The one who came to give life, buckets of it, was now hanging dead on a criminal’s execution stake.
“When the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, ‘Surely this man was a son of God!’”
It’s likely this centurion, a trained killer and leader of a hundred of Rome’s finest, had been in charge of everything that happened to Jesus after Pilate sentenced him. He’d overseen Jesus being whipped to shreds. He’d observed him beaten and mocked. He’d seen the insults hurled at him from his own people. Like he had countless times before with so many other accused, the centurion had overseen this Jesus being tacked up on a tree so the public could see his body and his reputation die.
But what he hadn’t seen is what caught his attention. Unlike so many criminals executed before, he never saw this Jesus become ugly or disparaging.
Not one time did he blame.
He didn’t spit back, swing, argue or threaten.
He wept and groaned, but without venom.
And honest to God the man even prayed for the forgiveness of those involved in his crucifixion.
The centurion had never been prayed for by one he was killing. It was as though this man from Nazareth had kept himself untouched from the very hate that was murdering him. It was a strength rooted in a very different soil than he himself, a conquering Roman, had been planted in.
“Son of God” was a title applied to Caesar. We can find the phrase on coins and columns from Roman antiquity. Like so many despots before and after, Caesar’s power came largely from his being perceived as the savior of mankind, the absolute principal of the civilized world. Caesar was the Empire- the king of the kingdom of peace. Anyone who disagreed was subject to slaughter in the name of this peace. Rome was a machine fueled by military might and was destined to overcome the world. The centurion upheld this glorious purpose on oath.
And yet here was one bleeding out on a cross, mocked with a sarcastic sign about his kingship hanging over his head, representing something more powerful than “power.” And it was one of the most remarkable things the centurion had ever seen. We can’t know what happened next for the centurion. Perhaps that doesn’t matter. Perhaps seeing one trained under the ideology of Pax Romana, a peace at gunpoint, shift slightly is enough story for us to benefit from.
But this still leaves me why the day Christ was crucified be named Good Friday. The short answer some of us may give is because it was good for us that the Christ died for our sins. But perhaps we should consider that it might have been a bad Friday if King Jesus had simply made sure that true justice was served, that the murderers and the liars and the cowards and the betrayers were dealt with in full accord with the law. That the filthy were thrown away and the clean were embraced and allowed to sit on Heaven’s furniture. Jesus could have displayed his great and magic power against that of the Empire. He could have wiped them out if he truly was the god-man. Not even Empire, in its sprawl across half the globe could have survived a pinch of God’s might. Them and all the liars and the dirty, dirty cheats of the world, eliminated. And I suppose it would have been justified. Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad Friday if Christ would have done what was warranted.
And perhaps that’s just it. That’s the paradox. What makes Good Friday good is that what was justified went undone. Instead, innocence and beauty willingly absorbed evil ugliness. Compassion trumped the vicious brutality required of a person to nail Jesus to a tree. It wasn’t fair or right. It could and should have been avoided. But it happened. It happened and it was swallowed up in Love, cancelling the sin and brutality out rather than escalate it. What was arguably “fair” was exchanged for “Good.”
With a bit of reflection we realize many of us have seen this in our own time. Men and women of incredible Love, confidence and self-control, not reacting to the evil of their circumstances, but somehow absorbing it. Refusing to let the craziness spiral on for even a moment more, because they realize good can only come when one chooses not so much to win, but to forgive. They circumvent Newton’s Third Law and don’t push back with the same force, the same level of consciousness. They respond under a different Law and the energy of harm is absorbed.
Christ is the King of such people. Deep down, you and I are such people.
“You have heard people say, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, Don’t get into tug-o-wars with those who are evil. Instead, if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the left also…”
The King absorbed evil on Good Friday like even the dimmest candle chews up all the darkness in a room. Because of this, the world would be gradually, over decades and centuries, grabbed by the collar and shaken into various stages of wakefulness. And here we are, generations later, staring at a cross bewildered and inspired.
Wait a minute.
Is this how the world is saved?
By overcoming evil with Love rather than with more evil?
By forgiving and considering rather than justifying any means required to win?
By absorbing a wrong rather than retaliating against it?
Is this what a Son of God looks like?
“In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Christ to reconcile to himself everything, whether things on earth or things in heaven, making peace for everything by the blood of his cross.”
I’d argue it’s a Good Friday because what Christ did on the cross wasn’t magic. It’s Good Friday because what happened on it shows us the beauty of being conquered by the audacity of Love. Not just for a person here or there, but for all that exists, things above and below. All of it can be set right by the Christ, as well as by Christ’s people as they follow suit in taking up their own cross and demanding others pay no more.
If this sounds hard, it is. It’s also easy to misunderstand, and as a result of this misunderstanding faith looks to many like letting abusive people abuse you. It’s her cross to bear. This is a tragic suspension of self-love, which I hope by this point has been reconsidered as something to scale down but never eliminate. Yet even with a healthy understanding of ourselves and the harm leveled at us by others, this absorption and forgiveness bit is as hard as it gets. Can there be anything as difficult as mimicking Christ’s Love for those he, to the degree he was also fully human, was justified in hating?
But it’s even harder to go on living like the centurion was taught to live by his god. Far harder to look at life as acquiring wins and the avoiding ego-damning losses. It’s far more miserable to maintain citizenship in the Empire of the Tick. It’s just plain harder to live apart from our essential nature, which is Compassion and Love. Somehow, choosing the harder way, is where peace seems to be.
Christ died. And Christ lives again. “Follow me,” said this Christ.
The rewards are anything but immediate. But from the very first moments it has had an affect on even the most unlikely of shows us the beauty of being conquered by the audacity of Love. Not just for a person here or there, but for all that exists, things above and below. All of it can be set right by the Christ, as well as by Christ’s people as they follow suit in taking up their own cross and demanding others pay no more.
