Together, Alone

"So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

 ― 2 Corinthians 5: 16-21

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Dear Kate,

Jesus sided with the poor, the needy, the dispossessed?  Yes.

Jesus was killed by the wealthy, the powerful, the religious, the bourgeoisie?  No.

No one who actually reads the Bible can come up with the second conclusion.  Not to be found in the New Testament, and not in the Old either:

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities; 

the punishment that brought us peace was on him, 

    and by his wounds we are healed.

One could say historically Jesus was indeed put to death by specific individuals, but the slope is slippery.  One could go from Pontius Pilate to the Jewish people and justify pretty much any sort of hate in oneself, which, ironically, is what Jesus died for--and not only theologically, but also, yes, historically.

In his wonderfully succinct "Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel" Rowan Williams "sets out to show how the experience of Jesus's resurrection was from the first an experience of forgiveness and of the healing of memories of injury, guilt, and failure, and how, out of this healing, grow new patterns of life together, and a new understanding of God."

We are all implicated in rejecting God and trying to kill Him for good, and, scandalously, offensively enough, this is also how a new vision of "togetherness" is to grow out of the unforgivable being forgiven--but not without cost.

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."  If we trust this is what God has been up to all along, now fully revealed in the crucifixion, resurrection and exaltation of Jesus, we would "embark upon discipleship" to "surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death."

Going back to my first question: the answer is actually "maybe."  A very big maybe.

It takes an imagination with moral integrity to see Jesus could have lived in the time of Marx, a time of the most powerful vision humankind have yet conceived to fight for the poor, the needy, the dispossessed, a vision of "togetherness" that sees two "classes" of human beings not only unbridgeably different, but shall forever be antagonists to each other in a deadly war of "class struggle."  Would Jesus have been put to death for being a "Social Justice Warrior"?  Just as likely to be killed by one.

We are in this together...if you are on my side.  And the end of history, as we envision it, is when, on the final bloody hill, there is only one side left: mine.

“My concept of hell, I suppose," Rowan Williams once said, "is being stuck with myself for ever and with no way out. Whether anybody ever gets to that point I have no idea. But that it’s possible to be stuck with my selfish little ego for all eternity, that’s what I would regard as hell."

The possibility of hell.  One day when we look around the bloody hill on which we stand for the world to see, we might find no one else but Me.  Not a very big "maybe."

Yours, Alex