Cross of Christ – Peculiar Faith

Saved from Violence: Witness to Solidarity

I still remember rather vividly the O. J. Simpson case back in 1994. The former NFL football player and television personality was accused of murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman.

On June 17 of that year, Simpson refused to surrender to the authorities and led the Los Angeles police department on a low-speed chase in his white Ford Bronco, and did so for about 60 miles of southern California freeways.

The chase itself was televised live on NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. An astonishing 95 million people watched it live! It was the highest-rated television broadcast of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl!

Back then, an NPR commentator captured an insight about that moment that seems to have become truer over the decades. Reflecting on the Simpson case—the car chase and the infamous trial that followed—the commentator noted how we have become “audienced,” rendered as passive observers by our media-drenched culture.

That passivity has only become exponentially worse since then: the advent of the Internet, and smart phones, and social media make it nearly impossible now not to be merely an audience. As we scroll through online reels, we might come across a clip of a stand-up comic in one moment and with a simple swipe, we are watching horrific episodes of genocide happening in real time, right there, on our little screens.

It’s hard to say whether our technology has changed us or whether we just have new tools to do what humans have always done. We might recall Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014—he was shot by a police officer, who simply stood there and watched him bleed out and die, and many of us watched him do that on television.

Or we might go farther back to the era of Jim Crow segregation and the practice of lynching. Some of those violent episodes took place at church picnics, of all things, when faithful churchgoers shared food at picnic tables while “strange fruit,” as some have called those Black bodies, were hanging from nearby trees.

We can certainly go much farther back, recalling that early Christians described the Cross of Christ as a “tree” and the body of Jesus as its fruit, his blood watering the roots.

Is that how the street mob thought about it, the ones calling for the death of Jesus? Is that how the cohort of religious leaders thought about it? What about the disciples?

What kind of meaning do we make from the violence we witness? Whom do we hold responsible for the violence we witness? When do we cease witnessing and become “audienced”? What kind of people are in that shift? Who, then, have we become?

Public theologian Jon Paul Syndor has recently referred to these times in which we live as an age of “performative cruelty”: children ripped from their parents’ arms by government officials, immigrants warehoused in filthy detention camps, tens of thousands of children buried in the rubble of Gaza, hospitals and schools targeted for bombing—the violence of our age is stark, gripping, and dismaying.

How, Syndor wonders, do so many religious leaders, most of them Evangelical Christians, support such cruelty, visibly and vocally? Why would they ever do so?

Syndor is convinced it’s because of their religious interpretation of the Cross of Christ; they firmly believe that the death-by-torture of Jesus is the means by which God saves us, and so violence will continue to save us today.

That ostensibly pious supposition sounds traditional and even biblical, but I have become convinced that it is instead just bad theology; and bad theology is deadly.

To be clear, I do believe that the cross of Jesus Christ is a symbol of blessing and divine salvation; but I do not believe that God ever uses violence as the means to save anyone or anything. To the contrary, God is committed to saving us from violence, not with violence.

In today’s world of unrelenting violence it is all the more imperative for religious people to be very careful—especially religious people—not even to appear to embrace or endorse violence as a means to an end; as human history shows time and time again, religious faith adds a dimension of justification for the most brutal actions. So we must be as clear as possible about this instead: brutality and torture cannot heal us or anyone; there is nothing soothing, healing, or saving about brutality, whether we commit it ourselves, watch it being done by others, or proclaim it as religious doctrine.

We must never imagine God as violent lest we ourselves embody violence itself.

In my western Michigan parish along the Lake Michigan shoreline, we include an opportunity in our Good Friday liturgy to venerate an image of the Cross of Christ. The cross we use for that purpose is made from driftwood found on the beach near where the sanctuary sits—a tangible reminder that God is committed to saving us from violence not only in first-century Judea but also right here, today.

That moment of veneration must include, I believe, a commitment to stand firm in a shared rejection of violence, and to say clearly, in both word and action, every single day and at every moment we can, that violence will not save us.

What is soothing, and healing, and yes, saving, is the God who joins us in our pain and confusion, who stands with us in our foolishness and tragic missteps, the one who dwells among us and travels with us all the way to the cross, and from there to lead us through it toward a bright day of new life.