If this sounds hard, it is. It’s also easy to misunderstand, and as a result of this misunderstanding faith looks to many like letting abusive people abuse you. It’s her cross to bear. This is a tragic suspension of self-love, which I hope by this point has been reconsidered as something to scale down but never eliminate. Yet even with a healthy understanding of ourselves and the harm leveled at us by others, this absorption and forgiveness bit is as hard as it gets. Can there be anything as difficult as mimicking Christ’s Love for those he, to the degree he was also fully human, was justified in hating?
But it’s even harder to go on living like the centurion was taught to live by his god. Far harder to look at life as acquiring wins and the avoiding ego-damning losses. It’s far more miserable to maintain citizenship in the Empire of the Tick. It’s just plain harder to live apart from our essential nature, which is Compassion and Love. Somehow, choosing the harder way, is where peace seems to be.
Christ died. And Christ lives again. “Follow me,” said this Christ.
The rewards are anything but immediate. But from the very first moments it has had an affect on even the most unlikely of people. As we step out of Lent and into Easter Weekend may we, as the unlikely centurion may have, leave one kingdom for the Other. May we see clearly what we’ve been blind to. May we entertain that we are being offered a place in the salvation of not just certain people, but of everything. It is all Loved, because it all comes from Love. So do you. So do I.
May we have our notions about this God called Love, dying at our own ignorant, anxious hands, dismantled. May we find ourselves awakened and saying to each other, somewhat surprised and confused,
“Oh…Oh! This is the Son of God. This is Love.”
And then, let’s be as he is.
31
Look Out Below.
Pontius Pilate can’t understand what the big deal is. The crowd was worked up to a kosher lather about this Jesus fella from Nazareth and him being guilty of some or another crime. There were always fires to put out in this part of the Roman Empire. He’d just volleyed a few times with this Jesus in an inner room, finding himself confounded by a discussion of what’s true. What’s real.
“I’ve interviewed him,” Pilate announces to the angry assembly. “I don’t see that he’s guilty of anything.”
“He claimed to be king!” yelled one.
“He threatened to destroy our Temple,” said another.
“He thinks he’s God. But we lack the sovereignty to execute him for it!” It was a dog pile now.
Pilate rubbed his head, wishing Passover would pass over. It was customary to release a prisoner to the Jews every Spring, at Passover. The irony of a man playing God with the Israelites, allowing the Exodus of a Hebrew, was not lost on the crowd.
“This year for release, how about I release to you this King of you Jews.” He was trying to put out a fire with sarcasm. Pilate must not have been married for very long.
“No!” They screamed. “Not him. Give us Barabbas!”
Barabbas is labeled here in the story as a thief. But his brand of thievery is different than the guy who busts your window to take your car stereo. Barabbas is an insurrectionist. A Robin Hood type, who leads brigands, who may or may not have been merry, to take from those who have and redistribute it to those who don’t. Barabbas was a revolutionary.
Barabbas, whose name is Aramaic and literally means “son of a father” would have had a following. Supporters. Teens would have worn Barabbas t-shirts. Parents would have been torn over whether a guy like Barabbas was of God, or something else. He had a vision and a challenge to anyone who’d listen. Doubtless he spoke powerful words about what it would require to take the world back from the corrupted powers and set it all right again. There was a way things ought to be. And any means to get it there were justified by that Glorious End. Murder, upheaval, reversal of power. To God be the glory.
“Do you Jews want me to pardon Barabbas,” Pilate asked. “The revolutionary who wants to change things? Change how people are and how systems work and what people value? The change agent with a vision and a strategy and the chops to garner a following…
“or….
“Do you want this other leader? A revolutionary, with a vision, but who goes about things differently does he not? He speaks of a Kingdom superseding Caesar’s while he plays with children, treats women as equals, surrounds himself with bad résumés and washes the feet of people who don’t have any clue what the gesture symbolizes. One who forgives to the point of the ridiculous and who says the trajectory of true Compassion is to be able to love even your enemy.”
“Do you all want a son of a father, or the Son of the Father?”
“Not Jesus,” they said. “Give us our Barabbas.”
So the guards took Jesus, beat him and killed him while Barabbas went home and got a shower. And before I start shaking my head at all this, I should probably admit to myself that I usually ask for Barabbas too. It’s hard to blame the people then. Jesus went to Jerusalem to die; what lasting good could that possibly accomplish?
They wanted something they thought would work. “Give us someone great! We want to be part of something great! This Jesus is the wrong direction if we’re ever going to have lives worth living.”
I would have been right there chanting Barabbas’s name with them. Not because I’m a vile sinner who’s fun to imagine hissing and writhing in the bloodthirsty crowd. But because if things are going to change, if my world, my city, my culture, are going to make it all the way through, then give us someone who can fight to preserve it. To save it! How else will I know we succeeded?
When Jesus got into the city earlier that week he all but set the scene up for his disciples:
“I tell you honestly, unless a seed falls into the earth and dies, it remains just that, a seed. But if it allows itself to die, it bears much fruit. Whoever prioritizes the preserving of his own life ends up losing it, and whoever resists this impulse will find themselves living an eternal quality of life now and forever. If anyone wants to serve my interests, he must follow me. So that wherever I am, you’ll automatically see my servants are there too.”
It’s almost too risky to adopt. It reads wonderfully on Sunday morning, but in the real day-to-day, this is insanity. Especially when it matters most. Why would I rationally choose your interests over mine? Why would I spend my life’s energies calibrating myself to give your interest priority. Why would I choose to throw the game for the opponent?
“Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact that you’ve never been to a Church of Barabbas. That movement didn’t take.
It’s the heart of Ahava, our true self, that responds to Christ’s crazy idea. Even as we call it unrealistic, we read it, we see glimpses of it at work or in traffic, and we feel the whisper of the Cosmos calling to us. The one who showed us how to give himself away for the sake of the other, who Creates not by force but by gentle consideration, and cooperation, is what is deepest within ourselves.
