In the Garden, an icon by the hand of the artist, Angelica Sotiriou, 2009.
I’m writing this on Maundy Thursday, the night of Jesus’ tender farewell supper with his friends—and the night he was handed over to malevolent powers. The beautiful icon from the hand of California sacred artist Angelica Soteriou [i] captures the wrenching moment between the solidarity of his loving community and the fatal desolation of his Passion. He is alone. Neither friends nor enemies share his existential space. He’s kneeling in prayer, arms stretched out, beseeching his Father for whatever is needed to make it through the night. But his hands remain open, receptive to a will not his own. Not my will, but thine. And though an annihilating blackness surrounds him, his body is held safely within the warm color of the mountain of God. Even when we feel alone, even abandoned, we are still enfolded within divine love and mercy. Our divine milieu is not an exemption from trouble, but an assurance against trouble’s finality.
On this holy Thursday, many churches, including mine, do the eucharist in the context of an actual shared meal. It is is our custom to eat in silence, which monastics know is a profound way to be together. Our silence is punctuated by a series of meditative readings from the Farewell Discourses, the words of encouragement, comfort and challenge which, in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks to his friends on the night before his execution. It’s not a reenactment of a past event. Those words are spoken directly to us, in our own fraught time.
Tonight, however, we added a word from one of Jesus’ more recent friends, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was facing his own Gethsemane in a German prison. At Christmastide, 1944, a few months before he would be executed by the Nazis, he wrote a poem which was smuggled out of prison in a letter to his mother. Its expression of confidence and hope in the midst of an evil time not only echoes the spirit of Jesus’ Farewell Discourses, but it speaks strongly to our own latter days, when so many things are in peril.
Here is the versified translation of Bonhoeffer’s poem by the British hymn writer Fred Pratt Green:
By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered, and confidently waiting come what may, we know that God is with us night and morning, and never fails to greet us each new day.
Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented; still evil days bring burdens hard to bear; O give our frightened souls the sure salvation for which, O Lord, you taught us to prepare.
And when this cup you give is filled to brimming with bitter suffering, hard to understand, we take it thankfully and without trembling, out of so good and so beloved a hand.
Yet when again in this same world you give us the joy we had, the brightness of your Sun, we shall remember all the days we lived through, and our whole life shall then be yours alone.[ii]
Yes, we too are living through “evil days” which weigh down “our frightened souls” with “burdens hard to bear.” But our brother Dietrich, like our brother Jesus, reminds us that there is an alternative to fear and despair, if we can find the courage to live into God’s future, come what may, and the Paschal wisdom to walk the Way of the Cross “thankfully and without trembling,” because we know that death doesn’t get the last word.
Now, as we move into Good Friday, listen to what Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, says about the cross:
Jesus crucified is God crucified; so we believe. Jesus is the total and final embodiment in history of God’s loving mercy; and so this cross is a unique, terrible, extreme act of violence—a summary of all sin. It represents the human rejection of love. And not even that can destroy God; with the wounds of the cross still disfiguring his body, he returns out of hell to his disciples and wishes them peace. There is our hope—the infinite resource of God’s love, the relationship with God’s creatures that no sin can finally unmake. God cares what we do because God suffers what we do. God is forever wounded, but forever loving. The possibilities of our relationship to God are indeed ‘new every morning.’” [iii]
In other words, says Williams, “we have a future because of God’s grace.” Bonhoeffer said the same thing, and he said it from death row. That’s what the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising is trying to tell us—not only in the rituals and narratives of Holy Week, but in the kind of lives we live when we fully embody the archetypal pattern of surrender and transformation. The way down is the way up. Lose your life to find it. Let go and let God.
There’s always more to say about this, of course, but it’s almost midnight, and tomorrow is the rigorous journey to the foot of the cross. And beyond that, there’s the Easter Vigil, a night of wonders when heaven and earth are joined and liturgical curators are left exhausted yet exultant in its wake. If you want to read more about the cross, try What Will the Cross Make of Us?, written in 2022 by my less tired self. For more on the Easter Vigil, try Just a Dream?—Reflections on the Easter Vigil.
I’m going to bed now, but let me leave you with a 3-minute trailer for the Triduum, pushing the point that the Triduum is not a la carte, but a 3-part connected sequence that wants to be experienced in full. The three-day Paschal passage from Passion to Resurrection isn’t just bingeing on liturgy. It’s a profound way of knowing that delivers you to a different place. As we say at my church every Holy Week, “The journey is how we know.”
[iii] Rowan Williams, from a sermon excerpted in A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2004), 99.
The Transfiguration of Christ (Sr. Abraham, Ethiopian community in Jerusalem, 1990)
I spent only one year in a world without nuclear weapons. My first birthday fell on July 16, 1945, the day of the initial atomic bomb test in New Mexico. A few weeks later, my country used the bomb to extinguish countless human lives on the Feast of the Transfiguration. With Transfiguration falling on a Sunday as Oppenheimer is playing in the theaters, a few comments are in order.