Christians are never an “audience” in our religious sanctuaries; we are rather witnesses and participants in an ongoing and still unfolding story of God’s own solidarity with us, and how this story shapes us to set aside our violent tendencies, and our brutal nightmares of vengenance, and even our petty resentments that can fester into bitter hositilities. Set all of that aside as we witness the Cross of Christ among us and live in deep solidarity with others, with the vulnerable, with the wounded, and the forgotten.

And that is how God saves, and that is what the Cross means: gracious accompaniment; tender presence; and bold solidarity.

Standing at the Crossroads of Healing

Today, Ash Wednesday, Christians begin the annual Lenten journey toward the Cross. While always important to note, this year it seems especially vital and indispensable to say as clearly as possible that this journey does not glorify pain and suffering, nor does it imagine violence as saving.

To say the same thing but differently: crucifixion was a first-century tool of state-sponsored terror—it is quintessentially that from which we must be saved. The image of Jesus on that cross is the image of God in solidarity with us, all of us, on a path toward new life.

I stumbled upon yet one more way to say the same thing in a compelling blog post by Jon Paul Sydnor: crucifixion was a crime, and we must stop seeing this act of performative cruelty as salvific. For Sydnor, “The crucifixion is the wound; the resurrection is the balm.”

Those insights have a long way still to go before they sink fully into my bones and muscles. I grew up in an Evangelical Christian tradition that told me (in both overt and subtle ways) that I’m tainted, depraved, and mostly if not wholly bad—being a burgeoning gay boy didn’t help. The cross of Christ was our only hope at appeasing the wrath of the God who made us. (Don’t try to make sense of that sentence; it doesn’t make any sense at all.)

The struggle to embrace the “way of the cross” as none other than the “way of life and peace” (as the Book of Common Prayer would have us do in the Collect for Monday in Holy Week) is not particularly helped by the Sunday lectionary, which will give us a set of texts this week that can feel like a relapse into a religious addiction: the putative “fall” of Adam and Eve in Eden (Genesis 3:1-7) and St. Paul’s apparent framing of that story as the origins of “original sin” (Romans 5:12-19).

For these reasons and more, I’m so grateful for the “Crossroads of Healing” initiative here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, our shared effort to host gatherings and events at the intersection of the arts and spirituality. This initiative emerged from our commitment to name and address the wounds of race, gender, class, and sexuality in an ecological frame, and especially for the sake of healing toward thriving.

I’m particularly grateful for this initiative as we begin Lent and reflect on the multi-layered imagery of the Cross. Or, as we might note, Christian communities have especially appreciated the image of a cross at intersectional moments. Rather than just one meaning, the cross of Christ carries many modes of interpretation, including the reassuring hope of divine healing for the wounds of separation, isolation, and the violence of oppression.

This initiative has heightened my own awareness of how Christian faith and culture create various intersections as race and gender (especially in this patriarchal society of white supremacy, which describes the United States from its very founding) intertwine with the Cross, and all for the sake of interlaced liturgical rites and spiritual practices.

But really, what does all of that mean for the first Sunday in Lent and those trigger texts from the lectionary?

We spend nearly as much time on visual art in my parish as we do with Scripture and the Prayer Book. All three have been woven together in ways that prove remarkably insightful and life-giving. Preparing for this year’s Lenten journey, for example, I spent some time with the work of Nigerian artist Olamilekan Abatan; his mixed media piece “Adam and Eve” will certainly accompany me this year on the forty-day journey through Lent.

The complexity of Abatan’s painting echoes and magnifies the complexity of the story itself—for some, this painting could introduce complexity into a biblical story that is usually treated in rather simple (and therefore misleading) ways. The first and most obvious thing to notice, and in rather stark contrast to many visual depictions of Adam and Eve in Western art, these figures are Black, and clothed in ways that might suggest they are African. This makes contextual sense given that Abatan is himself Nigerian, but it also makes scientific sense given that our human species originated on the continent of Africa.

There are other layers to notice here. Adam and Eve are poised on the brink of eating the forbidden fruit. Look closely and you will see something unusual in Eve’s lap—a laptop computer made by Apple. It’s a wonderful double entendre evoking the longstanding cultural assumption that the “forbidden fruit” was an apple even though the kind of fruit is not mentioned in the biblical story.