We worship Christ. But we ask for Barabbas.
That may be why he didn’t stop at the seed and the dying and losing thing. He added a bit about following him. Which we can reasonably assume means right into the maw of death, into forgiving those responsible for it, and out the other side prepared to watch the world recalibrated by Love. He didn’t want us to merely agree. We’re supposed to go do this, work it all out in the real world.
I am incrementally more willing to be one who dies as an act of my own will. I’m a seed with strong hands, clutching the vine in desperation, unwilling to be obscured, forgotten, to suffer the loss of me. But I am losing faith in the way of Barabbas, because I’ve tried to make revolution his way and it’s only made me tired.
And, so, here’s to weakened hands and the ensuing strength of Christ.
30
Behold, I Make All Things Nude.
See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
There is an ancient tradition of contemplating the beaten and then crucified body of Christ. And then to consider the apparent scarring even his resurrected body maintained. But there’s one detail about his body that may feel a little strange to meditate on.
Blood.
Nail-scarred hands.
Nail-scarred feet.
Spear-pierced side.
Thorn-stabbed head.
Completely naked.
When he died Jesus was wrapped up in grave clothes and placed in what turned out to be a borrowed tomb. The Gospel of John tells us it was a tomb in or adjacent to a garden. Jesus went into it wrapped up like a mummy and the door was sealed.
A seed planted in the ground.
The following Sunday morning Jesus wasn’t where they put him. The disciples went to confirm the rumor and were devastated to find that the body of their Lord, and the place they would have commemorated him, had been taken from them. Mary Magdalene hung back near the tomb as the men went away drawing up a silly fix to the problem as men are prone to do.
Suddenly Mary is speaking to a man she doesn’t immediately recognize. John helps us understand what she did with her lack of recognition; he said she assumed she was speaking to the gardener.
It would be a few beats until she realized she was speaking to the very much alive Jesus of Nazareth. She went from this conversation to tell the others this amazing news, becoming the world’s first Evangelist of the Resurrected One. Strange how the church has historically been so resistant about women preaching. They started it.
But the detail we often overlook as we talk about the empty tomb is that it wasn’t exactly empty. When the men looked inside, they found an important something. Grave clothes.
Clothes. Folded neatly.
Jesus, the consummate guest.
This unabashedly puts a nude Jesus in our heads if we pay attention. As one rarely paying full attention to anything, I didn’t see it until it was pointed out to me. Not even to John saying, “Mary thought she was speaking to the gardener,” which might have been a little on the nose.
A naked gardener is raised to life in a garden, at the end of John, a book that begins with the same three words as the opener in Genesis: “In the beginning.”
The Apostle Paul offers help:
“Christ has been raised from the dead, the first Yield of the larger harvest made of those who have ‘fallen asleep’. Just as death came long ago through a man, now resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. Just as in Adam all must surrender to death, so in Christ all will be made alive…So it is written: The first Adam became a living being, the last Adam: a life-giving spirit.”
The resurrection, as I hope has become clear, isn’t just an assurance of the continuation of life. In that the resurrection was like this, naked and vulnerable, harkening back to the original story of unobstructed connection in the Garden, we seem guided to learn to resurrect now. Like all Kingdom things, it’s wherever we are. Buried in the field. Lost in our own house. Not so much “there!” or “there!” but within us, waiting to be brought to life, uncovered and shameless.
Death belongs in the tomb wrapped up and unseen. Guarded. Love lifts it out, unveiled and unhidden, allowing us to live together at peace and at one.
What point is there to any of this if resurrection can only resuscitate corpses, but not resuscitate what’s already dead in me – dead between you and I – now? We’re going to miss the resurrection if we keep thinking of it as only getting to live forever. Easter then becomes a celebration about a life we can’t get to yet. A life we aren’t ready for anyway. First, we have to start getting what’s unknown, known. Start facing our fear of shedding fig leaves and grave clothes. Start thinking about being naked Earth dwellers who are unfit to float in robes forever. Christ, naked and unafraid, draws my self-protected anxiety out of my tomb and into the light. Where we all are being drawn. Back together, with nothing to hide.
“O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.”
29
Reality is Deciduous.
One winter my wife and I were about half an hour across the Ohio border when she broke the road weary silence with this:
“If we were explorers or pioneers, and had no previous understanding that trees do this,” she said, pointing to the miles of leafless, dormant trees lining the highway, “can you imagine how it would seem?”
She went on to explain her question.
To the uneducated the whole landscape, stretched in browns under a winter grey sky, looks dead. With the exception of a few pine trees and their sporadic dots of green, everything looks expired. It would seem for those unacquainted with the seasons that something bad had happened. A bomb had gone off. Maybe a great fire had consumed the state. A terrible disease had swept across the whole country and all but those last green survivors were gone. You would have every reason to believe death had had its way and you’d want out of there.
But we aren’t uneducated. Much the opposite, since we grew up where there are deciduous and coniferous trees. So, we know almost instinctively that trees do this from about October through March. No sense of fear or grief follows. A vague sense of revulsion if you’re as unappreciative of the cold as I am, but not despair.
Just wait, we think. Spring is coming. Winter’s a season, not a final state.
Deciduous trees shed their leaves. The Latin decidere means to “fall down” or “fall off”. Coniferous, or cone-bearing, are Evergreens and are ever green. This is kid stuff. We know it like we know about the effects of gravity and excessive beans in our diet. We learned early the trees aren’t dead when they look so. Without this rudimentary knowledge what is temporary would have the convincing appearance of permanence. We assume a cycle without knowing we do, despite finality being better supported by the immediate evidence.