In an interpretive retelling of the Transfiguration by a 17th-century Anglican bishop, Moses and Elijah discuss the paradoxical mixture of evil and glory that permeates the Way of the Cross:
A strange opportunity … when [Jesus’] face shone like the sun, to tell him it must be blubbered and spat upon;… and whilst he was Transfigured on the Mount, to tell him how he must be Disfigured on the Cross! [i]
In the twentieth century, that paradox was tragically deepened when we dropped the atomic bomb at Hiroshima on the Feast of the Transfiguration. Two kinds of light, diabolic and divine, contending forever after for the soul of this world. Whose world is it, anyway? To which light do we belong? To which light do we pledge our allegiance?
In his novel Underworld, Don DeLillo chillingly mixes and confuses the primal images of divine and diabolical light when a nun, swept out of her conscious self into the informational totality of the Internet, has a visionary experience on a website devoted to the H-bomb:
She sees the flash, the thermal pulse . . . . She stands in the flash and feels the power. She sees the spray plume. She sees the fireball climbing, the superheated sphere of burning gas that can blind a person with its beauty, its dripping christblood colors, solar golds and red. She sees the shock wave and hears the high winds and feels the power of false faith, the faith of paranoia, then the mushroom cloud spreads around her, the pulverized mass of radioactive debris, eight miles high, ten miles, twenty, with skirted stem and platinum cap.
The jewels roll out of her eyes and she sees God . . . .
No, wait, sorry. It is a Soviet bomb she sees . . . . [ii]
Seattle Times, July 16, 1995 (50th anniversary of the first atomic bomb).
I’ve not yet seen Oppenheimer, the film about the creator of the atomic bomb. But I was struck by this paragraph in a review by Adam Mullins-Khatib:
“Oppenheimer … is a searing portrait of a man plagued by visions of a world that can’t be seen, a theoretical world composed of the literal particles of his ideas. Driven by an unyielding need to bring his visions to light, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) struggles with the notion of bringing theory into practice … It’s a film about the creation of something not before seen and the consequences this entails.” [iii]
Something not before seen and the consequences this entails. That could describe both the coming of Christ and the invention of the Bomb: each brought into the world something not before seen, manifested in a moment of blinding brilliance. And each has had enormous consequences which are still very much with us. But only one of them is the Light eternal, pure brightness of the everlasting Love who loves us.
To paraphrase the divine Voice in Deuteronomy 30:19,
This day I set before you life and death, blessing and curse, the light eternal and the light infernal. Choose life. Or else.
In 1944, one year before Hiroshima, Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, wrote these words:
“We live in a world of suffering, a world broken and disintegrated, in which Christ’s Transfiguration uncovers reality and reveals to our skeptical minds a new humanity that has either entered into the light of the Risen One or is still called to do so … [W]e need to put on a robe of light, the apparel of those who live without fear, since they have already conquered death and the multiple anxieties associated with it.” [iv]
In this troubled and darkened age, that is exactly how the friends of God must live.
Let us put on the robe of light, and live without fear.
.
[i] Bishop Hall Joseph Hall, Contemplations upon the principal passages of the Old and New Testaments, 1612-28, found on Google Books, p. 383.
[ii]Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 825-6.
[iv]Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002, Originally published in French in 1944)), 151, 244.
Windows, south nave of León Cathedral on the Camino de Santiago.
I was walking instead of writing in May, on pilgrimage along St. Cuthbert’s Way from the Scottish Borders to Holy Island in Northumbria. More on that soon. Meanwhile, I’m preaching the following for Trinity Sunday at my home parish, St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Some of it has appeared before on this blog, but the ending is entirely new.
Part of the fun of Trinity Sunday is getting to watch the preacher attempt to explain the most formidable mystery of Christian faith in less than 20 minutes. It can’t be done! We all know that—the preacher knows it too—and the fun part is seeing how he or she is going to fail this time.
Of course, we could just say that a mystery is not meant to be explained, and leave it at that. Let’s just adore the mystery, not investigate it.
But if, as the theologians insist, “the nature of the church should manifest the nature of God,”[i] then we need to know enough about the nature of God to understand how to be a church whose own way of being reflects and manifests that divine nature.
And if investigating the nature of God seems like a daunting task best left to the professionals, those who have the aptitude and training to navigate levels of complexity and nuance which would make our own heads explode, we must remember that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a math problem (How can one be three and three be one?), nor is it an abstract, highly technical construction of the metaphysical elite who spent centuries sorting out differences between Arians, Monophysites, Monothelites, Monarchians, Modalists, Ebionites and Sabellians.
Trinitarian thought isn’t made of thin air or abstract speculation. It is produced and nourished by the concrete, tangible history of Christian experience. Whatever we can actually say about the Trinity is first of all grounded in experience, both the experience of our spiritual ancestors, encoded in Scripture and tradition, and the contemporary, ongoing revelations of our own communal and personal life.
