symbolize healing, as the shedding of a snake’s skin signified the promise of renewal.

These ancient societies also knew very well that snakes can be dangerous and deadly. That mix—whether of danger and healing, of both risk and renewal—that mix shows up in the old aphorism about how to soothe the effects of a hangover—what you need is a “hair from the dog that bit you.”

That insight also contributed to the development of modern vaccines. And the insight is just this: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

That insight found its way into that rather strange story from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9) where the ancient Israelites are wandering through the desert and they stumble into a nest of poisonous snakes, the bites from which make many of them ill and some of them die. God instructs Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent and to lift it high upon a pole so everyone can see it. All those who looked at it were healed.

Some have suggested that this story from Numbers led to the familiar image we still see today of a snake wrapped around a pole as a symbol for the medical professions and healthcare; here again, the key insight remains: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Going back to the third chapter of Genesis, we encounter yet another serpent. That story of Adam and Eve in the garden is so familiar that most people miss exactly what that serpent said to Adam and Eve.

Standard readings of that chapter from Genesis frame it as a story about humanity’s guilt and our need to be forgiven for our sin. I embrace that way of reading the story, but it’s not the only way to read it. By focusing so much attention on sin and guilt, the modern Church has left virtually untouched the epidemic of shame and violence.

This was the life-changing insight for me years ago when I was researching these texts, to understand the difference between guilt and shame.

Guilt attaches to something I have done, a mistake or an offense which I can confess and for which I can seek forgiveness. Shame, by contrast, attaches to my sense of self and who I am, usually in quite physical and bodily ways.

Guilt says, “I did something bad”; shame says, “I am bad.”

Social psychologists and sociologists have been urging us to notice for quite some time now just how pervasive shame is and just how severe are its consequences. (Be sure to read Brene Brown on this and watch her videos.)

Shame can make us dangerous to ourselves (in patterns of isolation and alienation and addiction and self-harm) and also dangerous to others (when we project our own shame on those who are different from us, or whole communities, or other species, and then treat them with hostility and violence).

Take all of this back into that ancient story of a garden where a serpent persuades human beings to eat forbidden fruit. If you eat it, the serpent says, “you will be like gods.”

The essence of this temptation is to suppose that being human isn’t good enough; that how God made us is flawed; that who we are is fundamentally bad.

That’s a lie; it’s simply not true. The ancient storyteller in Genesis insists that what God makes is good, and is indeed very good (1:31).

When Adam and Eve believed the lie, they tumbled into the spiral of shame, with the results today’s psychologists would easily recognize: they hid from each other; they hid from the wider world of the garden; and they hid from God. And in the very next story, Cain kills his brother Abel.

Shame isolates and shame kills.

And so, John’s Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up for the sake of unending life.”

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent…

Why just like that?

Because, if being human is the cause of our distress, then the truly human one—and that’s what that title “Son of Man” means—then the Truly Human One will be the source of our healing. After all, that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Here’s one of the key pivot points in my own theological development that these interlaced texts provoked: shame cannot be forgiven; it can only be healed. And in that moment of realization, I remembered the Australian aboriginal story about the rainbow serpent, who created the land and the humans to inhabit it.

The rainbow, the serpent, the associations with sex and sexuality, bodily shame, and growing up gay: I still have trouble threading all of this together with the words of a logical sequence. But somehow I came to know this: embracing that which caused my shame would be healing; it would save me.

The grace of God provides forgiveness when we’re guilty.

The love of God provides healing when we’re ashamed.

That’s likely enough, more than enough, to ponder. And still, I can’t stop thinking about that distorted desire and the tormented urge to “be like gods.”

Humanity’s godlike aspirations and ambitions have led to unspeakable pain: the dynamics of racism and white supremacy; misogyny and the denigration of women, which leads quickly to the oppression of LGBT people; stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and enough nuclear warheads to obliterate humanity many times over; the relentless decimation of ecosystems and plundering of the environments that give us life—all of this, I’m absolutely convinced, and an ancient story about a serpent in a garden illustrates, is rooted in the corrosive effects of bodily shame.

Our salvation as a species and for the sake of this precious Earth may very well depend on the most robust and fulsome reading possible of that one chapter from Genesis, and in concert with that famous chapter from John: being fully at home in our own bodies without shame; fully at home on Earth without any guilt; and fully at home with God without any fear.

The world can scarcely name what it so desperately needs from today’s churches: spaces where we are free to love fiercely and live shamelessly and for the sake of a world in pain.

That great work begins and returns often to what Jesus wanted Nicodemus to see: God so loves the world that God forgives our guilt and heals our shame.

Praying with Palimpsests

In the ancient Mediterranean world and also in many parts of Medieval Europe, finding suitable writing materials—animal skins, tree bark, and parchment—was often challenging. When none were readily at hand, writers would sometimes scrape or scrub the writing off old manuscripts and write on top of those newly scrubbed spaces. Traces of the old writing sometimes remained under the new, and a document like this with multiple layers of writing and images is called a “palimpsest” (from two Greek words meaning “rubbed smooth again”).

One notable example of such a document is the so-called “Archimedes Palimpsest” (a detail of which is pictured below, courtesy of the John Hopkins University). The history of this document sounds like a sequel to Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Archimedes lived a few centuries before Jesus and is regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. A copy of one of his scrolls was used centuries later by a Greek monk, in the thirteenth century, who wrote Christian prayers on top of those ancient essays about mathematics.

The monastery prayed with this palimpsest for many years before it was stored away in the vault of a large church in Constantinople and then bought by a French antique dealer in the 1930s. Scholars later realized the ancient history of the parchment when it was taken for appraisal, and since the late 1990s it has been undergoing careful computer-assisted analysis to decipher as much of the underlying text by Archimedes as possible.

One of my theological mentors in graduate school was fond of thinking about the history of Christian traditions like a palimpsest, a long history of multiple layers, not all of which are clearly visible or fully distinguishable from the later additions. Rather than supposing that the earliest layers are somehow “better” (truer or more meaningful) than the later ones, the richness of Christian history instead appears in their complex intermingling. We might even think of our own lives as an extended palimpsest with many centuries of genetic mixing and cultural layering and ethnic intermingling to create who each of us is today.

I was reminded of all this after reading the lectionary texts for this coming Sunday, the fourth in Lent; the collection of texts, together with Eucharistic liturgies, strike me as a kind of biblical and doctrinal “palimpsest.”