Still more: might Abatan be inviting us to wonder whether modern technology is a kind of “forbidden fruit”? The biblical storyteller refers to that fruit as coming from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”; in that sense, do today’s technology devices give us too much access to knowledge? Or perhaps deceitful knowledge is the problem. Or maybe the technology itself—just like the fruit in the original story—is the problem because it creates a distraction from relationship as it pulls apart the intimate couple in this story. This echoes an important way to frame that third chapter in Genesis—as a rupture in intimacy, the breaking of relationship, and the dissolving of trust.

More than only these insights into that ancient story, the artist himself and his approach to the work provide intersectional touchstones—crossroads of healing, as it were—for just such a time as this. Abatan was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1997 and has emerged as a leading figure in what some have called the “hyperrealist” scene in contemporary African art; he blends Western sensibilities with elements of African visual culture, and he also mixes media (wax fabrics, charcoal and pencil, and acrylic paints, for example).

In addition, Abatan frequently places African figures in classical European poses, using the painting techniques of historical masters like Caravaggio, which tend to evoke Western art but with the “African human” moved to the center of the frame rather than the margins or unseen entirely. He sometimes replicates the style of a religious icon, as in the piece he calls “Black Lives Matter.” The pose, the gesture, and the clothes, not to mention the halo, all suggest an icon of Christ; the use of an African figure as well as the title of the piece can make that assessment a bit disorienting, but the Latin words on the open book held by this African man would seem to confirm the guess: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” One’s own cultural context and history make all the difference in how one reads this image—and what it evokes. Is a Black/African Jesus, for example, the “way to life” in a society trapped in the dynamics of white Christian nationalism?

Even this brief synopsis of Abatan’s life and work makes me wonder about my own reading of history, and the kind of engagement with Scripture I tend to favor, and the way I retrieve theological traditions for pastoral and priestly work: what have I consigned to the margins that might rightly belong at the center? Whom have I overlooked entirely in the texts or visual images of my theological education? More pointedly, how much of my Christian faith relies on having omitted key figures or moments or places (whether intentionally or accidentally)?

Questions like these are not about finding fault or assigning blame for anything; to the contrary, they seem more like assembling the pieces of a treasure map—what kind of riches have we never known in our own traditions because of the restricted views we have lived with for so long?

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

That question alone always makes me glad to observe Black History Month (and all the entanglements and intersectional complexities that go with it); every year I learn something new to intertwine with my own perspectives, not only about Black history but also about my own story; and I appreciate something in fresh ways not only about other traditions, but also how communities of faith can interlace these multiple traditions for a truly rich and “mixed media” witness to a better world—surely these are the “crossroads of healing” toward which we might actually be glad to journey in this Lenten season.

The Way of the Cross on the Road called Freedom

Religious symbols are complex by design. There are good reasons for this: religious traditions deal with complex topics, histories, and relationships, and none of this can be reduced to simple images. Religious symbols mark a whole world of meaning-making.

Religion’s complexity appears in the multiple layers religious symbols carry with them into our shared work of interpretation. We can’t deal with all of the layers in a given symbol all at once, but we should remember that there’s always more than one way to read them.

I reminded myself of all this as I tried (and failed) to write a sermon about “the meaning of the cross” on a Lenten Sunday when that symbol was directly in our line of vision. The cross is the most recognizable symbol of Christianity and arguably the central symbol of Christian faith. It’s also soaked in violence and suffering, and framed with betrayal and abandonment. Often forgotten, early Christian traditions also depicted the cross as a blossoming tree, a fruit-laden vine, and a shimmering object of divine glory.

Poignant stories, striking visual art, rich musical settings—all of these contribute to a long history of engaging in various ways with this one symbol. That history has been both insightful and sometimes deeply troubling. Given that complex history, I’m convinced of at least this much: the need always to read the cross with the hope of new life.

The Lenten lectionary gave us a passage yesterday morning from Mark’s account of the Gospel in which Jesus predicts his own death (8:31-38). When Peter recoils from this, horrified, Jesus seems to suggest the divine necessity of this painful path—not only for himself but for any who would live as his follower.