Imagine seeing a sunset for the first time as a conscious adult. It wouldn’t be beautiful at all. How terrifying that the great source of life-sustaining light and heat was dissolving into the horizon, slowly turning the sky red, then pinks, and then petering out and surrendering to the victory of night. Imagine a child walking up to you in your terror, your hands on your face, tears in your eyes; “It’s ok, sir. It comes back up over there in the morning.” Isn’t part of what makes a sunset not terrifying but instead, beautiful, because we know about morning?
People of faith are supposed to be paying very close attention, so that we can be more and more acquainted with the cyclical ways of pain and grief, and of death. Discomfort and hardship can’t be avoided – often can’t even be reduced by prayer in my observation -but neither are they final. I’ve spent so much of my life avoiding falling down or falling off. Because I learned somewhere that falling is the end. I have feared pain and I have feared death. Somewhere, probably like you, I learned life was one great straight line, rather than the circles and cycles it really is.
I am slowly learning to live more deciduously, because I think all reality might be so.
In speaking about the temporality of death, Paul rhetorically asked his friends in Corinth, “Where is Death’s sting? Where is Death’s victory?”
The is an ironic thing for a man who has since completely decomposed to say. But he was only in part speaking about the future state of “Paul.” He was also speaking to what happens within us when we come to recognize, with conviction, that death is a nonnegotiable, yet revocable. When death becomes penultimate in my mind, then it loses its ability to make me desperate. It becomes a troubling winter, but not despair. Spring comes next. The sun comes back up over there tomorrow.
Jesus gave the picture of a seed falling to the ground to make life. The seed dies, separated from its life source. It is buried, out of view. And then it is raised up to new life. This was one way he spoke of his life, death, burial and resurrection. A thing he said we have coming as well. Paul said the same before he asked about Death’s sting. These are metaphors, the actuality of which I have not yet experienced in full to encourage you about what lies on the other side of you or your loved ones dying. I’ll let you know.
But I have seen that, as I get older, calmer, less concerned with cheating the inevitability of pain and death, I am more able to live. And to Love.
We live in the unending cycles of joy and sorrow, of work and rest, of laughter and weeping, of faith and doubt, of living and dying. This is human life. Fighting against this only makes me miserable. I had this backwards for most of my life.
Misery comes when I believe I can somehow achieve perpetual Spring. Through money or more faith.
Misery is believing the hardship I’m currently experiencing is the end of the story, despite being able to look back and see I’ve survived – even benefitted from – every single thing that’s happened to me.
My choice to live deciduously is way of embracing the cycles, the seasons, as necessary components of one reality. To live trying to cling to one and avoid the other is a recipe for an anxious, desperate existence. And I will make you pay for this anxiety. I will make you my pharmacy, or the object of my disappointment. This is the song and the victory of Death.
Admit it:
You have some things going well in your life. But the leaves will someday fall off of it. This is nothing to become anxious or fretful or clingy about. That’s just how it goes. Enjoy it.
You have some things that have gone to hell in a handbag. Someday, those seemingly dead branches will look like life again. It may be a long winter. But it’s still a season. Those branches will sprout again. You can’t escape it. And upsetting yourself solves nothing. Learn from it. When Spring arrives you might be able, from the depths of experience rather than a book or a sermon, educate others who think leafless trees are forever dead.
And this will be your living in resurrection. This will be one of your greatest acts of self-calibrated Love of others.
28
Diss-ciples.
Forget you ever saw Da Vinci’s Last Supper. It’s a beautiful work, yes. I’m told you can even replace the pieces of bread dotting the table with musical notes and get a pretty great funeral dirge. But take it out of your mind. Because you may have an image in your head where all these men were basically the same. Variations on a theme, different robe and beard thicknesses, but essentially copies of each other. The Apostles.
Rather than thinking of only Judas as the one dissident – and of course he was the most potent one – try and see these men for who they were. How they thought.
Peter, Andrew, James and John. Fisherman who had lately felt forced to fish all day and all night in the overfished Sea of Galilee. “Damn those Romans” they said to their empty nets for the seeming insatiability for fish the Empire had, even as this Empire showed little regard for the hands that netted them.
Thomas wasn’t so much a doubter as he was a cynic. Messiahs come and go, was Thomas’s skeptical take. Tales of miracles and bold teaching were as common as the bone boxes they ended up in. “Might is right, and no one has might like Caesar. Get used to it,” Thomas said to anyone who wondered about God’s Kingdom ever being realized.
Simon the Zealot had some inflammatory views about all this. “You gotta fight fire with fire!” he’d say. The Zealots often carried little daggers in their robes, waiting for an opportune time to assassinate a government leader in the market or during a parade, in hopes to foment the unrest needed for a bottom-up revolution to begin. Overpower the powers that be. Would God call God’s warriors to any less?
Imagine the table, these men sitting there complaining, counter-complaining, pointing out the appreciable fact that complaining accomplishes nothing but ulcers.
Imagine now Matthew sitting between them quietly. Remember, Matthew’s job prior to his joining Team Jesus was tax collection. In a world where the temple, its compulsory offerings and numerous fees for being, coupled with Roman taxes, amounted to well over half your income. Imagine how Jewish men felt about a Jewish man who excised tax on, say, fish. Ancestral land. All for the Empire. Imagine how Matthew felt when Simon Z. got his knife out and sharpened it. How he felt when the fishermen cursed his employer, and maybe in hushed tones cursed Matthew himself for selling out. Imagine where all this would go with the Uniting One, Love and Compassion and Forgiveness Incarnate, sitting there doling out bread and acceptance.
Jesus put beatdown blue-collars, a mulcting government lapdog, and a volatile conspiracy theorist at the same table. Like a three-year, irresponsibly inflammatory arbitration meeting. And before his own crucifixion said,
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Why command his guys to Love each other unless their marked differences of opinion were to remain? Don’t we sort of automatically Love those who align with our path, whose voice harmonizes with our own? Didn’t Jesus imply strongly by making love a commandment that it was something they would need commanded to do. You know, in the event that they forgot there is a higher Love than that which is only given to people exactly like yourself.