We will hear John’s Jesus refer to his own death by recalling an ancient story from the Hebrew Bible about Moses in the desert lifting up a serpent on a pole; that story in turn evokes the potent image of the serpent in the Garden of Eden (which we won’t hear but I, for one, can’t help but think of it), and a number of commentators have suggested that John’s account of the Gospel could be read as ancient Christian commentary on Genesis, which we are now reading today after many centuries of Christian reflection on the meaning of crucifixion. That’s quite a complex textual and theological history for interpreting the Cross of Christ!

As we approach not only the texts and images for this coming Sunday but also as the complexities of Holy Week and Easter rapidly approach later this month, I find it helpful to realize and also appreciate that we are praying with palimpsests.

I know that sounds rather arcane and a bit religiously nerdy, but perhaps both helpful and vital when put in conversation with Black History Month (just concluded) and now Women’s History Month. These occasions bring to mind some of the troubling aspects of what we might call “cultural palimpsests.” Some state legislatures, for example, are actively trying to erase Black history, scrub it clean from our history books, and “whitewash” it—which is at least one very good reason to make sure that churches and also public spaces in the United States include images of Jesus that are Black and Brown and not merely white and terribly European.

More than this, and as I was searching for an image of the Archimedes Palimpsest, I stumbled upon an artist who inspired me to think about how one palimpsest might overwrite another. Perhaps that’s more complex than it needs to be—or at least that’s what I thought until I saw the images from Coral Woodbury.

Woodbury has paid careful attention to the erasure of women in patriarchal societies, or the way the significance of women is “overwritten” by the contributions of men. She is especially committed to reinterpreting Western art history from a feminist perspective, especially for the recognition of women artists who have been “scrubbed” from that history.

One of her recent exhibits is (appropriately enough) called “Palimpsest” (one of the pieces in that exhibit is reproduced at right, the image of a woman superimposed over the text from a history book about ancient Babylon). Books are a recurring theme in her work, a way to “connect humans across time,” which is exactly what a palimpsest does or can do. For Woodbury, books function as a kind of metaphor for human lives and communities: the spine of the book holds the pages together just as our own spines hold our skeletons together.

Multi-layered texts and bound books—I can’t help but think about one of the sources of our word “religion,” from the Latin verb religare, to “bind together,” like ligaments manage to do for our bones.

In a world that feels fragile, as if unraveling, perhaps falling apart in slow motion (or rapidly in Ukraine and Gaza, not to mention the Antarctic), something about the dense complexity of human societies, how they are held together over time, gives an odd sense of comfort.

There have been times when I have wished for a bit less complexity in my life and a few more clearer edges, but the “thickness” of the Lenten lectionary invites me to reflect a bit differently this week. After all, palimpsests can evince both a layered richness and an occluding varnish at the very same time. I might even cling more fervently to the “old rugged cross” this Sunday. We’ll be singing that classic as our closing hymn, and in palimpsest-like fashion, I might relish how early Christians imagined that cross as a budding tree, planted perhaps on our Lenten road toward Easter.

Leave No Goat Behind

Why does someone’s triumph nearly always require someone else’s demise?

This is of course the classic “zero-sum game” dilemma—you can’t win unless I lose. When resources appear limited, the more I have means others have less.

A more pointed version of this query has been percolating in my thoughts as the liturgical year draws to a close: must we read the parables of Jesus as if they were all just religious versions of a divine zero-sum game?

The last three parables in Matthew’s account of the Gospel are classic examples of this quandary. Two weeks ago, the lectionary gave us the story about ten young women; five had enough oil for their torches, which means the other five had none (25:1-13). The next week, we heard about the harsh master’s servants; the one who had more than enough was given even more, which means the one with very little had even that taken away (25:14-30).

Modern Western society trains all of us in a culture of zero-sum gaming. There must be losers in order to have any winners; we can’t be insiders if there aren’t any outsiders; there can’t be any sheep without goats—as many of us heard from Matthew’s Jesus just yesterday (25:31-46).

But is this really the only way to read our sacred texts? Where have our cultural assumptions interfered with our spiritual insights?

These aren’t just idle queries; it’s high time the Church stopped reading the parables of Jesus in ways that create whole classes of excluded, despised, and even damned creatures of God.

The stakes are extraordinarily high here. We are living dangerous zero-sum games every single day on a global scale with other human beings, with other species, and with Earth’s own precious ecosystems—and these divisive and violent tendencies are often justified by citing parables that appear to favor sheep (all of us good people) over goats (all the others).

We must and we can read sacred texts differently, for the thriving of all and not just for some. This is what I struggle with at this very time of year, as our liturgical year comes to a close and many churches (including my own) celebrate “Christ the King” Sunday, usually with triumphal images of divine judgment. Enough of that—it’s time get real about whatever kind of “king” this Christ is.

Here’s where I start, with the word judgment itself. As even a cursory skimming of the daily news clearly shows, the world is a tangled mess of complexities that often prevent us from seeing things clearly and directly. This hateful, violent mess needs to be sorted out.

And that’s the phrase I keep returning to in all the stories about divine judgment: the need to sort things out, just like sorting sheep from goats. Rather than leaping ahead to the dramatic image of punishment at the end of Matthew’s parable about those poor goats, the focus belongs first on what this parable is mostly about: seeing clearly, and discerning rightly, which is what it means to judge well.

Two things about this particular parable occur to me as helpful for thinking differently about judgment. First, Matthew’s Jesus is not interested in checklists. This does not sound at first like good news to me—I love checklists; I’m a post-it note junkie and I love checking items off my “to-do list.”

But that’s not what this parable is about. Just as Matthew keeps insisting throughout his account of the Gospel, it’s about a whole way of life, a fundamental approach toward the world and all others in it. When we have adopted and embraced a posture of compassion and love toward the world, we actually don’t need checklists—we simply respond lovingly, and with compassion, and for justice, and we do so as naturally as breathing.

Much to my chagrin, alas, checklists can actually get in the way of this kind of life. I truly sympathize with the so-called “goats” in this parable, the ones who are confronted with what they failed to do and who immediately object that those items were not on their “list”—hold on , Jesus! I wasn’t told that person was sick; I didn’t know they were in prison; no one taught me about the residential boarding schools where Native American children suffered; and I wasn’t even born when slavery happened!

These objections miss the point of Gospel life entirely. We’re not given a rulebook; we’re given a map so that we can travel well together no matter what we encounter on the road. And this, by the way, is exactly why Christian formation and Eucharistic worship are not merely optional but necessary and vital for God’s people—that’s how we cultivate lives of love and justice like muscle-memory.

And that suggests the second feature of this parable that might help in thinking differently about judgment: it’s not about others. Of course, I want to think of myself as a “sheep,” and I have a rather long list of those I’m sure are “goats.”