As Mark’s Jesus urges his disciples to take up their own cross (8:34), we Christians need to stop foisting it on others. I mean, how that symbol shows up in ordinary, everyday speech. Or more severely, in cases of domestic abuse, when a woman is told that she must remain with her violent husband because, well, that’s just the “cross she has to bear.”

As friend of the poor and outcast, and champion of the oppressed, beloved Jesus would never say such a thing—not ever.

The profound damage wrought by otherwise well-meaning Christians needs to stop right now. So let’s be crystal clear: the God of abundant life whom we encounter in Jesus does not demand sacrifice for its own sake, does not demand sacrifice of any kind, and certainly not from those trapped in systems of abuse.

How then do we deal with this particular passage from Mark’s account of the Gospel? We might recall that first-century readers would know very well that crucifixion was the means by which the Roman Empire executed political dissidents, and kept slaves and the underclass under control by terrorizing people into submission. There were times in Palestine’s history as a Roman province when the road to Jerusalem was littered with crosses and crucified bodies—that’s an image Mark’s readers would recall only too well.

That’s not the only way to interpret the Cross of Christ, for sure, but it is a powerful way of framing the death of Jesus—the Jesus who disrupts imperial order, who disturbs the cultural peace, who overturns the tables of economic injustice. This is the Jesus who must be silenced, who must not be allowed to live.

But Mark won’t let us stop there. “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it,” he says, “and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (8:34-35).

As someone who grew up as (mostly) “the best little boy in the world,” and still lives (mostly) as a well-behaved adult—a respectable (mostly) member of the clergy, no less!—I have trouble imagining whatever “cross” it is I’m supposed to pick up and carry.

As I reflected on this classic exhortation from Marks’ Jesus, I thought once again of Nkululeku, the young bartender I met in Johannesburg on my recent trip to southern Africa. I wrote about him here a few weeks ago; his name in Zulu means Freedom.

In that encounter with a Black man, I felt my whiteness intensely. I don’t mean my own skin color or my latent racism—I mean the cultural system of Whiteness and Blackness that kept us separated from each other; a system that relies on erecting barriers of distrust between two people just because of our skin color; a system that thrives on suspicion. We did not create that system, but Nkululeku and I were nonetheless firmly stuck in it.

I realized something else in that moment: liberation from such a system is actually a painful process. Longstanding cultural systems make the world a familiar place; even when those systems function like prisons, staying trapped there can feel safer than venturing out into an unknown world of freedom. Healing from old wounds can feel risky, especially when the wounds are all we’ve ever known.

This is surely what Jesus means, at least in part, when he insists that losing our life is how we save it. Hearing that insistence on the last Sunday of Black History Month can frame the cost of discipleship quite distinctly. That cost can be measured in many different ways, but not least with this: by how much we disrupt the cultural systems that feel comfortable but actually cause painful and even violent divisions. Perhaps for those of us who benefit the most from the cultural systems of division, the Gospel “cross” to bear is the willingness to live as agitators for a new way of life.

That word “agitation” can take on many guises, too. I thought of this while watching the wonderful performance by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs during this year’s Grammy Awards. They sang a duet of Chapman’s 1988 classic song “Fast Car.” One commentator urged us to notice that a black folk singer and a white country music singer “came together to sing a song about belonging. America is starved for connection across divides,” this commentator wrote, “and that performance shows how much music has the power to heal.”

Healing in this case meant Chapman and Combs appearing with each other on stage, defying the current cultural system—which seems to be gaining strength by the day—that insists on keeping black and white separate, even violently divided.

Reflecting on Mark’s Jesus, I couldn’t get Chapman’s “Fast Car” out of my head. It includes these lyrics: “And I—I had a feeling that I belonged / I, I had a feeling I could be someone / be someone / be someone.”

“Take up your cross,” Jesus says, “and follow me.”

Live like an irritant, Jesus says, a trouble-maker, a grave problem for any cultural system that makes hatred normal and violence common.

Be someone who causes “good trouble,” as John Lewis would say. Be someone who disturbs a wounded world with healing.

Be someone who insists on replacing suspicion with trust, even when the price is our own safety and comfort.

Actually, I can’t do that by myself. That’s something else I learned in my encounter with Nkululeku, and it’s something I want to bring with me to Christian worship. I really can’t “be someone” on my own; I need others to “be someone” with me, all of us together.