Ever since the first Easter and the first Pentecost, Christians have been trying to make sense of the concrete, experiential data of salvation. Based on our collective and personal experience of being “saved” (or, if you prefer: healed, forgiven, reborn, renewed, resurrected, empowered), what can we say about the God who has done this?
Trinitarian reflection began within an ancient community deeply grounded in the monotheism of Judaism, which had, over the centuries, found ultimate reality to be not a plurality of disconnected or contradictory energies—what the ancients called “the gods”—but a coherent unity, understood to be the “one God.” However, once the early Christians began to attribute divinity to both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, a simple self-contained oneness was no longer sufficient to describe the Reality.
Without losing the unity of God, how could they account for the divine diversity revealed in the saving activities of Christ and the Spirit? Once they began to call Jesus Kyrios (Lord), which happened very early in their worship and their storytelling, traditional monotheism was radically destabilized. The growing perception of the Holy Spirit as a guiding and empowering presence of deity in their communities only compounded the problem.
There were various attempts to solve the problem by downgrading Jesus and Spirit to subordinate, derivative, or semi-divine realities, by no means equal to the eternal and uncreated God. Such “heresies” were popular with those who wanted to keep God simple. But “orthodoxy” was unwilling to deny the fullness of divinity to either Christ or the Spirit. For them the bottom line was this:
Only God can save us. Christ and Spirit, in the biblical revelation and Christian experience, are integral and essential to salvation. Therefore, they must be equally integral to the Holy One who is the Creator and Redeemer of all things
As a consequence, the doctrine of God became trinitarian: Three in one and one in three. In other words, God is relational. God is social. God is a communion of Persons.
If we have difficulty with “God in three Persons,” it is because we think of a person as defined by his or her separateness. I’m me and you’re you! We may interact and even form deep connections, but my identity does not depend upon you. I am a self-contained unit. You can’t live in my skin and I can’t live in yours. That’s the cultural assumption, which goes back at least as far as Descartes in the seventeenth century, and continues today in such debased forms as rampant consumerism and economic selfishness, where my needs and my desires take precedence over any wider sense of interdependence, community, or ecology.
But what we say about the Persons of the Trinity is quite different. Each Person is not an individual, separate subject who perceives the other Persons as objects. The Trinitarian persons experience one another not from the outside, but from the inside. They indwell each other in a mutual interiority.
Is this image of trinitarian indwelling difficult to conceive? Or is it something like the old John Lennon lyric?: “I am he as you are she as you are me and we are all together.” A French mystic put it this way: “it’s a case of un ‘je’ sansmoi” (an “I” without a me). Subjectivity, yes, a distinct consciousness within my own body, particular and unique, yes; but a consciousness deeply permeated by the otherness of interdependent reality.
But if the divine Persons are all inside each other, commingled, “of one being,” as the Creed says, what makes each Person distinct? To put it succinctly: the Persons are distinct because they are in relation with one another.
As Jewish theologian Martin Buber observed, we are persons because we can say “Thou” to someone else. To be a person is to experience the difference – and the connection – that forms the space between two separate subjects. My consciousness is not alone in the universe. There are other centers of consciousness: Thou, I… Thou, I… The fact that you are not I is what creates self-consciousness, the awareness of my own difference from what is outside myself.
If we apply this to the Trinity, we say that there are Three Persons because there is relation within God, relation between the Source who begets, the Word who is begotten, and the Spirit who binds the two together and carries them—and the love between them—outward in ever widening circles.
These relations are not occasional or accidental. They are primordial. They are eternal. There is an eternal sending within God, an eternal self-giving within God, an eternal exchange by which God is both Giver and Receiver simultaneously.
Trinitarian faith describes a God who is not solitary and alone, a God who is not an object which we can stand apart from and observe. The Trinity is an event of relationships: not three separate entities in isolation and independence from one another, but a union of subjects who are eternally interweaving and interpenetrating.
The early Church had a word for this: perechoresis. It means that each Person penetrates the others, each contains the other, and is contained by them. Each fills the space of the other, each is the subject, not the object of each other. As Jesus says in the Fourth Gospel: I am in the Father and the Father is in me.
The word perechoresis literally means “to dance around,” and the ancient theologians quickly seized on that image as an accessibly concrete description of a complex process. The Trinity is a dance, with Creator, Christ and Spirit in a continuous movement of giving and receiving, initiating and responding, weaving and mingling, going out and coming in. And while our attention may focus at times on a particular dancer, we must never lose sight of the larger choreography to which each dancer belongs: the eternal perichoresis of Three in One, One in Three.