The modern Western world has inherited a long and painful history of making these distinct divisions almost at every turn: between tribes, nations, languages, races, sexualities, genders—the list of potential “goats” goes on and on.

But it’s probably worthwhile noting that the Greek word in this passage from Matthew is actually “kid-goats,” or babies. First-century shepherds often raised young goats with the sheep and cared for them in exactly the same way.

So the “sorting out” that happens in this parable is not between us and some exotic or foreign them; the sorting out happens among and within us. Divine judgment always begins not only at home but within our own minds and hearts. What needs to be sorted out in my own life? Which component parts of my own thinking need to be reoriented? How do I adjust my own course to stay on the good road?

These are the great questions of divine judgment, which are not about separating ourselves from others but discerning how to become the people God intends.

If typical notions of judgment fall away in Gospel parables, then standard images of kingship dissolve in the light of Christ. These realignments of judgment and kingship belong together. The lectionary also gave us reasons for this in a portion from the Letter to the Ephesians (1:15-23). There we read that the “king” is the one who lived among us as one of us, who suffered and died as one of us, and whom God raised from the dead for us.

This King is not the powerful monarch on high who condescends to step down from a heavenly throne but is instead intermingled with the dust of decay and the ashes of mass death and the dirt of our despair, buried there with us, and also with the promise of God: to rise up, Phoenix-life, with us enfolded in heavenly wings—and not just some of us, but all of us.

So here’s the thing: I have never liked the last three parables from Matthew’s Jesus. I think they mostly perpetuate exactly what has been wrong with institutional Christianity for quite a long time—the religious permission to judge and separate and divide and conquer. Besides all that, I rather like goats.

As I paused right there this past week and reflected on the goodness of goats, it suddenly occurred to me: There’s actually nothing in this parable to suggest that the final scene of punishment is inevitable. I would go further: the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a whole is good and it’s news precisely because God loves goats, too.

So what if Jesus told this parable to inspire us to live in such a way that everyone, absolutely every creature of God is welcomed into everlasting joy and delight?

What if God is calling the Church to exactly this kind of life, to do all that we can, with whatever we have, and for as long as possible to ensure that no goat is left behind?

That’s the road I want to travel toward the only “kingdom” I want to live in with a King truly worthy of our worship.

“Make All Things New,” James B. Janknegt

A River Runs through It

The Bible begins and ends with a river.

A river runs through the Garden of Eden in the opening chapters of Genesis, and a river runs through the Heavenly City in the closing chapter of the Revelation to John.

We might say that a wonderful storyline runs through Scripture just like a river: God sustains and nurtures what God has made with the water of life; and when things turn truly grim and dire, that same God heals and renews with the water of life.

This storyline invites our faith, which is to say, our trust, in Creator God.

I try always to remember that faith is not the same thing as “certainty.” Faith is our willingness to trust the God we cannot possibly understand. And I have to wonder if whether that might be why biblical writers seem so enamored with the image of a river. As the old saying goes, “you can never step into the same river twice,” because it’s always changing.

The infinite mystery of the living God is exactly like that, like a river: it sparkles on a sunny day, reflecting the sapphire blueness of a clear sky; it waters a thirsty land and promises fruitful harvests; and it will not sit still.

Just like a river, our knowledge of God is slippery; we can cup our hands to hold it but it will always, eventually, run through our fingers. As one theologian has put it, trying to speak with certainty about God is like “catching water with a net.”

This approach to faith used to make me quite nervous; I usually prefer a bit more stability, something that feels a little more secure. Over time, my love of rivers has helped me embrace a more “fluid” sense of faith. Rivers that move, whether with slow, eddy-like currents or quickly in foaming rapids, are rivers flowing with “living water.”

Water that doesn’t move—water that sits still and stays put and never changes—that water stagnates, becoming acrid and foul. The best known example of that kind of water can be found in the Jordan River Valley and is quite rightly called “The Dead Sea.”

This past Sunday was the fourth week in the “Season of Creation” and its theme was in fact “river.” This whole season has invited an embrace of faith, a deeper trust in God, the God whose own grace flows like a river for healing and renewal on an Earth that is parched for it.

We’re invited, in other words, to live with hope, precisely what feels so tenuous these days, nearly impossible in a world of runaway climate chaos.

The biblical passages some of us heard on Sunday sounded triumphant notes of hope—just like the kind Noah must have tried to muster as the flood waters were rising, higher and higher. And clearly the kind of hope the closest friends of Jesus tried to muster as they watched him die a terrible death.

We now stand on the other side of those classic stories, the side where we can breathe easier. The Creation lectionary gave us the story from Genesis about the “rainbow promise” God made to Noah (Genesis 9:12-17), and also the Easter story from Matthew (28:1-10) where startled women encounter an angel at an empty tomb.

But we’re not on the other side of the climate story, not yet. And that’s what makes faith, and trust, and hope so challenging right now in a world rather full of grim realities.

My own journey toward an ecological faith and hope was a rocky one. I grew up in a Christian tradition that emphasized the importance of avoiding Hell and going to Heaven; Earth was mostly just a stage on which that cosmic drama played out.

That view of Christian faith continues to linger around the edges of my life and it’s common in many Christian communities; for many Christians, it’s the very essence of what the Gospel itself even is. But that view changed dramatically for me, and ironically I suppose, by paying closer attention to Christianity’s own traditions. Just one example comes from the “Lord’s Prayer.” When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he urged them to pray that God’s will would be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Here, on Earth, is where God’s will should be done. And here, on Earth, is where God is calling us to spend our lives bearing witness to that earthy Gospel.

My journey, in other words, began as an “other-worldly” Christian, and I still am one, but I now believe that “other” world of God’s love and grace is emerging here, on Earth, and that makes all the difference, for everything.

So many people today are desperate for communities of spiritual practice and environmental healing, especially for ways to integrate spirituality with ecological renewal. It has never occurred to most of them that churches might actually be places for exactly that kind of community.

That’s exactly where my own ecological passion has emerged over the years, to tell the old, old story in fresh, new ways. The Church must tell the story of faith not as a story of escaping to some other world, but always and only as the story of love and healing and new life in this world.

New Testament scholar N. T. Wright makes this very point when he notes that many modern Christians suppose that the Gospel presents us with a choice between going to Hell or Heaven. But Scripture, he says, is not the story about us going somewhere; it’s about Creator God coming to make a home with us, right here—on Earth as in Heaven.

One of the obstacles to that compelling vision is actually the Bible itself, especially the last book of the Bible, from which the Creation lectionary also tapped this past Sunday. The temptation is to read the Revelation to John as wild spectacles of an apocalyptic age far beyond this time and place.

