Cross – Peculiar Faith

The Unbearable Nearness of God

I wouldn’t call myself a monarchist, but I do admit to a certain fascination with the regalia of royal courts. The peculiarities of Mark’s account of the Gospel help me to understand why this might be: monarchs can be kept safely at a distance (mostly) but God remains surprisingly and (often) uncomfortably close.

Palm Sunday—and/or “Sunday of the Passion”—is always rather jarring as we pivot quickly from the cheers of a jubilant crowd to the jeers of an angry mob. This year felt even more unsettling with Mark’s version of the stories.

“Palm Sunday Procession,” P. S. Solomon Raj

The so-called “triumphal entry into Jerusalem” isn’t very triumphant in Mark’s version (11:1-11). Shockingly, there aren’t any palms being waved about; Mark gives us just some leafy branches on a dusty road out in the countryside.

This little parade with Jesus doesn’t even happen in Jerusalem at all but near the tiny village of Bethany; he enters the big city almost as an afterthought and then turns around and goes back to Bethany.

Noticing this made me wonder what kind of insights Mark’s distinctive features might offer. I easily began with Mark’s emphasis on Bethany, a village around four miles outside of Jerusalem. For some time now I have appreciated what each of the Gospel writers suggests about Bethany: this was a haven for Jesus, where he could breathe. This is where Jesus could relax with some of his closest friends—the two sisters Mary and Martha together with their brother Lazarus lived there. This village, that house was a place of intimacy and tender care.

In today’s lingo, Bethany was a place for framily—good friends who have become something like a family.

Skipping ahead to the “passion,” there’s another curious detail to notice from Mark. While many will recall “Simon,” a man from the city of Cyrene who carried the cross for Jesus, Mark tells us a tiny bit more about him: he was the father of “Alexander and Rufus.”

If those names don’t ring any bells, they shouldn’t. Today we have no idea who Alexander and Rufus were what became of them. But back then, Mark’s readers must surely have known those two brothers—you know, that guy from Cyrene, Rufus and Alex’s dad, that Simon carried the cross for Jesus.

When we know someone directly caught up in a drama, we feel caught up in it, too. That seems to be Mark’s point: this is not a story we can keep at a distance; we are all entangled together in it—including God.

By focusing on that tiny village called Bethany and telling us about Alexander and Rufus—you know, Simon’s boys—Mark invites us to see the nearness of God. What we mean by “God” is not restricted to remote mountaintops, in other words, or inaccessible temples. God is woven into the ordinary routines of everyday life.

Ordinarily, I’m happy and reassured to find God in the ordinary, but the “Sunday of the Passion” also directs my gaze to the violence lurking just beneath the surface of everyday routines. I used to think Palm/Passion Sunday overplayed its liturgical privilege with such a swift pivot toward the cross; but as Hannah Arendt would remind us, such evil is really quite banal indeed, and violence rather ordinary.

I wonder if this is why Mark seems so fond of God’s nearness—not only or even necessarily for the sake of hearing “comfortable words” but for the sake of finding God outside the ring of respectable relationships, even in scandalous encounters.

I’m sure Mark loved the figure of the Roman centurion for those very reasons. As Jesus dies on the cross, it’s not the religious insiders who see God hanging there; it’s the “unclean” outsider, the soldier, the colonizer and oppressor, the executioner who finally appreciates that Jesus somehow embodies the very presence, the nearness of God.

Mark appears to relish flipping “insider” and “outsider”—or I suppose it’s even better to say that Jesus relished this. The foundational elements by which human societies are almost always stratified—family, ethnicity, gender, wealth, geography, to name just a few—these are routinely cast aside at nearly every turn in Mark’s account of what Jesus said and did.

I thought about this five weeks ago, when Lent began with Jesus in the wilderness. Mark is the only Gospel writer who includes “beasts” with Jesus in that desert. Jesus is accompanied by those animals, Mark says, not attacked by them.

Not family, not ethnicity, not religion or status or power, not even species—none of these can dissolve the nearness of God. I’m glad for this—and then I wonder what it means for how I should live.

St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Philippi is one of the earliest texts in the Christian Testament of the Bible. This letter to the Philippians includes a fragment of one of the very earliest Christian hymns, and we often hear it on Palm Sunday (2:5-11).

Early on in Christian traditions, what got Jesus killed is what Christians themselves tried to live, and that’s what that hymn is all about.

The Philippian hymn praises Jesus for refusing to exploit divine power and instead choosing to live as a humble servant. That’s the “mind of Christ,” Paul says, the posture toward social status that we ourselves must adopt.

Mark doesn’t give us a “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem; there are no palms, no emblems of royal power in Mark’s story. There are only leafy branches strewn about on a dusty road, apparently just recently cut by field hands—and that road leads to a cross.

All roads lead there eventually, toward death. But being on this road with Mark, during this week with the Church, and traveling toward that cross—I might actually live with the nearness of God.

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.