Wallace Stevens made a poem about the process of giving ourselves over to a larger whole. He calls it “the intensest rendezvous,” where we find ourselves drawn out of isolation “into one thing.” He wasn’t writing about the Trinity, but his words come as close as any to describing the essential dynamic of the divine Persons:
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.[ii]
This divine relationality is not something which an originally solitary God decided to take up at some point. God is eternally relational. Before there was an external creation to relate to, God’s own essential self was and is an event of perpetual relation. There was never simply being, but always being-with, being-for, being-in. To be and to be in relation are eternally identical.
When the Bible says, “God is love” (I John 4:16), it means that love is not just something God has or something God does; love is what God is. As Orthodox theologian John D. Zizoulas says in his influential text, Being as Communion, “Love as God’s mode of existence … constitutes [divine] being.”[iii] Feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson echoes this when she says, “being in communion constitutes God’s very essence.”[iv]
In other words, God is Love giving itself away—self-emptying, self-diffusing, self-surrendering—and in so doing finds itself, receives itself, becomes itself.
For those of us made in God’s image, who God is matters deeply, both for our own self-understanding and for our engagement with the world. The Trinity isn’t just a doctrine or an idea. It’s a practice, a way of life, the shape of every story, the deep structure of the church, and indeed of all reality.
The mystics can help us out here. Early in the twelfth century, a German monk named Rupert of Deutz went into a church where mass was being said by a white-haired bishop. At the offertory procession he experienced a vision of the Holy Trinity:
“On the right at the edge of the altar stood three persons of such revered bearing and dignity that no tongue could describe them. Two were quite old, that is, with very white hair; the third was a beautiful youth of royal dignity …”[v]
A century later, Hadewijch of Antwerp, one of those remarkable women mystics who flourished in the late Middle Ages, also had a vision of the Trinity. But instead of three white males, what she saw was a dark whirlpool, which she described as “divine fruition in its hidden storms.” Hovering over this whirlpool was a spinning disc, on which sat a figure wearing the countenance of God – the face of God – on whose breast were written the words, “The Most Loved of All Beloveds.”
We may find Hadewijch’s vision more congenial: it is genderless, and less crudely specific than Rupert’s. And the tempestuous whirlpool, a flood of energy ceaselessly flowing through the universe, conveys a dynamic image of divinity that resembles the postmodern cosmologies of process theology and quantum physics. It’s probably easier for most of us to believe in a divine whirlpool than in three white guys.
But the crucial difference between Rupert and Hadewijch is not in the relative resonance of their imagery, but rather in what happens next. Rupert remains an observer, one who stands apart and sees God as an object. But Hadewijch does not remain separate from what she sees:
“Then I saw myself received in union by the One who sat there in the whirlpool upon the circling disc, and there I became one with him in the certainty of union… In that depth I saw myself swallowed up. Then I received the certainty of being received, in this form, in my Beloved, and my Beloved also in me.”
Rupert’s knowledge of God remained conceptual. Hadewijch’s knowledge of God became experiential. She was gathered into the circulating current of divinity. She became part of its flow, and that divine flow became part of her.
The language she uses for this experience is not mathematical or philosophical. Her language is the language of the heart. She describes being “swallowed up… in my Beloved, and my Beloved also in me.” Love, she discovered, is the way the soul knows. Love is the way the soul sees.[vi]
And what Love knows, what Love sees, is this: God is not a simple, static substance but an event of relationships. That’s why we say that God is love. “To be” has no ontological reality apart from “to be in relationship.” In the words of Anglican priest John Mbiti of Kenya, expressing the strongly communal mindset of African theology, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”[vii]
Each Person contains the others and is contained by them in a shared communion of self-offering and self-surrender. But that continuous self-offering is never a one-way transaction, either one of self-emptying or one of being filled. It is always both at once – giving and receiving – as we ourselves know from our own mutual experience of love at its best.
As Jesus said, “losing” yourself and “finding” yourself are equivalent and simultaneous. In giving ourselves away, we receive ourselves back. This may be counterintuitive to the modernist mindset of autonomous individual self-possession, but it is the essence of communion: “a giving of oneself that can only come from the ongoing and endless reception of the other.”[viii]
As God’s friends, we are not merely observers of this divine life of self-offering and self-surrender. We are participants.
If God is communion, the eternal exchange of mutual giving and receiving, then the Church must live a life of communion as well. When Love’s perechoresis becomes our way of being in the world—as believers, as church—the Trinity is no longer just doctrine or idea. It is a practice, begetting justice, peace, joy, kindness, compassion, reconciliation, holiness, humility, wisdom, healing and countless other gifts. As theologian Miroslav Volf has said, “The Trinity is our social program.”[ix]
The Church exists to participate in the life of God, and to enable others to do the same. We exist to make divine communion not just an inner experience but a public truth. We don’t just feel God’s perichoresis. We don’t just feel Love’s eternal dance. We embody it. We live it. We show it. We share it.
