Holy Week

Today is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. We remember Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, recognizing that it led to the cross. Dying for our sake that we might have forgiveness and new life, Jesus endured excruciating pain and loneliness, dying a criminal's death. This is the scandal of the cross- a challenge to our own assumptions, institutions, and values. As St. Paul wrote, "but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor. 1:23). We confess and celebrate the resurrection, but we can never afford to forget the reality and brutality of the crucifixion. In anticipation of the resurrection that we will be celebrating a week from today, I am posting a passage from the liturgy of St. Basil the Great for reflection on the significance of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Coming from the Holy Anaphora, I think this text is a powerful reminder of the power of God and the hope of resurrection:

Priest: Together with these blessed powers, loving Master we sinners also cry out and say: Truly You are holy and most holy, and there are no bounds to the majesty of Your holiness. You are holy in all Your works, for with righteousness and true judgment You have ordered all things for us. For having made man by taking dust from the earth, and having honored him with Your own image, O God, You placed him in a garden of delight, promising him eternal life and the enjoyment of everlasting blessings in the observance of Your commandments. But when he disobeyed You, the true God who had created him, and was led astray by the deception of the serpent becoming subject to death through his own transgressions, You, O God, in Your righteous judgment, expelled him from paradise into this world, returning him to the earth from which he was taken, yet providing for him the salvation of regeneration in Your Christ. For You did not forever reject Your creature whom You made, O Good One, nor did You forget the work of Your hands, but because of Your tender compassion, You visited him in various ways: You sent forth prophets; You performed mighty works by Your saints who in every generation have pleased You. You spoke to us by the mouth of Your servants the prophets, announcing to us the salvation which was to come; You gave us the law to help us; You appointed angels as guardians. And when the fullness of time had come, You spoke to us through Your Son Himself, through whom You created the ages. He, being the splendor of Your glory and the image of Your being, upholding all things by the word of His power, thought it not robbery to be equal with You, God and Father. But, being God before all ages, He appeared on earth and lived with humankind. Becoming incarnate from a holy Virgin, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, conforming to the body of our lowliness, that He might change us in the likeness of the image of His glory. For, since through man sin came into the world and through sin death, it pleased Your only begotten Son, who is in Your bosom, God and Father, born of a woman, the holy Theotokos and ever virgin Mary; born under the law, to condemn sin in His flesh, so that those who died in Adam may be brought to life in Him, Your Christ. He lived in this world, and gave us precepts of salvation. Releasing us from the delusions of idolatry, He guided us to the sure knowledge of You, the true God and Father. He acquired us for Himself, as His chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. Having cleansed us by water and sanctified us with the Holy Spirit, He gave Himself as ransom to death in which we were held captive, sold under sin. Descending into Hades through the cross, that He might fill all things with Himself, He loosed the bonds of death. He rose on the third day, having opened a path for all flesh to the resurrection from the dead, since it was not possible that the Author of life would be dominated by corruption. So He became the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, the first born of the dead, that He might be Himself the first in all things. Ascending into heaven, He sat at the right hand of Your majesty on high and He will come to render to each according to His works. As memorials of His saving passion, He has left us these gifts which we have set forth before You according to His commands. For when He was about to go forth to His voluntary, ever memorable, and life-giving death, on the night on which He was delivered up for the life of the world, He took bread in His holy and pure hands, and presenting it to You, God and Father, and offering thanks, blessing, sanctifying, and breaking it:

Priest: He gave it to His holy disciples and apostles saying: Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you and for the forgiveness of sins.

People: Amen.

Priest: Likewise, He took the cup of the fruit of vine, and having mingled it, offering thanks, blessing, and sanctifying it.

Priest: He gave it to His holy disciples and apostles saying: Drink of this all of you. This is my blood of the new Covenant, shed for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.

People: Amen.

Priest: Do this in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this Bread and drink this Cup, you proclaim my death, and you confess my resurrection. Therefore, Master, we also, remembering His saving passion and life giving cross, His three; day burial and resurrection from the dead, His ascension into heaven, and enthronement at Your right hand, God and Father, and His glorious and awesome second coming. (link)

I hope this week will be a time for sober and grateful reflection on the passion of Jesus that we might be all the more able to be filled with the joy of the light of resurrection.

Remember Me

Why doesn't God constantly reveal Himself to us? This thought has often crossed my mind, and I have heard it expressed many times, whether as the anxious petition of someone crying out for God's guidance and a sense of His presence, or from someone seeking to cast doubt on the existence or goodness of a God who seemingly is unable or unwilling to provide what seems like such a simple act of reassurance. Next week I have the chance to attend a lecture addressing the issue of divine hiddenness, so I won't try to unpack that subject just yet. Instead, I was struck by the role that memory plays in faith.