But No—the outrageous visions and complex symbols of that book are not about leaving Earth but about Earth transformed.

In that final chapter from Revelation, John, in one of his ecstatic states, sees a vision of the heavenly city arriving on Earth. An angel shows him a river running through that city, watering the Tree of Life. The tree bears “twelve kinds of fruit,” John says, and its leaves are for the “healing of the nations.”

Early readers would have recognized right away the number twelve, referring to the tribes of ancient Israel and thus to God’s own chosen people. But those same readers would have been shocked by how far the healing of the tree reaches—to the nations.

That word, “nations,” does not mean “country”; it means “all the others,” “strangers,” “outsiders,” all those whom we think don’t belong with us: different races and creeds, different histories and cultures, different philosophies and religions, different species! All of them find healing; all of them reside together, praising God in the Heavenly City on Earth, and a river runs through it.

Life is short, and we do not have much time to tell this amazing story for a wounded world. A story few of us can even imagine. It’s a story of that river watering the Tree of Life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations—not just some of the nations, but all of them: Potawatomi and Pakistani, Irish and Canine, Nigerian and Bovine, Taiwanese and Feline, to name but a scarce few.

That’s a vision worthy of giving our hearts to in trust.

That’s a story compelling and hopeful enough to tell others.

That’s the hope we must share of that river where—as the old Gospel song would have it— bright angel feet have trod, with countless dear and precious saints of God, who yet dance in the silver spray, as they lure us onward to that happy, golden day…

…a Day right here on Earth.

Living as Ikons of God

And it was good.
And it was good.
And it was very good.

There are still four more instances of that declaration of goodness in the first account of God’s creation of the world in Genesis, and many Christians heard all seven of them this past weekend when we celebrated Trinity Sunday.

What does it mean to call something “good”? What makes something “good” and how can we discern when it is? And why would it matter so much to repeat this refrain of goodness so often in the story of creation?

I’m guessing that human beings have not changed so terribly much over the last few thousand years. Just like today, humans in the ancient Mediterranean world likely thought something was “good” when it was good for them; something’s good when we can use it, or sell it, or trade it for something else; we become the standard for what’s considered “good.” I cannot help but think of how often I called my dear dog Judah a good boy simply because he obeyed me!

So perhaps it’s time to notice again (or for the first time) that all but one of the declarations of goodness in the first chapter of Genesis occur before humans even existed. Six out of seven times, God’s creation is declared good without any reference to human beings.

The whole creation itself is thoroughly good—whether it’s useful to us or not.

Well, that’s rather rude, isn’t it? Don’t we count for anything? Yes, we do, and much more so than most of us have dared to imagine—and sometimes more than we want to believe. To be described as “very good”—as humans were in that story—comes with some responsibilities.

John of Damascus, a monk and theologian of the seventh century, was embroiled in what came to be known as the “iconoclast controversy.” This was a vigorous debate about whether it is appropriate to have icons, or visual images, in churches.

John was an ardent supporter of icons and actually cited a familiar verse from Genesis to support his case: “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…”

John would have been reading the Greek version of that passage, and in Greek that phrase—“in the image of God”—reads as the icon of God.

The human face as an icon of God! Shouldn’t this take our breath away? My face, and your face, and every single human face we see, all of them, icons of the God who made us!

And so, John of Damascus says, if you degrade and denigrate and reject visual images, you offend the artist—and in this case, the artist is God.

I think a lot these days about the visual arts, living and working as I do on what many call the “arts coast” of Michigan. We Christians actually have a lot to say and to offer, from our own Christian traditions, about the importance of visual images, the spiritual depth of art as it connects us to Creator God, the very source of creativity itself.

We might also note, rather urgently, that the stakes are rather high in this shared artistic endeavor with God. John of Damascus goes on to note something else about that familiar passage in Genesis. We are created not only in the image but also the likeness of God.

Those are not the same words; in fact, in Greek the word “likeness” is not a noun but a process, not a state of being but a state of becoming.

We are created in God’s image, yes, but we’re still on the way toward God’s likeness.

To be human is to be engaged in a profound process of assimilating to God, of resembling the One who made us, of being constantly formed and transformed into the divine creatures God intended to make from the very beginning.

The choices we make in this life shape the course of that journey; that’s why the stakes are so high, and that’s why visual artists can help us.

Visual artists can help us see at least a bit more clearly the imprint of God not only in our own faces, but also in the faces of those who are different from us, even different species, and in Earth herself. And by seeing more clearly the presence of God all around us and among us and in us and in each other, hopefully we will act and live differently.

As we launch into June, LGBTQ Pride Month, we need to see just exactly how high the stakes are for the varieties of gendered sexualities in the human race. Beyond the usual platitudes—“love is love” or “we embrace diversity”—we need to see much more clearly that those who do not conform to the standards of White Patriarchy are increasingly at risk of serious physical harm, especially with easily accessible firearms.

This risk pertains no matter where we happen to live or work or play in this country, from shopping malls and suburban streets, to national parks and urban office buildings—and this risk continues for black and brown people, just as it always has been present for women.

And still, it was good.

Everything depends on the goodness of God’s creation, and therefore on the goodness of God—a divine goodness in which we are invited to participate ever more fully.

That’s a key word—participation—for a celebration of the Trinitarian character of God. Rather than some abstract metaphysical doctrine, affirming God as Trinity is meant to draw us ever deeper into the never-ending mystery of God’s own life of self-giving, reciprocal love.

Returning to John of Damascus for a moment, he used a mostly untranslatable Greek word to describe this Trinitarian mystery of God—the word is perichoresis.

Some scholars have noted that there is at least a trace of our word “choreography” in that Greek term. John apparently was inviting us to think about the Trinitarian relationships of God like a cosmic dance—and if you’ve ever been swept away by the alluring rhythms of a tango or the gracefulness of a waltz, the energy often spills off the dancefloor and you can feel it pulsating across your skin, rumbling in your muscles, your heartrate rising.

And that, John of Damascus said, is how God creates. The creative energy and fertile relationality of God’s own life just spills over, as it were, and the whole Universe comes into existence—the whole cosmos itself as an unimaginable dance of evolving, changing, glorious life.

That mutual and eternal exchange of divine energy among the divine persons makes it impossible to tell the dancers from the dance and the dance itself is endless, deathless love—that’s the Holy Trinity, a doctrine that could actually change the world!

The very source of creativity itself is swirling all around us and in us and among us—our very faces the ikons of Creator God as we journey into God’s own likeness, from one degree of glory to another—world without end!