Church isn’t something we decide to do—or not do—on a Sunday, when we’re not otherwise occupied. It’s not a consumer item, just one of many options competing for our individual time and attention. Nor is it like a fire hose safely stored in a glass case, for emergency use only. And it is certainly not an antiquarian society preserving quaint rituals, or a museum to display our nostalgia for a lost past.
No! The Church is the society of God’s friends—resurrection people, animated by divine breath—striving to imitate the triune communion of divine life in our human life together. By showing up, by committing to the shared vocation of worshipping, witnessing and serving together, by tending the holy flame of faith in a heedless world, we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, as vessels of that communion—not only in our sacramental life, but wherever we happen to live and move and have our being.
Is that too hard for us? Are we up to it? My friend Bob Franke once wrote a song about the various ways he showed love for his daughter when she was a little girl. He didn’t do it perfectly, of course. No one does. But he gave it everything he had. And a line from that song, I think, speaks to our own calling as a community of faith to imitate the divine communion of the Trinity in our common life, to practice trinitarian love on earth as it is in heaven:
It may not be the thing we do best, but it’s the best thing that we do.[x]
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, now and forever. Amen.
[i] Catherine LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 403.
[ii] Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 444.
[iii] John D. Zizoulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 46.
[iv] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (NY: Crossroad, 1993), 227.
[v] Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the 12thCentury (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994), 330.
[vi] ibid., The Flowering of Mysticism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 212-16.
[vii] q. in Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 352.
[viii]Graham Ward, “The Schizoid Christ,” in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, ed. John Milbank and Simon Oliver (NY: Routledge, 2009), 241.
[ix] Miroslav Volf, “‘The Trinity is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (July 1998).
[x] Adapted from Bob Franke, “Boomerang Pancakes,” on For Real (1986). The original line is in the first person singular.
The Last Judgment (detail), Tympanum of the Abbey of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France (c. 1107).
God isn’t the prime mover of every natural catastrophe and human ill; inexplicable tragedies are never a so-called act of God. Life is more complicated than that; so is the universe; so is God.
— Gary Commins
Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died (John 11:21).
In Son of Man, a 2006 film retelling the Jesus story in a 21st-century African country, Jesus and Satan are sitting side by side atop a tall sand dune. After putting up with the three temptations, an exasperated Jesus turns suddenly toward his adversary and gives him a hard shove. As Satan tumbles down the dune, Jesus shouts after him, “This is my world!” But Satan is unbowed. When he reaches the bottom, he picks himself up, dusts himself off, and cries up to Jesus, “NO! THIS IS MY WORLD.” The film cuts to the country’s ongoing civil war, where a mass shooting of schoolchildren proves Satan’ point.
One night last week, a drunken man was shooting a gun in his front yard—reportedly a form of recreation in his Texas neighborhood. But his next-door neighbor had a baby who was trying to sleep. He asked the shooter to stop. The shooter refused. Instead, he fetched a deadlier weapon—an assault rifle—took it into his neighbor’s house, and slaughtered five people, including a nine-year-old boy. The police found a few survivors—children shielded beneath the bodies of their mothers—uninjured, but covered with maternal blood.
Such unspeakable evil has become a regular occurrence in my country. Mass shootings are setting a record pace this year. Twenty years ago, there were 200 million guns in America. Now there are 400 million. Twenty years ago, assault rifles were 2% of the market. Now they are 25%[i] The man who pulled the trigger in Texas is not alone in his guilt. He is joined by the gunmakers who make themselves rich from the carnage, the right-wing lawmakers who fetishize guns to get votes, the cable propagandists who stoke fear, rage and hate, and a dysfunctional society incapable of exorcising its legion of demons.
The Last Judgment (detail), Tympanum of the Abbey of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France (c. 1107).
I have written about our capacity for denial in “The Murderous Hypocrisy of ‘Thoughts and Prayers.’”If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (I John 1:8). Or as a modern theologian puts it, “It is only when our capacity for evil has been rendered explicit that we have a realistic basis for understanding that transformation or metanoia, that healing, which constitutes our salvation.” [ii]
Zooey Zephyr, a representative in the Montana state legislature, recently provided a perfect image of the cognitive dissonance inherent in pious self-deception. She was speaking against a Republican anti-trans bill which she believes will increase suicide among the young; but her words could apply to every political misuse of “thoughts and prayers”: “If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” [iii]
The Republican majority, like Pilate washing his hands of innocent blood, voted to silence Zephyr. They expelled her from the house. It’s easy to mock their fear of truth-telling, but when we look at our own hands, what do we see?
Evil is woven not only into the fabric of the world, but into each and every soul. In Terrence Malick’s great (anti)war movie, The Thin Red Line, we are shown the violence and death of a terrible battle, but the realistic sounds of gunfire, grenades and human screams are muted beneath the elegiac music of Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” as though we are watching human evil through an impartial God’s tear-stained eyes. Then we hear the voice-over questions of an American soldier, seeking to penetrate the surface of the visible:
“This great evil, where does it come from? How does it still enter the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this, who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might have known? Does our ruin benefit the earth? Is this darkness in you too?” [iv]
Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us? Is this darkness in you, too? The problem of evil is not only an unanswered question; it is unanswerable as well. In his valuable and insightful new book, Evil and the Problem of Jesus, Episcopal priest and theologian Gary Commins invites us to set aside the philosophical conundrums, engaging evil not as a theoretical puzzle but as a practical challenge.