And of all things we people of faith could be known as “disciples” for, and of all the things we are known for, is there anything more dignifying of our uniqueness than to be told we have to Love each other, despite our differences?
We weren’t commanded to make people change. Really, we could have been given the command and the magic power to back it up to transform people into something better.
We weren’t commanded to partition ourselves off from people when we can’t change them. A turn or burned bridges motif.
Neither were we commanded to perpetuate tribalism as all religion eventually boils down to. Our god and our guns against your god and your guns, for example. Make them like you, or make them pay. No. Instead the scriptures say that someday every tribe, every nation, finally one day gets it. But it never says, “They finally become one tribe.” Every tribe. Every language. Every nation, the dignity of difference united in their taking a knee for the uniting One. No two people will see the One they bow before the same way. Apparently he was ok with this.
Jesus looked at people who would argue on a good day and who would attempt murder on a bad day and said, learn to Love the others at this table. To honor and respect and dignify. As a wonderful joke on us all, he never told them which one of them was right. Because what’s right is Love. The command to Love is something of a warning: it won’t come naturally. At least not at first. We will have to choose to suffer the gap between our ideas, our views, and find a deeper oneness than that which we make out of similarity or agreement. Maybe someday it will become habit. Until then, it’s a command.
Is there anything more remarkable than wholly disparate objects being held in the gravitation pull of Love? Frankly, is there anything remarkable at all about a clique where that gravity isn’t required?
This I call forgiving the sin of dissimilarity. To be honest, it’s easier for me to forgive you for punching me in the eye.
According to how Jesus socialized and got his work done, this kind of forgiveness can be given to anyone, from anyone. Even to someone as unforgiving as me.
27
Forgiving My Idols.
Jesus stood on the Mountain, about half way through his Sermon.
He’d said much to this point. More than anyone could digest in one sitting.
Now he was telling his diverse audience, the rich and the poor, the upper and lower class alike, to not worry.
“Don’t worry about your life,” he said. “What you’ll eat or drink or wear.”
The rich were hearing something about the major components of their social lives.
The poor were hearing something about what makes them feel desperate.
Everyone was hearing something about what populates too much of their thinking, and too much of their ranking of others as well.
He didn’t suggest we have no concern at all for having basic necessities. Surely Maslow’s first couple of tiers in the Hierarchy of Needs would get a divine nod. But He went on to say birds have food, and flowers are beautiful, without the distinctly human trait of having anxiety over maintaining it.
Jesus told his students to not live anxiously like the Gentiles do in making his point. Gentiles, those outsiders and pagans who’re ostensibly not acquainted with the Love and Peace of God, are the ones who live with this angst about how they are fundamentally doing. They have no compass, but Jesus’s audience did. Jesus effectively said, “You’re a people of faith in God, differentiated and set apart. Well sometimes I can’t tell when I watch how you scratch through a day.”
As long as I believe I am not ok, that I am owed better than I’m getting, that my happiness is around the corner but can’t be found on this block, I become a bit nervous inside. I begin to be someone looking for a thing I already have, a mindless idiot searching for the glasses on top of his head. And when I become this way, owed and unfulfilled, I subtly – and then overtly – expect you all to come through for me.
And you won’t. You never really do.
Neither will I for you in any fulfilling way.
And so now, here we all are, desperate for survival in practical and metaphoric ways, slighted by all the disappointing failures others have proven to be. You failed me. You can’t be trusted. You can’t be used the way I need you to let me use you.
Your appearance has to be attractive because I need to be with the very best of the species. Your attitude must be not too negative, but not overly cheery, as I need people who make interactions as untaxing as possible.
I don’t know how I am going to get through a day, so I need people around that I am sure can help, while disposing of those who will create problems.
The verse numbers and chapter breaks were added to the Bible generations after they were first penned. So what we call Matthew chapter six and Matthew chapter seven are actually one long thought. And at the end of chapter six we read Jesus saying that anxiety is bad for us and is unnecessary. That what we become desperate to seek out in others- and therefore subsequently disappointed – is already available to us. “Seek first God’s Kingdom,” Jesus said here, “and you will find that what you actually need will be made available outside your desperate worrying about it.”
And then Chapter seven continues:
“Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
Telling people not to worry about their own life, flowing right into telling people to stop judging others for their shortcomings. I’m telling you, it was a great sermon.
My inability to be charitable to others’ shortcomings are rooted not just in who they are, but in what I believe I require from them. But why am I judging others for their crap? Why am I withholding forgiveness for the piddly thing you did? The thing I am holding against you most probably, and probably definitely, resides solely within me. Anxious people are deft blamers. Pointing to all the world and finding it at fault, finding it unforgivable.
The more I learn that no one is in possession of what I need to be happy, that The Empire of God is others-centered, non-transactional, the more I begin to forgive you for not “coming through” for me. The more I stop even thinking of it as “forgiveness”, though I needed to start there, because there was no sin to forgive but my own. It was my eye with the log in it. My anxieties blind me. I sinned by making you God and your behavior toward me the Kingdom I was subject to.
And maybe that’s just it. Maybe most of my withheld forgiveness and grace towards others can legitimately be catalogued as idolatry. What else is it when I expect you to absolve me of my anxiety and work miracles so that I might have my happiness back?
26
Forgiving You for Being You Allows You to Be the Real You.
None of us love a two-faced person. A manipulator. A conniver. A dissembler.
But who else is there to love?
If we’re going to love, these are exactly who we’ll be loving. Because our lack of forgiveness – demands that others be and do something else before we’ll be at peace with them – is generally the reason for the duplicity we hate in the first place.
“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
The television series “V” was a huge hit my third grade year. But I wasn’t.