Now…let’s live as if this were true.

Heaven and Earth are One

See the Conqueror mounts in triumph; see the King in royal state…

Those are the opening phrases of a hymn often used for the seventh Sunday of Easter, when many churches hear about the Ascension of Jesus, the story of the risen Christ being lifted up and taken by a cloud into Heaven.

We used a revised version of that hymn at my parish yesterday morning, with words that portray the rising Jesus not as the one who conquers but the one who saves; and to offer our praise, not for the glory of vanquished foes but of tender hearts.

I am convinced, perhaps more than ever, that such differences make a difference in today’s world—especially among those of us who are eager to make Christian worship matter for a world in pain.

The older and more typical images for the Ascension—images of conquest and of the totalizing power of monarchy—reflect particular cultural assumptions. The original version of the hymn I just noted, for example, was written by Christopher Wordsworth, a nineteenth-century English Bishop, who was writing at the height of the British Empire. The triumph of the risen Jesus, in other words, is the global triumph of Western civilization.

This blending of divine and imperial power offers a cautionary tale about religion itself: it’s never merely benign or neutral. Even well-intentioned people can mingle religious institutions and cultural customs in harmful ways. More severely, religious symbols can be appropriated for nefarious and violent purposes.

Nearly every religious tradition has fallen prey to this kind of appropriation over the centuries. And it’s happening today, in this country and others, under the banner of “White Christian Nationalism.”

I am not referring to all forms of patriotic engagement with our civic institutions; I don’t mean “Christian” in the way all churches worship and serve; and I certainly don’t mean to imply that white people are inherently bad.

“White Christian Nationalism” describes a particular cultural movement rooted in authoritarian impulses, divisive and hateful rhetoric, and is increasingly violent. I urged my own parish yesterday morning to take up the vital work of resisting this burgeoning cultural movement, to denounce it, and then bear witness to the transformative love and healing grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

While it seems like a wild stretch to go from the first-century ascension of Jesus to twenty-first century nationalism, religious symbols have always been vulnerable to that kind of political manipulation.

It’s worth noting here some key features of symbols. Many years ago, when I first started to learn about metaphorical and symbolic speech in Christian theology, it troubled me. I worried that theological symbols made the world of Christian faith less “real” somehow—as many people often say, Oh, that’s just a symbol.

What I have realized about symbols since then is precisely the opposite. Symbolic speech points to a reality so real that our ordinary, everyday language fails us. Whatever we may be trying to consider, perhaps its intimacy is just too close, or the joy too ecstatic, or the grief just too unraveling—in any case, we cannot speak of it directly; we need a symbol.

Gospel writers do this frequently. Many churches heard from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles yesterday morning, for example, when the closest friends of Jesus encounter Easter itself embodied; the risen Jesus is standing before them, and they have no idea what to say (Acts 1:6-11).

All they can manage to do is to look backward, to what they knew in a time gone by—what glory used to be, what fullness of life felt like so long ago, and what happiness might yet be once again.

“So,” they ask Jesus, “is this when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

That question sounds like such a wild non-sequitur it’s almost funny! But this is exactly the kind of question most of us would ask in a moment like that. Human beings always interpret and understand the world based on our past experiences and expectations. That’s really all we have to go on. Especially in disorienting moments of divine encounter we naturally revert to old patterns and familiar rhythms.

So while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the question these disciples ask the risen Jesus, it just sets the bar far too low for Easter.

When we finally realize that Easter has ushered in a new world, already unfolding before us, with a wider horizon than we could have imagined, a dawn lighted with a brighter sun, we suddenly need a symbol for this, a way to talk about what we cannot possibly comprehend—and so Luke gives us the Ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God in Heaven.

It’s a beautiful symbol and it makes perfect sense to frame it with triumph. But precisely because “triumphalism” presents a real and present danger in today’s cultural moment, we need alternative frameworks.

We might consider a wonderful line from poet Mary Oliver: “My work,” she says, “is loving the world.” And that means, as she describes it, “mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

What might happen if we embraced the Ascension of Jesus, not with images of conquest and triumph, but with love and astonishment?

What if we were astounded not only by the spectacular pyro-technics usually associated with heavenly glory, but were also thoroughly amazed just by looking at each other, the nearly unspeakable glory of human faces? What if noticing iris blooming and dogs playing and babies taking their first steps actually took our breath away? Could we hear the wind in the springtime trees and the birds singing their own songs of praise in the early morning and the waves that come rolling up the ancient dunes along stunning shorelines and just stand still, astonished?

I don’t mean that we must choose between the heavenly glory of ascension and a down-to-earth God dwelling among us. To the contrary, the Ascension of Jesus invites us to embrace both and especially how they are inseparably intertwined. Right there is the good news of Luke’s dramatic symbol, of Jesus joining Heaven and Earth, revealing their intimate union.

Heaven is not far off, and Earth is not lost. They are joined, united, woven together in an unimaginable tapestry of divine beauty.

We must live into that vision of union and communion, or we risk abandoning Earth to those whose only desire is to “divide and conquer.”

God calls the Church to live as witnesses to flourishing life and gracious healing and the transformations that come only from love and laughter and all the things we can’t even dare yet to hope for—because Heaven and Earth are one.

And that’s what it means to live as Easter people, people who are loving and astonished.

Thomas the Truth-Teller

The second Sunday of Easter is often referred to as “low Sunday”—after the intensity of Holy Week and Easter Day, both attendance and energy are a bit low by comparison. It’s also the day on which we always hear the story about “doubting Thomas,” but I never want to refer to him that way again.

Poor Thomas has been branded as the “doubter” for far too long, as if he were the only one who wanted to hear the voice of his beloved, as if he were the only who needed to see the risen Jesus in the flesh, and to touch him.

Contrary to how I usually read this story from John’s account of the Gospel (20:19-31), I no longer think doubt is the focus of this story at all, and it isn’t even mostly about Thomas. This story is about the healing of a fractured community—and the love Thomas has for Jesus becomes the occasion for that healing to happen.

John constructs this story, broadly speaking, in two parts—the first, when Thomas was not there, and the second when he was. How John stitches these parts together is where the insights simmer.

The first part is framed with fear. The closest friends and disciples of Jesus have gathered together on the very first Easter Day. They are afraid that what happened to Jesus might also happen to them. They’re meeting behind locked doors, John says, for “fear of the Judeans.”

Christian communities need to note carefully whom those first disciples feared. Among first-century Semitic peoples, the Judeans were the religious elite among the Israelites, and they had conspired with Roman authorities to execute Jesus.