Since ancient times, the existence of evil has raised unsettling questions about the nature of God. If God is good, why is so much evil allowed to happen? Is God indifferent to our suffering, or somehow powerless to eliminate it? Can divine purpose ever justify evil, turning it to the good? Or must we conclude that a good God, or any God at all, is a logical impossibility, given the prevalence and persistence of evil?
Theodicy is the philosophical or theological attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil. It has produced a vast amount of profound intellectual reflection over the centuries. But Commins, drawing on his own pastoral experience, calls the whole enterprise into question. It’s not just that a rational explanation for evil offers little real comfort to its victims (Who wants to hear “It’s God’s will” at a funeral?). It also strips both God and evil of their complexity. The sources of evil are multifarious and impossible to trace with precision. And the activity of God within our temporal, finite existence is not a unilateral and unfettered exercise of power. The self-emptying God chooses to work within incarnational limits. The vulnerable babe in the manger grows up to die on a cross, and in between does what he can to address evil, not always successfully.
“Traditional Western theodicy,” says Commins, “jams billions of people, or the planet, millions of millennia, and the infinite intricacy of subatomic matter into a solitary, simplistic enigma of God-and-evil. By tapering all its energy into one worn-out query, it diverts us away from more illuminating questions. Not only does it boil down a myriad of meanings into one conundrum of divine power or love. It concentrates on what is, in all likelihood, the least fruitful of many mysteries.” [v]
Instead of defending God’s honor or solving the ancient enigma of good and evil, we should accept the sheer givenness of “a wild, wondrous, chaotic creation [we] can’t comprehend or control.” [vi] Instead of wondering why the world is so, we should devote our energies to the divine project of making it better.
“The causes of evil and suffering are personal, social, structural, and cosmic: human delusions, collective misbehaviors, institutional grandiosity, and spiritual malice .… Until the End, suffering and evil will neither cease nor desist—they are inherent in creation and intensified by social ills; we can decrease them by aligning ourselves with God’s will.” [vii]
We may never understand why the world must be an unstable mixture “of storms and stillness, gloom and brightness,” where “suffering, evil, and chaos commingle with glory, love, and joy.”[viii] But it’s the world we’ve got, and what we really need to figure out is how to live in it.
And for that, Commins says, we must turn to Jesus, who shows us “what it means to be human.” If we seek a Christian understanding of God’s response to evil, we should start not with metaphysics, but with the gospel.
“Jesus never waxes philosophical. Rather than offering an ‘explanation’ for evil, he gives his followers ‘a charge and a benediction’: the charge to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, the benediction to empower his followers to resist evil.” [ix]
“Nowhere does Jesus construct a system of ethics or author a theology of evil. In broad terms, what we can do to undo evil is clear—act on his words, treat all as equals, seek the kingdom, go and do likewise, repent, follow, forgive, and love—but unless we face the evils within us, we won’t have a positive influence on the world around us and, even then, nothing is a sure thing.” [x]
At the same time that Jesus is showing us how to be fully human, he is revealing who God is and what God does. Jesus’ own responses to evil are “epiphanies into God’s relationship with evil.… what Jesus does in time, God does in eternity; the ways Jesus responds to evil in his lifetime—confronting, undoing, and erasing it; bending, circling, and transforming it—are ways God always engages evil.” [xi]
No metaphysical speculation needed. Just keep an eye on Jesus, and the Way will show itself. In a beautifully succinct summation of this Way, Commins says that “Jesus embodies compassion, challenges judgments, reverses fates, levels inequalities, frees from demons, forgives sins, tells truths, and plants seeds of shalom.” [xii]
So whose world is it, after all? We wonder every time we watch the news. But ultimately, it’s a question to be answered not within our minds, but in the activity of our lives. As the song says, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”[xiii]
The late German theologian Dorothee Soelle (1929-2003) found this paradigm of Christian discipleship perfectly expressed in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan and his younger brother Alyosha are earnestly discussing theodicy. Both agree that no long-range divine purpose could ever justify the torture of children in the here and now. Where the brothers differ is in their personal response to evil. Ivan blames and rejects a God who consents to the immense sufferings of history. But Alyosha, notes Soelle, does not shake his fist at heaven. He is too busy attending to the needs of earth, just like the God who became one of us.