I didn’t understand the social requirements for becoming one. So I did what any socially inept, eight-year old sci-fi enthusiast would do to try and garner friends and belong. I drew scales on my arm with a sharpie and covered it with peach construction paper and tape. When kids came by who I hoped to would eventually deem me worthy of a birthday party invitation or a kind word, I’d rip the paper off and hiss at them. Astoundingly, no kindness was awarded these special effects. Earthlings.
In fourth grade I experienced my problem more acutely. I was rich in imagination but destitute on social know-how. Blessed are there poor? Hmph. Drawing aliens with my colored-pencil set was easy. Drawing a crowd that didn’t want to harm me for the sport of it, hard. I needed to adjust their attention toward me to positive, to compensate for my odd looks and odder interests. Einstein observed problems aren’t solved by the level of consciousness that create them. Which is probably why my solution made so much sense to me and garnered so little positive results.
I began telling kids my real name wasn’t Steve. It was Rex. Rex of course is Latin for King and was also my favorite Dinosaur’s surname. I was Rex Daugherty. This had all the relational magnetism of paper skin and a flitting tongue. It turns out dinosaur kings have less appeal to the upper echelons of fourth grade hierarchy, not more. Back to the drawing board.
In fifth grade I had a burgeoning reputation as an artist. The weird kid with the oversized cranium can draw, something like that. I vividly remember the day I sketched a scene from Star Wars and, before I could rationally process the decision, found myself sliding it across the table to Michael. Michael was a popular kid that would often talk to me. But he would also, without warning or provocation, lead attacks against me. This left me in an ambiguous anxiety over whether he was an enemy or not. For a desperate fifth grader, this ambiguity may have been more psychologically dangerous than consistent hostility.
Michael took the drawing and carefully placed it in his folder like a precious ancient manuscript. I was stunned. Stunned I’d shared it, and stunned he’d received it with such care.
At the end of the day our class would line up for final bell. Scholarly types by the door, cool kids in the middle, leprous losers in the back huddled by the coat rack. As I made my way to the tail of this social creature, Michael stopped me.
“You wanna cut?” he said.
Assuming he was either talking to his roundtip scissors or was joking at my expense, I didn’t respond. When he repeated himself, it was suddenly clear I was experiencing what I believe may have been the first invitation of my life. Then Aaron, a head taller than Michael, whose hostility was graciously consistent, spoke up with disgust on his breath. Aaron had a mustache and was rumored to have already fathered a child.
“You’re letting him cut?” Aaron said to Michael.
I looked at Michael to see what he would say. It never occurred to me that I had every right to cut in line if so invited. I waited to hear Michael defend himself, not me. Hey I was just as surprised as Aaron.
“Yeah,” Michael said. He reached into his folder and pulled out my drawing. “He drew me this.”
Aaron rolled his eyes and backed off. At least the spot in line had been purchased. Otherwise he’d have to object. His clique couldn’t bear suddenly becoming charitable toward kids with the lingering reputation for being lizards with paper skin.
I shuffled in to the middle of the line where jeans fit correctly, kids choose their own haircuts and Stacy’s up-close beauty could be confirmed in the absence of the caste buffer. As I stepped out of the margins and into the median, waves of revelation swept over me: I had converted their opinions. By George (Lucas) I’d finally figured it out. How to compensate for all the insufferable, unpardonable facets of what made Rex, Rex. I finally knew how to make up for all I’d learned was unforgivable about me.
You and I have our thing. I have the impulse to offer what can only be considered an entertaining product, buying my way into your acceptance since, as was solidified decades ago, I don’t have what it takes apart from this. Maybe you use charm, intellect, tight skirts, cash, humor, soup kitchens, compliments, undaunted effervescence, witty cynicism. I’m using the word “use” here. These things aren’t bad. They’re just often not as natural as they seem, being instead an act we were driven to by the unforgiveness of others also trying to find a way to get by.
Being “saved” has so much more to do with right now than our postmortem arrangements. And we humans of every religious description need saved. Saved as having so much to do with accepting Acceptance, shown to us in an unoffended Christ. Being gracious enough to allow others to be whatever they are – or more to the point – to allow others to not be what they aren’t, just as has been done for us who follow this Christ and have found our selves transformed by the invitation.
Allow them to be annoying. Wrong. Unattractive. Misguided. Angry. Not funny. Untraditional. Not of our tribe. Naive. This is the work of Compassionate Forgiveness. The Spirit of Grace liberating us, rescuing us, delivering us from the sense of safety our performance seems to grant us, so that we can be one and known. Not many and alone.
But we can’t step into any of this so long as we believe our preferences, our take on morality, our truths, our insistence that what we want from others is what we’re entitled to, have to be satisfied. We will not only not get what we demand – which is its own misery – but we will continue to motivate people to be the pretending, performing actors we find it so hard to love anyway – a second layer of misery.
Maybe Forgiveness takes the world largely as it is, and then enjoys the change that unfolds as a result of its acceptance. This doesn’t mean I don’t share my faith or my reasons for thinking and believing as I do, or get involved if someone needs help or is hurting themselves. This is not anything like apathy. On the contrary, I eagerly try to invite people to accept Acceptance and Love, and the forgiveness provided us by the Christ for all the ways we’ve tried to be other than what we are. That’s the only way anyone ever gets any better.
Forgive me for having my own way about things.
I forgive you for having your own way about things.
I’m trying hard to not require a performance in exchange for my kindness and inclusion.
Please don’t make me do anything for yours.
“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself-and especially to feel, or not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at any moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is.”
25
Billy Joel Sang it Best.
My buddy Brian and I agreed to help our mutual friend Patrick build his barn for a couple days. It is to date the most Amish week of my life.
There we were, thirty feet in the air, straddling still-naked trusses of two-by-fours as we banged away at the frame. My main concern was not falling to my death. The other two seemed to be more attuned to the work at hand. But Patrick soon proved less focused on driving in nails as he was with something else.
As we joked and told stories, Patrick kept looking over at Brian and shaking his head, agitated. After half an hour he was out with it.