So while John doesn’t tell us directly why Thomas wasn’t there, it seems rather plain: he was afraid. There’s the first insight: nothing will fracture a community more quickly than fear—fear of the “other,” fear of the self, fear of change, fear of honesty and vulnerability and even intimacy. Fear gathers to itself a whole herd of toxic energies.

Then suddenly, right there in midst of that toxic stew, Jesus appears—locked doors be damned! John is not writing about a clever magician’s trick with this remarkable appearance. This is instead a second insight we might note: fearful isolation dissolves in the light of love.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says. He would have said this in Aramaic, echoing the Hebrew word “shalom.” This ancient and beautiful word means much more than merely the absence of conflict; it evokes wholeness, harmony, and completeness.

Jesus blesses them with peace once again and then, John says, he “breathed on them.”

It’s worth considering how close you have to be to someone in order to breathe on them. We have certainly become accustomed to that calculation in this era of Covid. Interior “perimeter alarms” go off whenever somebody gets too close! In this story, the risen Jesus gets close to his friends, very close, close enough to breathe on them—a touching moment of tenderness and intimacy.

It’s also an ancient intimacy of life itself. John uses the very same verb here that the Greek version of the Old Testament uses in Genesis to describe the creation of humanity, that moment when God breathes life into the creature God has just made from the dust.

Into a dusty room of fear, John’s Jesus breathes life.

John could have stopped right there and we would have a lovely story. But this is only Part One, because Thomas isn’t there. You can’t have a story of wholeness, harmony, and completeness when someone is missing.

Part Two begins with the disciples gathering once again, a week later—the original Greek says, eight days later, and that’s not a random number. Returning again to Genesis, this gospel writer is reminding us that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh; the eighth day is for the new creation.

Eight days later and Thomas is there, symbolizing a restored community of friends and the healing of this household of companions—a new creation wrought from the wreckage of violence and grief. Thomas shows up on the Eighth Day, a symbol for our shared healing toward a brand new world.

I’m reminded of some words from Methodist minister and poet Steven Garnaas-Holmes: If you want to see resurrection, don’t trot out your success stories or your jubilations or your triumphant marches in front of defeated enemies. No, if you want to see resurrection, look at your wounds; look at those places in your life and in your communities that need healing, those places we try to cover over, repress, push aside, prefer to ignore, even find shameful.

Thomas knew all this, maybe better than all the rest of them. All this talk of resurrection, he says, is just a sham if we can’t talk about how we betrayed Jesus, and how we deserted him, and how all of us fled when our Beloved needed us most—well, all of us men did, I’m sure Thomas would be quick to add; the women actually remained, and at great risk to their own lives.

Rather than referring to Thomas ever again as the doubter in this story, let’s call him the truth-teller. “Fear of the Judeans” doesn’t hold a candle to the fear we harbor about ourselves, the fear of our own capacity for betrayal, the fear of our own spite and hostility, the fear of our self-destructive patterns that plunge us into isolation and violence.

Thomas will not let us off the hook for that; show me the wounds, he says. Show me that we’re being honest and transparent and real with each other—otherwise this whole resurrection business is worse than pointless; it’s delusional.

Denial and avoidance won’t save us—this is the (annoying) truth Thomas insists we confront. And John’s brilliant story-telling speaks directly to each of us many centuries later: be brave and look at your failures; reach out and touch your betrayals; put your hand out where so much has been lost, where the emptiness breaks your heart, and where your deepest wounds go deeper still.

Don’t be afraid—reach out and touch the healing.

Recalling that we can plausibly read every story in John as a Eucharistic story, a recent commentator suggests that John wrote this morning’s story for future believers, for us. John wrote this for all those who would gather around the Eucharistic Table, for the ones who would reach out their hands to touch the bread and the cup.

Don’t be afraid—reach out for healing.

Go to Galilee

Hollywood filmmakers turn often to the drama of crucifixion (most notably, Mel Gibson) but rarely to the resurrection. I wonder if an empty tomb is a bit…boring. Or maybe there are too many oddities to stitch together coherently, or strange moments of anticlimax.

This year’s lectionary cycle gave us Matthew’s version of the story as an option, a great example of Easter’s peculiar character.

“Go to Galilee.”

What an odd thing for the risen Jesus to say. Just then, at this first post-resurrection appearance, this profound moment of realizing God’s victory over death, Jesus says, “go to Galilee” (Mt. 28:10).

What would “Galilee” have meant to those women, those men, those first followers and disciples and dear friends of Jesus? What was “Galilee” to them?

Matthew drops hints about this throughout his account of the Gospel, hints about a place where I might imagine feeling completely at home and fully myself. That sets a fairly high bar, so I sometimes try to imagine a place where I can at least come close to feeling perfectly at home in my own body and gladly at home with other bodies.

If you can imagine such a place, that’s your “Galilee.” That’s your home base, your go-to, can’t-live-without place. And the risen Jesus says to his closest friends, “go to Galilee; I will meet you there.”

This homey image matters, it seems to me, especially when confronting the disorientations of Easter. Christmas, after all, is much easier to manage—what’s not to love about a newborn baby? But what in the world do we do with an empty tomb?

Believers and skeptics alike have answered that question in different ways. Throughout church history and today, there’s a whole range of ways to read and interpret the Easter story.

For some, Easter is a beautiful metaphor, evoking the cycle of life itself in the seasons of the year. What lies buried in the cold earth beneath layers of snow emerges in the warm daylight of spring, the green shoots of new life, and here in western Michigan, the carpets of lavender crocus everywhere.

For others, Easter offers reassurance that what was lost can be found, what has been damaged can be restored, what has grown old will be made new. Whatever has failed in our organizations and institutions, whatever has died in us—joy, perhaps, or intimacy, trust and tenderness—whatever has been marred by neglect or abuse or trauma, God can renew and restore and bring to life once again; that’s Easter!

Still others will of course embrace this morning’s celebration as the story of God raising Jesus bodily from death to new life. I don’t mean the resuscitation of a corpse and Jesus is not a ghost. Resurrection in this view instead marks something new and uncanny, and it is the first fruit and foretaste of our own resurrection-destiny.

Those are just a few of the options for embracing Easter, and my prayer is that Christian communities everywhere would welcome everyone, regardless of where they fall on that spectrum of options. The arc of our liturgical year, from Christmas to Easter, touches on the deepest mysteries of birth, death, and new life any of us can confront; I see no point in administering orthodox tests or quizzing anyone’s doctrinal acuity about such things.