“[Alyosha] directs his attention not to the power above but to the sufferers. He puts himself beside them. He bears their pain with them. He listens with agony as Ivan introduces examples of suffering he had assembled against the compassion of God … He is silent, he shares the suffering, he embraces the others.” [xiv]
Compassion’s embrace: from Alexander Sokurov’s “Lc. 15:11-32” (Prodigal Son installation,Venice Biennale 2019). Sculptures by Vladimir Brodarsky & Katya Pilnikova.
[i] These statistics were cited in a televised interview with Fred Guttenberg, speaking about the new book he has co-authored with Thomas Gabor: American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence.
[ii] Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), 157.
[iv]The Thin Red Line (1998), adapted by Terrence Malick from James Jones’ 1962 novel.
[v] Gary Commins, Evil and the Problem of Jesus (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2023), 14. Full disclosure: Gary is an old friend. We meet up periodically in Eugene for national track & field championships, but never discuss evil during the meets. His new book not only offers a fresh and timely take on a central theological question, it does so through an illuminating method of reading Scripture and tradition in general.
Mary took a pound of costly perfume made out of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him) said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” — John 12:3-5
Judas raises a troubling question for everyone who is not destitute. As long as there is human need, how dare we spend our money on anything else? And Jesus’ answer—“The poor are always with you”—might seem equally troubling, if taken to accept economic inequality as inevitable. But Jesus was never complacent about the status quo. In both word and deed he lifted up the lowly—the ones either ignored or shamed by their culture—declaring them worthy of blessing and honor. As Jesus himself put it, he came to bring good news to the poor: Injustice has no future. God’s kingdom of loving interdependence is at hand.
Here’s how I read this text: “You can help the destitute any time you want, Judas. If your concern is sincere, they’ll still be around after I’m gone. But I won’t be. So don’t be so quick to judge this woman. If you could only understand what’s going on here, it would save your life.”
So what is going on here? A woman, Mary of Bethany, whose brother Lazarus had recently been rescued from death by Jesus, pours very expensive oil over the feet of her Lord, and then wipes those feet with her hair. It’s an extravagant gesture of devotion, gratitude and love. The oil, worth a year’s wages for a common laborer, may have cost Mary most of her wealth, while letting down her hair to do the work of a towel was, in that culture, a shocking display of abasement and vulnerability. In other words, she was offering all that she had and all that she was to honor Jesus.
This act, both sensory and symbolic, overflowed with meanings. Anointing with oil was a way to mark the special vocation and identity of authoritative figures, whether powerful rulers or holy persons. It consecrates them as chosen and set apart. The title of “Messiah” or “Christ” means “the anointed one.” It was revolutionary to have a woman be the one to anoint Jesus as priest and ruler, but so was the kingdom he came to manifest and embody.
Anointing was also part of the culture’s preparation of a body for burial. Performed in the week before Jesus’ death, Mary’s gesture inaugurates the sequence of sacrificial acts culminating with her Lord’s burial in the stone-cold tomb. The feet she anoints will walk the Way of the Cross for the salvation of the world. This was his chosen destiny.
The story’s third meaning is in its foreshadowing of the foot-washing, when Jesus, on the night before he died, knelt at the feet of his friends to perform the work of a servant, surrendering his power for love’s sake. He was teaching by showing: This is how we must be with one another. This is exactly how God is with us. Just a few days before Jesus taught this explicit lesson at the Last Supper, Mary of Bethany had performed it instinctively, offering all she had, holding nothing back.
At the time, the disciples did not grasp the full significance of Mary’s act. Nor did Mary herself. How could they? As we like to say about Holy Week, the journey is how we know. The disciples had to follow Jesus all the way to the cross—and beyond—before they could begin to understand—through memory and reflection—what it was all about.
One of the strongest triggers for memory is our sense of smell. When John’s gospel tells us that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume,” it sounds like a vivid personal memory. Recalling the fragrance, the disciples could revisit that moment to absorb all the meanings which had escaped them at the time.
As we make our own personal and communal journey through Holy Week, may we too immerse ourselves extravagantly in the sensory images and sounds of the Passion narratives and rituals, allowing them, by our faithful participation, to take us deeper and deeper into the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising in Christ.
As for Judas’ sour complaint, Sydney Carter’s Passion carol, “Said Judas to Mary,” nicely disposes of its false premise of either/or. Devotion to Jesus and loving service to “the least” of God’s family are not opposed. They are inseparable:
Said Jesus to Mary, “Your love is so deep, today you may do as you will. Tomorrow, you say, I am going away, but my body I leave with you still.”
“The poor of the world are my body,” he said, “to the end of the world they shall be. The bread and the blankets you give to the poor you’ll know you have given to me.”
Here is a lovely rendition of Carter’s Holy Week carol sung by Fiona Dunn:
True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.
— Jonathan Edwards
“After Thursday, I was like, okay, I’m going to go sleep. But [God] was like, ‘No, I have more for you.’”