“Brian. Your belt is on crooked. The nail pouch should be on the front.”
Brian looked down and made an unconcerned sound. Patrick waited a couple minutes and tried again.
“If you have it where it goes, you can pull nails out more easily. More safely. See?” he said, demonstrating with his own.
Brian assured him. “Got it. This is fine though.”
Another two or three minutes of hammers banging filled the quiet.
“Brian, dude, spin it around right,” Patrick said.
Brian gave me a glance. Why was Patrick concerning himself with the placement of the nail pouch on someone else who was fine with where it was?
Bang, bang, bang.
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
“Brian! Just. Ugh! Here!” Patrick was now sprawling across the beams and twisting the belt around Brian’s waste into its proper place, speaking through his teeth as he did. Brian held his hammer, bracing himself on the trusses as he was jostled, staring at Patrick, then staring at me. “There! It goes like that!”
We didn’t return the next day. Later I saw the barn and assumed it was exactly how Patrick wanted it.
The Gospels are missing most of the content many of us have been led to think is there. All the content that has Jesus speaking to people about how they need to be different than they are, based on the absolute of Divine preference for every life, got erased or something.
Who does Jesus level criticisms to but, in 99/100 of exchanges, religious leaders who make it their careers to tell other people to change. And isn’t the rest of Jesus’s time spent healing people who are empirically not what they could be – real beneficiaries of change.
Missing are the stories of people told to dress differently. Told they needed to buy a car with better gas mileage, and not spend too much time playing video games past a certain age. Stories where Jesus tells people that they need to pick a specific church, back a particular candidate, believe in a certain age of the Earth. It’s almost as if Jesus was ok with people generally having their own way about things. When men of good standing with the faith did successfully convert people to their way, Jesus had some strong words:
“You Bible teachers travel land and sea to convert a single person and in doing so make them twice an accursed son as you are.”
I’ve been persuaded in recent years that forgiveness isn’t just letting people off the punitive hook for a specific thing they have done to me. That is its own effort to be sure. But forgiveness is more. It’s the moment-to-moment charitableness which doesn’t hold my unmet preferences against others. People not being or doing what I want, even when I have my reasons validated, feels like I am being wronged if allow the childish tick to reign. You can see it on a middle school playground when the new kid’s shoes aren’t to standard, costing her inclusion and love. The kids will actually say “ew” to feign disgust. They believe they are being offended by their preferences not being met. You can see it in adults when they hear the word Republican or Democrat, depending on their election predilections. They can become angry at the mere name of the Incumbent. They in their mind are being wronged at the very mention of an alternative worldview.
In truth, I’m rarely ever being wronged. I just want everything to be my way. Compassion, that sacred together suffering, is the maturity to absorb humanity’s terrible track record for being just how I want them.
Being that forgiveness is Love, it contains in it the others-centered expansiveness to say to all others, “I don’t need you to be any different than you are.”
That would be a far better greeting than “Hello”, would it not? To shake hands at the store, at church, at home or atop an unfinished barn and say with a heart that forgives the other for not being what my selfishness would prefer, “I don’t need you to be any different than you are.”
And if I do need you to be different, well now we’re talking about my weakness, not yours.
24
Paralysis.
It was standing room only. Jesus and the boys were back in town. Hearing this everyone showed up at his house to take in his wisdom and bask some in his rising profile.
Five friends got there late. Who could blame them, considering four of them had to carry the paralyzed fifth. Their friend couldn’t walk, and out of something ranging from compassion for the unfortunate friend to the reasonably selfish desire to start getting all five of them to parties on time, the friends carried him to Jesus to see if he could heal him.
When they found the door blocked and even the windows obscured by eager listeners, they improvised. Climbing the outside stairs of the home, they carried their friend to the roof and yanked a few tiles out of the mortar. Jesus’ sermon was suddenly interrupted by the limp form of a man in a halo of sunlit dust dropping through the ceiling.
A few close to Jesus sprang to assist the human marionette safely descend to the floor. The friends looked down eagerly through the new hatch to determine Jesus’ level of irritability.
Jesus smiled back at them. Acts of courageous, innovative compassion always trump a sermon.
There in the middle of the room lay a crippled, motionless man in the glow of a makeshift skylight. What does the healer say to a man needing healed?
Heavenly Father heal his legs?
Dude, just walk already?
Neither.
He says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Jesus went first into the man’s mind while everyone else stared at his withered feet. I hate it when God doesn’t address the problems I present.
An immediate sense of scandal arose for the Biblically educated men in the room. Forgiving sins is God’s job. This Jesus was a good teacher but he was playing with fire now. Jesus asked them about it. And after a religious debate failed to get off the ground, the paralyzed man did. Jesus has the man “arise”.
The same word used elsewhere in the New Testament for those waking up and getting out of bed. The same word used to describe the dead living again.
The paralytic man is a man who cannot walk. But the story isn’t chiefly a story of a man having his legs healed as though that’s the programmed outcome of forgiveness. I’m sure there have been plenty of paralyzed readers of this story who have accepted that there are depths to plumb beyond the plain reading. And those depths might go like this: The paralyzed man’s guilt and shame and the burden of condemnation that renders us all unable to “walk,” needed lifted.
“Son,” said Jesus to a man who the text depicts as being toted around by friends rather than family, ”your sins have been cast out. You’re free.”
Then, and only then apparently, can the man arise and take responsibility for his journey. After finding out that his burden of guilt was damaging himself, not Christ.
To the man lying motionless on Christ’s rug, and in some way to us, he says,
You know you’re forgiven?
You know you don’t have to be a slave to the lowest parts of yourself and society anymore?
You know the shame you carry wasn’t assigned to you by anyone with authority?
Off the floor, son!
Get up, daughter!
Stand up and walk!
Get up, daughter!
You’re free! Go and be this same healing Love!