Everyone—whether convinced, searching, certain, doubtful, agnostic, perplexed, wildly faithful or some combination of these depending on the day of the week or what they had for breakfast—everyone should find an Easter home, a place to be loved into healing and renewed by grace. We all need a Galilee.

Personally, I land in some fashion on all of the ways one might conceive and believe the Easter story; I see no reason to choose just one. In fact, all those various ways of believing mutually affect the others: of course God raised Jesus from the dead; look what happens in the spring! Of course this community can come back to life; look what God did on Easter!

In my (perhaps peculiar) view, nothing is too good to hope for. What biblical writers consistently urge us to consider has also been true in my own life many times: God usually surprises us with more than we expected, with far more than we thought possible.

Here’s something, however, that I do worry about: postponing resurrection life into such a distant future that it makes no impact on the present. That’s not the Easter story; that’s actually the story of Empire. The powers and principalities of imperial regimes will always try to divert our attention away from the needs of the poor, delay the call for justice, and mute the urgency of ecological renewal by insisting that our only hope resides in some far-away world beyond the grave.

Remember, Empire killed Jesus; and God raised Jesus right there, in Empire.

In contrast to imperial paralysis, and as my good friend Jim Mitulski likes to say, the point of an Easter faith is to practice resurrection now, every day, in our lives and personal relationships, in our organizations and institutions, and in the wider world around us.

Practice resurrection now—in this world of narrow-minded bigotry, and death dealing institutions, and casual acts of violence, and where we can’t even get sensible gun safety legislation passed in Congress when our children are dying.

Practice the transforming love of resurrection now in all the most familiar places, in the most ordinary communities, among the people you know best.

In other words, go to Galilee.

This anticlimax moment in Matthew’s version of the story should remind us that Easter is not some foreign, exotic, distant planet we’re invited to visit at some point in the far-off future—it’s in our own backyard right now.

Just last week, on Palm Sunday, we heard Matthew’s story about Jesus bringing crowds of people with him from Galilee to march on Jerusalem. They had heard him teach there in Galilee, watched him heal the sick, and share meals with prostitutes and tax collectors there, they got into boats with him and sat on hillsides with him and had finally found their place with him, there.

Go to Galilee, the risen Jesus says, the place where we met and where we were most at home together; that place where you learned how to fish as a young boy; where you climbed sycamore trees as a “tom girl”; where you dropped your fishing nets and left your orchards and followed me because you caught a glimpse of something new and powerful—the hope of healing and love and flourishing and finally and at last, beyond your wildest dreams, being fully at home and fully yourself.

“Go tell this to my brothers,” Jesus says to his closest women companions. These are not slaves or servants or even disciples; all of these are family; all of this happens at home.

“Galilee” is here and now; no need to travel, and we must not delay. Christian communities everywhere must practice resurrection today, together, because the world is desperate for Easter.

“All Saints’ Parish,” Saugatuck, Michigan

Bury Your Theology

What is your theology?

People have asked me that question in various ways over the years, in many different communities, and for more than one reason. Eventually, I started responding with some version of “it depends”—on the daily news, my mood, or what the lectionary appoints from the Bible for the coming Sunday.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the question, but I am increasingly skeptical of providing an adequate answer. Or rather, the kind of answer modern Western sensibilities recognize as sufficient. Holy Week quite naturally provokes the question in all sorts of ways, entangling so many of us not only in liturgical complexities but prickly and often unwieldy theologies.

I have always loved Holy Saturday for the respite it offers in this holiest of weeks, not only from liturgical fussing but also the theological wrangling that sends me grasping after theories to explain what cannot even be named. It has been occurring to me recently to take this quiet day as an opportunity to review the systems and doctrines I’ve inherited and studied, the theological ideas that have both vexed and inspired me, and then just bury it—all of it.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, for example, I live some of my days as a Johannine Christian, relishing the Beethoven-like thickness of the phrases in John’s account of the Gospel. Not only thick but also obtuse, such as the image of Jesus as both shepherd and sheep-gate (10:7-9; 10:11-14), or more unnervingly as a serpent on a cross (3:14).

On more spritely days, with energy running high and wanting just to get on with the work at hand, I embrace a more Markan Christianity. The shortest and bare-bones account of the Gospel rarely pauses for reflection—“immediately” is Mark’s favorite word, and he concludes his account with women running away in fear.

When my gay self feels a bit queer around the edges, I’m oddly grateful for Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes God’s inclusion of Gentiles in the Church as an “unnatural act” (11:24). If God can act contrary to nature, then surely I can? Or maybe nature itself is just much queerer than most of us can imagine, as Paul himself describes a universe filled with earthly bodies and heavenly bodies and angelic glories, all of it contained in a bare seed that is sown in the earth (1 Cor. 15:35-41).

How tempting (nearly irresistibly so) to suppose that we must choose which of all the biblical options is the “correct” one. But when I do resist that urge and take this rich panoply of biblical tropes into the history of theology’s development, I find myself not unlike a fickle lover, enamored by Dionysian ecstatic mysticism in the morning and turning fondly toward Augustine’s self-excoriating disciplines by noon.

So much of this, I have come to realize, depends on exactly what kind of question I’m asking, which is often not entirely apparent. To the standard Evangelical question—are you saved?—I must at first respond, from what? And then eventually, for what? And of course, how? Holy Week gathers all these questions, and more, those countless and often repetitive inquires that have been building all year long and stacks them, one on top of the other, a virtual mosh pit of symbols and rites.

In a society of increasing isolation and fragmentation, and having recently lived through the severe touch deprivation of a global pandemic, having one’s feet tenderly touched and washed on Maundy Thursday can feel salvific. I pause there gratefully, but then realize that the Cross still matters to me, or perhaps that it should matter to me more “salvifically” than it usually does.

I recall Rowan Williams’ arresting insight about the cross in his interpretation of the resurrection narratives: “salvation comes from our victims.” I began to grasp his meaning far better by reading M. Shawn Copeland’s racial analysis of it and her heart-stopping image of what the Gospel demands from us. She interrupts my romanticized images of table fellowship with the Gospel call to orient ourselves “before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal.”

That sentence cannot mean the same thing to me and in the same way it does to Black Americans in this white supremacist society. That’s why Copeland resists making the cross our saving symbol but insists that we cannot be saved without it, precisely because the whole arc of betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection demands from all of us the kind of life that reflects the deepest possible arc of solidarity with the poor and outcast.

Old ways of living—the ways of violence and violation—those ways must die with Christ in order for any of us to be raised with Christ to new life. This, Copeland says, is the “divine praxis of solidarity” that offers a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self— salvation, in other words.