It seems to me that’s exactly what happens at the Eucharistic Table: we gather around a simple meal of bread and wine and we do indeed become someone—that meal makes us the Body of Christ.

Living as that “Someone” puts us on the road toward the Cross. Thanks to Nkululeku, I now know the name of that road—it’s Freedom.

One and Only Noble Tree

Today is Holy Cross Day. This has always seemed to me like a strange time of year to remember and venerate the central symbol of Christian faith. We’re nowhere near Holy Week or Easter, and even Lent is a long way off. On the other hand, every single Sunday in our liturgical lives as Christians, even during Lent, is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead; likewise every Friday is an invitation to remember the passion and suffering of Jesus on the cross. Liturgical time is not particularly linear or even logical.

Today’s commemoration stems from fourth-century accounts about the Emperor Constantine and the buildings he constructed in Jerusalem to mark the sites of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus; those sites were purportedly dedicated on September 14, 335, and eventually became the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Since then, this mid-September day has been a time for reflection, though not so much on the death of Jesus per se but on the cross itself.

Yes, a bit odd perhaps but I’m reminded rather vividly these days, in an era of heightened ecological awareness, that the wood of that cross was once a living tree. The wood itself, as some strands in Christian traditions would have us ponder, “remembered” its own life as the Lord of Life was hung upon its “branches.”

What I appreciate about this view of the cross is how an otherwise “inanimate” object can still “remember” life, how life is still buried within it, perhaps like the faintest of heartbeats. Indeed, even some early depictions of the cross picture it as a slowly budding tree, as if still rooted, as if still living, as if by being touched by the flesh of the Incarnate Word of God, the life within the wood itself surfaced and blossomed.

Thinking about the cross in this way stretches my imagination and invites me to see life in every nook and cranny of everything God has made. Strictly speaking, there are no “inanimate objects” anywhere in the universe; everything pulsates with life from the Creator. This stands in shocking contrast—perhaps, as theologian Elizabeth Johnson has labeled it, “blasphemous contrast”—to the pervasive treatment of Earth’s ecosystems as a vast storehouse of lifeless stuff for us to mine, harvest, and burn at will.

And so I pause on this Holy Cross Day, not worried in the slightest about how oddly timed such a commemoration might be. The Cross will stand for some time to come for ongoing pain and suffering experienced by God’s creation. Perhaps as well the hope, deeply buried within that suffering, of God’s own life still to come. As with most artifacts and rites of a Christian life, this one is a complex brew of memory and hope—of recalling the death of Jesus and still proclaiming the (startling) promise of new life.

I am helped in all of this, as always, by music and by hymn texts. And every year on Holy Cross Day I recall one of my favorite hymns from Holy Week. It always brings me to tears. It’s an ancient text—some have placed it as early as the sixth century. It invites an astonishing level of adoration for the cross, not as an instrument of death but as the means to see anew the resilient presence of God’s own life. I offer two of the verses from that hymn for our shared pausing and reflecting. The text is by Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus and you can find it in the Hymnal 1982, #165 and #166:

Faithful cross, above all other:
one and only noble tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peer may be:
sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
sweetest weight is hung on thee.
Bend thy boughs, O tree of glory!
Thy relaxing sinews bend;
for awhile the ancient rigor
that thy birth bestowed, suspend;
and the King of heavenly beauty
gently on thine arms extend.

Healing Shame, Changing the World

Perhaps you’ve seen the random placard in a football stadium crowd with “John 3:16” written on it. If you grew up like I did, you probably memorized that Bible verse: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…”

That’s supposed to be a life-changing snippet of Scripture, and it certainly can be. But for me, the two verses that come right before it prompted a profound re-orientation to Christianity entirely. This is rather odd, actually, because those verses are pretty obscure and they refer to a bizarre story from the Hebrew Bible.

I’m convinced that there are nuggets of spiritual insight here that carry the potential to change the world. To get there, I would invite you to consider that modern Christianity has focused so much of its attention on sin and guilt that it has left virtually untouched the issues of bodily shame and social violence.

“Redemptive Love of Christ,” Bronze door of the Grossmunster Church, Zurich

My own work as a teacher and pastor, my understanding of Christianity and the role Christian faith communities can play in the wider society, indeed my own life and sense of self changed significantly when I turned more directly to the problem of shame and its consequences (it prompted me to write a whole book rooted in this insight called Divine Communion).