I can’t count how many times I have marinated in simmering remorse for days – months! -because I was sure I had hurt someone with my words. With a forgotten date. With an offhanded comment made about someone who wasn’t in the room but who heard about it later. Then I am face to face with them, the consequences of my lack of consideration burning in my chest, paralyzing me.
And they say, “Dude, it’s no big deal at all. I never gave it a second thought.”
Or, “Yeah, it stung a little but I got over it. Seriously, we’re cool.”
Or, “I’m still mad. I still don’t know why you did that. But, thanks for apologizing. Maybe we can talk more about it later.”
Suddenly I’m on my feet rather than stuck on my back. Formerly lifeless limbs of the Body, tingling, renewing their connection as unique but integrated parts of the whole. Movement returns.
And I give this same gift to others when I forgive. When I forgive, I relieve a burden and put you and I back on our feet together. We are as people of faith a liberation people after all, given the power to liberate. Love made in the image of Love to do what Love does; frees captives. Forgiveness is an Exodus. Withheld forgiveness a hardhearted maintaining of slaves.
“If you forgive others for their wrongdoings, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive, don’t pretend you get to participate halfway in the circuitry of Grace.”
23
A Love That’s Intents*
*I stand by this joke, especially as we begin thinking about forgiveness.
Suspend your dislike for the most sleazy lawyers for a moment. And if you are a lawyer of any description, suspend your awareness of this fact the best you can as you read.
Imagine someone you knew got arrested for kicking in several storefront windows. It was his first offense of any kind, no one was injured, but criminal damaging being a second degree misdemeanor, he’s facing thousands in fines and six months in jail.
Imagine you are somehow offered a chance to free him. All you have to do is explain what happened in terms that will persuade a judge that it’s not as bad as it seems. And if you could explain it satisfactorily, not only would your acquaintance be released, but you also would be rewarded a million dollars.
Don’t worry for a second about the moral implications.
Could you do it?
Might you possess the creative vigor to contextualize the act in such a way so as to get the man out of trouble and you into seven digits of reward. Could you cancel out his vilification with positivity, telling the story in a way that turned the tide of judgment? Could you spin it as a momentary lapse of reason which need only result in his replacing the windows, not his having a criminal record and yet another occupied jail cell? Could you argue that he was, for all we know, killing venomous spiders with his boot a little too zealously, though ultimately for our good? The Spiders are bad this year after all, your Honor. Could you offer to pay for the windows and associated lost revenue in exchange for dismissal of charges – you’d have the cash – promising to take him to anger management classes, adding “we all need help with our anger Your Honor,” and “Isn’t this arrangement far better for his longterm correction than incarceration and a rap sheet anyway?”
Couldn’t you find a way to fight for him by applying the best, most positive intent and outcome?
Now imagine they were your windows he kicked in.
Wouldn’t you, despite this new twist, still possess all the same creative vigor? Frankly, the same incentives? And wouldn’t you likely have even more leverage, since you’re the victim who’s seemingly not victimized? And couldn’t you, if we stop talking about windows kicked in and some hypothetical courtroom and start talking about the actual people in your home, school and office, apply the same creative vigor to find a way to make right what needs made right without the desire to inflict retribution? We don’t really believe victim energy is necessarily stronger than the spirit of forgiveness, do we?
Ask it this way: If it wasn’t a million dollar incentive but was instead the true reconciling and freeing power of Love, would you be any less able to fight for the forgiveness of others- even those who have made trouble very specifically for you?
When you hurt someone, unless you’re a sociopath – in which I’ll assume you lost interest many chapters back – you hope that when it comes to judgment your intentions will trump your actions. We naturally add to our apologies, “I didn’t mean to,” or “I really didn’t think about how that would affect you.” Even if there are real, tangible consequences for what you did, and there often should be, you’re confident that if the other knew your intentions it would reduce their bad feelings and increase the probability of reconciliation.
It’s a plea for the internal, unseen context behind a (mis)behavior to be considered by the other before sentencing. It matters deeply to us what we intended and we hope the wounded other will appreciate it. It makes all the difference. It hurts and offends when some woman stomps your toe on the bus. Watch out lady! But then you look up and see that she is very old and blind. The same physical pain is being experienced, but the place the encounter is processed in your head moves and you can instantly absolve her of guilt. There isn’t any guilt. Even as your toe throbs, the lack of intent can cancel the debt.
And yet, as much as we hope our intentions will be considered most eagerly, and as much as the blind lady would get a pass because it’s so easy to tell she didn’t mean it, we tend to judge others 180° from what he hope or demand from others. “Forget context and intentions,” we’re saying now. “What you did and what it did to me are all I care to consider. Excuses excuses.”
I’ve found I don’t really always want justice. I want revenge.
The Spirit of Compassion seems to be blowing in our society’s air in interesting ways. Ways that make it possible and even entertaining to contextualize Darth Vader into a salvaged good rather than a hopeless devil. We really seem taken by the idea that evil is too lazy a label and that maybe there is a something redeemable in one who a previous generation would have cast out. Yet how many of us still think our ex is genuinely bad, worthy of our slander, our contempt, or ill-wishes? How few of us are willing to fight for reconciliation with a parent, an old friend, that idiot neighbor, all because the pain they caused is all we care to consider for sentencing?
This is not to say no pain was caused. There really is a thing to be forgiven.
This is all to say you and I have far more creative vigor – far more Compassion reserves – to let someone off the hook than we give ourselves credit for. We are after all made in the image of a boundless giver of Love, and not in the image of a wounded, unsettled Account.
Our Father in heaven
Wholly Other be Your Reputation
Your Kingdom, Your Way, be in effect in our living
Give us today our plenty
And forgive us our infliction of pain
As we simultaneously forgive the pain inflicted on us
Lead us around the temptation to make this about ourselves
Rescue us from becoming the evil that’s happened to us
Amen.