Following others, I think of faith as belief, trust, and commitment. Faith is not merely believing something (God is good, God exists, the capital of Montana is Helena, etc.), but being willing to personally commit oneself in some way to that belief, while trusting in it. On this view, doubt and faith are not opposites or antonyms, but can in fact coexist. In fact, I would argue that doubt is essential for faith, because there is no need for trust or commitment in matters of certainty, at least not in any sense of personal stake. It is this uncertainty or doubt that causes us to rely on the one whom we are putting our trust in. In order to trust someone through periods of doubt or uncertainty, we need to remember what they have done in the past, and this is where the importance of memory comes in.

Failures of memory and the suffering and pain it causes are littered throughout the Bible. Time and again in the Old Testament, God delivers Israel from affliction, persecution, or imminent danger, causing Israel to worship God. However, soon afterward we see time and again Israel forgetting God and turning to sinful ways. The book of Judges is essentially dedicated to this cycle of deliverance and return to sin. Why does this happen? Because Israel did not remember the things that God had done in the past. In Exodus, we see the Israelites demanding if Moses has led them out of Egypt simply to die, seemingly ignoring the miraculous events that have allowed for their departure. Their deliverance from the armies of Pharaoh does not stop them from crying out at the lack of food they encounter, and then after being given quail and manna, growing tired of these foods.

In all of these situations, the Israelites encountered difficult situations that threatened their lives and health. The dangers were real: death at the hands of an army and starvation. However, God delivered them in each instance. That does not take away the uncertainty that inevitably faced them in these situations: the mere fact that they had left Egypt did not logically entail safe journey to the promised land. There were legitimate grounds for doubt then, and their only choice was to have faith in God, putting their trust not in any certain circumstances or law-like processes, but in a person. However, their failure to trust God showed a failure to remember all that God had done. No matter how often God delivered Israel, in the face of danger time and again they still did not trust Him. If nothing else, this should give us pause that if God were to suddenly start performing miracles in greater frequency and visibility that it would inevitably lead to greater trust. If God is really interested in lives submitted to Him in relationships of trust and commitment, as I believe, then it seems like great acts may not be the way to achieve this end. It certainly wasn't in the stories recorded in the Old Testament.

In order to trust God, we must remember what He has done in the moments when He seems distant or absent. This memory allows us to trust when our circumstances and instincts tell us to abandon hope or give up. Nowhere in the Bible does it suggest that God is interested in freeing His followers from lives that involve risk, danger, difficulty, and uncertainty. Thus, even more overt acts of God are not going to remove uncertainty from our life, because there must still be room for trust. This gives new significance to Jesus' words "do this in remembrance of me." Remembering what Jesus has done is central to the mission of the church, enshrined in the Eucharist. Faith requires trust which in turn requires memory. Failures of memory lead to failures of trust. The Church isn't just the body of Christ on earth, working for His kingdom. It is also a community that exists to serve as a witness to God's acts and promises.

In moments where God seems distant, we are reminded of the many times that God's people went years and decades in seeming silence. Even Jesus himself cried out to God, asking if God had forsaken him. These memories can serve to guide and comfort, reminding us that God does not always act in ways that we expect or in the time frames that I want, but that He is good and able and will complete His plans. This is what I strive to remember and what Christians can never forget.

More Thoughts on Law and Morality

A professor of mine made an interesting comment in passing that resonated with a lot of my recent thinking on the idea of law and human fallen-ness. He remarked, "God had to write his law on tablets of stone because human hearts were too hard." I think sometimes Christians overlook the narratives in the Pentateuch leading up to the giving of the Law of Moses and assume that somehow people were "pre-moral" before this event. The book of Genesis is full of moral judgments, and as I mentioned in my last post, full of various "falls." From the fall of Adam and Eve through Cain and Abel, to the flood (and numerous other places in between and after), we see time after time human beings engaging in wicked actions, causing death and division to one another. This is a far cry from the created order that God proclaimed to be "very good," itself a moral judgment.

The laws of Moses then are not some new source of moral revelation that humanity was somehow unable to discover on its own. On the contrary, the created ordered is described in moral language and as such it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to see moral awareness as a feature of humanity. (the "knowledge of good and evil" that Adam and Eve gained from eating of the tree, as I have mentioned elsewhere, ought to be understood in the more wholistic sense of "knowing" that is frequently employed in the Old Testament, which would mean experiential knowing, in the same way that Adam "knew" Eve. What was gained was not moral knowledge of good and evil, but first hand experience of doing evil). By engaging in deliberately de-humanizing behaviors, humans have dulled their hearts to their own moral natures, and the law represents an attempt to reawaken these natures. Jesus makes this point in his teaching on divorce when he notes that the laws concerning divorce were given "because of your hardness of heart; but from the beginning it has not been this way" (Matthew 19:8).