What I’m referring to here, in shorthand fashion, is this: the problem of guilt says, “I did something bad”; the problem of shame says, “I am bad.”

Consider the difference between those two statements—having done something bad and being bad—it won’t take you long to feel the difference in your own body.

One of many social science researchers working on this issue is Brené Brown, and I would urge you to watch her videos and read her books just as soon as you can. She defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling…that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging…”

Unworthy of love and belonging? That’s heartbreaking…and far too common.

We’re told this about ourselves almost constantly—our culture of celebrity; our idolization of wealth and popularity; mass marketing and advertising aimed at making us feel needy and empty without certain products; fitness crazes that make us hate our bodies; the list goes on.

Brown says that shame is likely the source of many destructive, hurtful behaviors; this sense of being unworthy of connection, she says, “can make us dangerous.”

She means, dangerous to ourselves (when we isolate and self-medicate) and dangerous to others (when we project our own unworthiness on those who are different from us and then punish them for it).

Needless to say, there’s a lot of resistance to dealing with issues of shame; ironically and tragically, a lot of people find it shameful to talk about shame—the problem feeds on itself, in other words. As Brown puts it, “Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.”

If, however, we cultivate our capacity for naming it and addressing it, we can weaken its power over us. We can, at long last, find healing—for ourselves, for our relationships, and for our communities, dare I also say, for our nation.

All of that is preface to the rather odd verses in John’s account of the Gospel that introduce the more famous one so many of us have memorized. In those verses, John’s Jesus says: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…” (3:14).

Stick with me here, because we need to know two interrelated things for this peculiar verse to make any sense.

First, the image of a serpent was a powerful one for ancient Mediterranean societies. Among the several meanings of this image, serpents could symbolize healing—the shedding of a snake’s skin evoked renewal and new life, for example. Serpents could also be dangerous and deadly, and this was important, too. That mix of risk and hope lingers in the old aphorism about how to soothe the effects of a hangover—you just need some “hair from the dog that bit you.”

More directly: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

The second thing we need to know is that the story John’s Jesus refers to is from the book of Numbers in the Hebrew Bible. It’s a story about the ancient Israelites as they are bitten by poisonous serpents which make some of them ill and more than a few of them die.

God instructs Moses to do a very strange thing in response: to make a bronze image of a serpent and then lift it high upon a pole. Anyone who looks upon that image, God says, will be healed—and they were (Numbers 21:9).

Some have suggested that this story influenced the development of the familiar image of a snake wrapped around a pole as a symbol for the medicinal arts. Others have suggested that the “rod of Asclepius” wielded by the god of the healing arts in Greek mythology is the origin of the healthcare symbol. In any case, across these cultural contexts, the insight remains: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

John apparently wants us to think about that ancient story in relation to Jesus being lifted up on the cross. If so, John invites not a mechanism of atonement to secure forgiveness; John wants us to gaze on the source of our pain for the sake of our healing.

If unnamed, untreated bodily shame can make us dangerous, as Brené Brown says, then let us seek out the cure for that disease within the disease itself—being fully human. God actually does this for us in Jesus—God becomes human, becomes the very source of our shame so that God can also become our cure, lifted high for all to see.

I am truly convinced that naming, addressing, and healing bodily shame would change the world. So much of our distress, our self-loathing, our fear and hatred of the “other,” our destructive behaviors and ecological suicide erupts from that grim pit of unacknowledged shame.

That’s not an easy trail of ideas to follow, I realize. Thankfully, John’s Jesus offers multiple ways for us to see his meaning. The very next verse, the famous one, is Jesus making his meaning plain: “for God so loved the world.”

That’s the key, right there—God’s love.

“For God So Loved the World,” Marguerite Elliott

Forgiveness is a great antidote for guilt, and we all need it, but it won’t touch our shame and it won’t mend our violent divisions and it won’t soothe our social heartache.

The only thing that will touch all of that and then heal it is love—and not just any kind of love, but the love of God, who does not love us from afar—as if ashamed of us—but instead becomes one of us.

Not to condemn the world, John says, but so that the world might be saved.

For God so loved the world…