Shutting up Sacrifice

"Christ is killed every day by the injuries that we cannot bear. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows and our first emotion, our first reaction is relief. Christ who lifts responsibility from us, Christ who suffers for us, Christ who takes away our burden and our misery, who stands between us and the world’s dreadfulness, between us and the squalor of our lives, as he was once thought to stand between us and the wrath of his Father. Christ the substitute, Christ the surrogate, Christ who saves us the trouble of being crucified. God will forgive: that is his job; Christ will suffer: that is his.  That great and highly uncomfortable saint, Raymond Raynes, once described the aim of most Western European religion as being , 'to shut up sacrifice in Jesus alone and not let it pass to us.'

… And so Christ is killed every day by the injuries we refuse, by what we will not let ourselves feel and know, by the risks we refuse, the involvement we refuse.

… Terror of involvement, fear of failure—of hurting as well as being hurt—the dread of having our powerlessness nakedly spelled out for us: all of this is the common coin of most of our lives. For beneath the humility of the person who believes he or she knows their limitations is the fear of those who have never found or felt their limitations. Only when we have traveled to those stony places of the spirit where we are forced to confront our helplessness and our failure can we be said to know our limitations, and then the knowledge is too late to be useful. We do not know what we can or cannot bear until we have risked the impossible and intolerable in our own lives. Christ bears what is unbearable, but we must first find it and know it to be unbearable. And it does not stop being ours when it becomes his. Only thus can we translate our complicity in the death of Christ into a communion in the death of Christ, a baptism in the death of Christ: by not refusing, by not escaping, by forgetting our realism and our reasonableness, by letting the heart speak freely, by exposing ourselves, by making ourselves vulnerable."

Rowan Williams, "Holy Living: The Christian tradition for today" (2017)

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Dear Kate,

I am very aware of the change of season, even more now this time of the year.  Yesterday the sun set quite a bit later than I remembered it the Sunday before, this morning rose perceptibly (in ways more than one) earlier than last Friday.  Of course it is stupid of me to talk about the sun "rising" and "setting"; science should have cured me of my childishness by now, but it ain't breaking through.  It ain't breaking me yet.  I was out there dancing under the sun, drying my umbrella at 5 last night, Gene Kelly style (and none of the substance, of course).  I can tell you for sure the sun did set on me.

Yesterday at church we again looked at the story of Jesus washing his disciplines' feet, a story that should shake us to the core, unsettle the most basic assumptions we have about life.  If there really is a God, what does He have to prove to me?  What scientific account or moral ledger does He need to show me to make a case for Himself?

If there's a point Jesus was making I suppose it has to do with his dying, even then as he was washing feet, dying to His pride, submersing beneath His dignity, giving the disciplines a preview trailer loaded with spoiler alerts they couldn't fully register the magnitude of until after the fact--that He was here, on earth, for us, to die, and summoning His followers to do the same.

But what if we no longer read the story this way, that it is about an incomprehensible grace and unreasonable, unscientific, even immoral mercy, that the innocent was "pierced for our transgressions," and for that save us from the "wrath of God" that should be ours to bear?

What if I believe God should be nice, like Santa Claus, that it is proper of Him to wash my feet, shed His blood for the washing, that it is God the Father who needs to explain His anger--and, for that, we Christians are adamantly sorry and would try our best to do a better PR job suppressing the OT and censoring the NT, excusing ourselves for triggering the pain in humanity caused by our childhood (and childish) nightmares of an angry cosmic authority figure fabricated and perpetrated by angry adults that are our parents and leaders and anyone who has ever tried to deny us of our dignity in essence, our "human rights," entitlement to glory (who cares based on what)?  What if it is offensive to even suggest we are in need of any forgiveness at all, let alone that from God?

Amazing grace

How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now I'm found

Was blind, but now I see

It's the lent season, but we find these words remote, as far from us as the Passion and many passions of Christ.  At the foot of the cross we will arrive, eventually, lying on our couch, speaking about feeding the poor and carbon footprint (mine better than yours, of course, always), and as Jesus is raised from the dead we will look away in embarrassment, nudging our preachers to give a more sensible account of what "actually" happened, maybe throw in some pseudoscience for good measure for those who have a  fear of blood and anything stupid and backward in general.

This morning I woke up with a twitch at the lower corner of my left eye.  The thought came to me: What if I can see no more?  What if last night was the last night that I was given the blessing of vision, a vision of sunset through the translucence of my white umbrella, as I was swinging it, with my whole body, fully being, in the mild chill of a soft winter afternoon?

The morning I wake up blind, would I then curse God for disappointing me, if I have never blessed Him for blessing me, died with Him for dying for me?  It would be kinda "unscientific," unreasonable, don't you think, to blame someone I don't know, acknowledge, or particularly care for, not enough to risk anything anyway?

We are radically rebellious children who question everything but somehow still found a way to believe in Santa.

Yours, Alex