Sometimes I hear the moral teachings of the Bible treated as if they are only meaningful if they represent original, heretofore un-thought-of moral principles. The claim seems to be that the teachings of the Bible should be things that could not be recognized independent of reading its pages. The problem with this is that it ignores the way the Bible itself presents moral judgments. Moral judgments are present in the very beginning of all things, they do no magically appear at Mt. Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments. What the law represents is a badly-needed reminder of the moral truths that humanity has time and again rejected. It represents an accommodation to the sinfulness of humanity that would seek to move them from morally destructive ways back towards God. This process is completed in Christ, who is the fulfillment of the law, but we see the beginning traces of it in the Pentateuch and its commands which seek to cultivate an attitude of intentionality towards one's behavior.

Yes, you can be "good without God" in the sense of never needing to open up the Bible to discover many moral principles, but a quick glance at the world (and at my own actions) shows that we constantly need to be reminded of things that we know. Virtue is developed through habit, and in order to develop habits we need reminders that prompt us to be intentional about whatever behavior we are trying to develop. In this sense, we need moral instruction and guidelines in order to soften our hearts so that they might once again become receptive to God. This is the purpose of the law in the Old Testament, I submit, and not an attempt to provide wholly original (or wholly perfect) moral instruction.

Thinking about Death

This week I read Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein's short and mostly humorous book Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between. Catchart and Klein have written other books in a similar vein, using jokes and philosophy to explore various topics. I was interested since death is one of those things that my mind seems to wander towards (perhaps to an abnormal degree). On on the one hand, it seems preposterous that I could continue to exist after death, while on the other hand, the idea that my consciousness could cease permanently seems almost absurd as well. I'm obviously not the only one who has wondered at the looming figure of death and what does or does not lie beyond it.

Cathcart and Klein make frequent reference throughout the book to Ernest Becker's influential book The Denial of Death. I have not had the opportunity to read Becker's book, so I anything I say is based off of reading a bit of secondary literature on it and from the summaries provided by Cathcart and Klein. Becker's thesis seems to be that fear of death is the most fundamental drive of human beings, and that as a result civilization itself is driven by the need to create structures that defy death. Catchart and Klein speak of "immortality systems" like groups and religions that are created to provide a means of escape from the looming spectre of death.

This is a provocative thesis, and Becker's book has been widely read since its publication in 1974. However, it makes me think some of the same thoughts that happen when I encounter the belief that the origins of religion can be rooted in wish fulfillment. Simply put, if religion is about creating an immortality system, then historically they seem not to have done such a great job. Ancient Greek and Hebrews both seemed to see the afterlife as Hades/Sheol, a place not of punishment or reward, but simply the place where souls went after death. It generally appears to be somewhat gloomy and not a terribly inviting place. If religion serves to provide an immortality system, it seems that many have gotten away with not offering their adherents much. This isn't even touching upon Eastern religions where "immortality," if we can even call it that, looks very strange indeed to Western eyes.

Plus, it seems that belief in immortality is not dependent on a belief in God. It seems, to use the Greeks again as an example, that they simply believed in an afterlife in which the things of this world (people, things, and yes the gods) continued to exist. The gods were part of this world and of the next. The gods did not secure the existence of the afterlife. Perhaps Becker was moving the right direction towards recognizing that a belief in immortality seems to be almost foundational for humans. I just don't think religions secured belief in immortality. Simply put, we don't seem to "need" immortality systems and religions to arrive at a belief in the afterlife.

Western civilization has produced many images of the afterlife through the works of Milton and Dante and a host of lesser known figures who have created deeply-ingrained images of heaven and hell that are easily called to mind. While these images have a basis in passages of the Bible, as Catchart and Klein show with tongue-in-cheek humor, they represent an enormous amount of exaggeration and extrapolation. This just shows that the New Testament really doesn't provide all that much detail about what the life to come will be like. If it's all about immortality, then why didn't Jesus focus more on it? Jesus speaks about a future resurrection as if its a foregone conclusion, not a new revelation and not something that seems to need additional fleshing out.

In light of Jesus' resurrection, Christianity has recognized the centrality of resurrection as the culmination of history and the sign of new creation and a reordering of the universe. When I die I'll do so in the hope of this resurrection that raised Our Lord from the dead as the first fruits of things to come, as Paul wrote. Until then, we live in a world where death is central and unavoidable, yet the inclination to believe that it is not the end remains difficult to shake. My specific hope for the future lies in Jesus Christ, but I think my belief in a continuation of life after death has a deeper history that may be a glimpse of God's presence in creation.