All of this (and more) swirls around all the ritual complexities of the week we have just traveled together as Christians, and on this Holy Saturday I cannot help but consider whether theology itself needs to die with Christ as well.

As Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the thirteenth century once uttered, “I pray God to rid me of God.” After all, even the word “God” can only point to what none of us can ever fully comprehend; and it can easily get in the way of actually encountering what it so feebly evokes.

I don’t mean our thinking and speaking make no difference, or that our theological ideas have no consequences. To the contrary, the stakes are high in what we say and do—bad theology kills (as the contemporary aphorism urges us to note); and this, too: good theology brings life.

Yes, and still, as John’s Jesus reminds us, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” How could this not apply to our theologies as surely as it does to our own bodies?

So perhaps as gently and respectfully as we can, it’s time to bury our theology with all the nails that keep tidy systems pinned to institutional walls and let our wounds breathe some fresh air.

I need to bury much of my own theology, even the most cherished bits, the ones that “make sense” and feel cozy, those beloved propositions and religiously fine-tuned mechanisms; without my realizing it, they’re blocking my path.

Perhaps this could be a shared Holy Saturday exhortation: Bury your theology, and then let it rise with Jesus, unrecognizable but strangely alluring, oddly familiar but fresh and new.

Audienced

“Hosanna” is a shortened form of a Hebrew phrase, a plea that means “save us, deliver us!” Christians hears this word every year on Palm Sunday, and this year from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (Mt. 21:1-11).

Jesus has come from Galilee and has just crossed the border into Judea. He has brought a large crowd with him, and as they march into Jerusalem together, the crowds cry out: Hosanna! Save us! Deliver us!

How very strange to see these jubilant marchers become a hostile mob shouting “Crucify!” The jarring shift happens every year at the beginning of Holy Week; in Matthew’s account, these crowds were no longer marchers but bystanders (Mt. 27:11-66).

I remember hearing, many years ago now, an NPR commentary about the news coverage of O. J. Simpson’s infamous attempt to flee policy custody in a white Ford Bronco. The commentator linked the development of cable news shows to that June afternoon in 1994 as people lined Los Angeles streets and sat glued to their television sets.

“We are becoming,” that commentator said, “audienced.”

As if gathered in bleachers to watch the big game, or perhaps more comfortably at home, safe on our couches, we now view the world from a distance.

This all sounded a bit melodramatic to me back then. But the situation has only grown more severe: the Internet, the World Wide Web, smart phones, social media. We can watch acts of gendered violence or racial hatred on our phones, as if going to an afternoon matinee, and then head out to dinner. Migrants and refugees, shooters in schools, factory farms and ecosystem destruction—for all this and more, we are more surely bystanders; we have become “audienced.”

I thought of that analysis as I pondered Matthew’s stories for Palm Sunday. Rather than wondering how the crowd could turn so quickly from adulation to accusation, I suddenly realized instead that these were not the same people; these were different crowds.

Some of the people in each crowd probably overlapped, like a Venn diagram. But by and large, those marchers and those bystanders were not the same people. This startled me; it was like seeing a black-and-white movie rendered into brilliant Technicolor. It changes so much, nearly everything.

So who were these people who processed with palms into Jerusalem, who marched with defiance into the Holy City so long ago?

Once you start asking that question, Matthew readily supplies the answer: they were not the clergy, like me, the religious leaders who worried about proper piety and strict observance of religious standards; nope, they weren’t marching.

Neither were the wealthy merchants who worried about disrupting the business cycle and shrinking their profit margins. In the very next story, Matthew shows us the moneychangers who stayed in the temple; they weren’t marching.

The Romans were certainly not out there, not the soldiers or the imperial officials; they were worried about a riot and disturbing the peace.

All of these—or at least most of them—audienced themselves that day; they chose the sidelines; they decided to be bystanders, simply to “stand by” as the parade passed by.

Well, then, who exactly were these people who marched so audaciously with Jesus into Jerusalem?

Mathew’s pretty clear about this throughout his whole account of the Gospel: the marchers were most certainly the poor—or to be clearer, the ones with nothing left to lose. They ripped palms off the trees and tossed them in front of Jesus like a party had just come to town. And the working classes and day-laborers were out there with them; not today’s electricians or plumbers but the stable cleaners and fishnet-menders. Let’s not forget the prostitutes and sex workers (all those “dirty” people), and probably a good number of tax collectors, who usually didn’t have any friends—these were the ones shouting Hosanna!

“Save us!” they cried, as Jesus rode a donkey into the Holy City, as if he were a king.

These were the ones who had come with Jesus from Galilee, the ones who had shared meals with him (even though they weren’t supposed to); the ones who got into boats with him and sat on hillsides with him while he broke bread and multiplied fish and had finally found their place, with him.

Hosanna!

These parade-goers were the “outside agitators,” the trouble-makers who had nothing to lose if the empire fell, or the system collapsed, or the banks crashed; to the contrary, they had everything to gain from the coming Kingdom of God—and they had already tasted it around tables of shared meals.

Hosanna!

As I think back on every congregation I have been in over the years, including the one I am now privileged to serve as rector, all of us have quite a lot to lose; it’s unlikely any of us would have been in that parade. And this isn’t accidental.

There are powerful forces in this world—imperial, corporate, moneyed—forces that will not relent in trying to “audience” us, to make us passive, acquiescent, and comfortable. That’s how they make profits and secure their power—it really is as crude as that, and it always has been, which is why the Palm Sunday narrative is a classic.

I am now plagued by another question: who am I in the Gospel story? Or more importantly, who do I want to be? (Just being able to ask such questions is itself a pricey privilege.)

As most Christians around the world enter our holiest of weeks, do we want to be mere bystanders—audienced—in the Gospel? Or, do we want to be “discipled”?

To live the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to follow a road toward the Cross, not merely to watch from the curb. It’s not an easy road to travel, not at all (even though it’s carved by an unimaginable grace). We can’t take very much with us on this road and we have to leave a lot behind; it’s pretty scary.

And I’ve come to see (far too slowly over the years) that the only way to travel this road is to do so with others, with companions—a lovely word that refers to those with whom we break bread.

Of all weeks, this one just now beginning is the time to resist that worn-out and utterly toxic supposition of modern Western society that we must always fend for ourselves, buck up and undertake arduous journeys on our own strength.

Traveling with others not only—as the old cliché has it—makes the burden lighter, it’s also how we learn why love is worth the truly hard work and also just how much we’re willing to risk for it (the answer is everything).

Yes, this road to the Cross is a hard one, and it’s scary. This also is true: it’s the only road that leads to Easter.

So let’s walk it together.