— Lauren, Asbury University student
On February 8 the morning chapel service at Kentucky’s Asbury University concluded, as usual, with a spiritual song. Then most of the students filed out to go to class, but the band kept playing, and a few stayed behind to sing along around the altar. What happened next has startled the world.
“I was like, all right, we’re just going to be around here for one or two more songs, and we’re going to go to class,” said Lena, an Asbury student. “But there was like something in my soul that said no-no-no, we’ve just got to stay here. So I just stayed. A little while later I thought I had only been there like maybe an extra 20 minutes. It had been like 3 hours. It just started turning into something bigger and crazier.”
Word spread through the campus that people were still singing and praying in the chapel. Classrooms and dorms began to empty, and by the end of the day the 1500-seat worship space was packed with students and faculty, singing, praying, and testifying to the power of God in their lives. Two weeks later, it’s still happening, day and night without ceasing.
Live video on social media quickly went viral. People from all over North America began to converge on Asbury to join in. Still others flew in from faraway places like Finland, New Zealand, and Indonesia. University officials estimate that tens of thousands of pilgrims have shared in the experience. The line to get inside can be hours long.
It’s been called the Asbury Revival, but some are wary of this designation. Too many have been wounded or betrayed by manipulative gatherings and domineering evangelists in the name of “revival.” Some prefer to call it an “outpouring” (the university’s preference), a “renewal,” or an “awakening.” One student said she was switching from “revival” to “encounter” because the divine presence, not the internal experience of the worshipper, was the central meaning here.
Whatever is happening, the watchword has been “radical humility.” Student Asher Braughton says, “I truly believe that the revival has been built on humility; that this revival isn’t focused just on one person—not one worship leader, not one pastor, not one speaker, not one student. It’s focused solely and only on Jesus Christ.” Or as one of the event’s speakers put it: “The only celebrity in this house is Jesus.”
During the “Great Awakening” in the eighteenth-century, the emotional excesses of the revivals worried the church establishment. Was it sincere? Was it of God? Historian George M. Marsden summarizes the criticisms in vivid terms: “Using vulgar appeals to sentiment, they would generate mass hysteria that they encouraged people to regard as evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit. Scores or even hundreds of people would shriek, swoon, or fall into fits.”
Although one student leader, mindful of the building’s aging fabric, had to announce that there would be “no jumping allowed in the balconies,” the tone in the room has been generally mellow. A youth minister described it as walking into “a holy hush.” There have been moments of exuberant cheering and clapping, but much of the music and prayer invites a tranquil surrender to the spiritual flow. Watching it online, I thought of Thomas Merton’s gently fervent plea: “Sink from your shallows, soul, into eternity.”
On the first day, Asbury professor Clint Baldwin was having lunch in the cafeteria when someone stopped at his table to say, “You know, the students are still in there, and they’re still worshipping the Lord. You should go over and see what’s happening. It’s a sweet, sweet thing.” Baldwin soon joined the awakening and saw that it was good. “This was just people saying we’re going to stay on and sit in the presence of the Lord and see what the Lord would have for us.”
Lauren, the student quoted in the epigraph, described the worship as all-consuming: “Nothing else matters anymore except being in the presence of Jesus and worshipping him for the rest of my life.” She acknowledged the hyperbole of this—she would of course continue with the life of a student—but her perspective on everything had been transformed. “Ways I have of viewing people negatively—it doesn’t matter anymore. Anxieties and worries that I have, it doesn’t even matter.… Whenever you can just let go and surrender and forgive, then, you’re just set free.”
The majority of worshippers are under 25. Living through a time of immense stress, they hunger for the healing peace of God. In spontaneous prayer groups around the chapel, or in testimonials from the stage, many have openly shared their deepest griefs and heaviest burdens. Their vulnerability has been met with tenderness and love. When a young woman shared her story of attempted suicide before the whole assembly, a multitude of women came forward to lay their hands on her. “An hour later she was dancing and smiling with a joy on her face that I had never seen before,” said one witness.
“God is moving through this generation that has been so affected by mental health,” says Asher. “Once this revival ends, we can carry this message of goodness and forgiveness … The chains of suicide, the chains of depression, the chains of anxiety can be broken in Jesus.” Many of the songs reflect this hope in their melodic repetitions of heartfelt cries:
Jesus, Jesus, you make the darkness tremble— your name is a light the shadows can’t deny … You’re never gonna let, you’re never gonna let me down … He is for you, He is for you, He is for you …
There are of course critics and skeptics. All religious experience is bewildering, even suspect, for those who stand outside it. It is a reality both given and received, not grasped or possessed. Its truth abides in its own domain of experience. You can’t judge it at a distance, as a spectator. You have to go inside it, open your heart to it, be in loving relationship with it. As the mystics testify, certainty is only found within the experience.
Among believers, there is certainly a proper concern about delusion and self-deception. “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). But religious experience can be tested by its fruits. Asbury’s president, Kevin J. Brown, is an encouraging witness to the Outpouring’s authenticity:
“Since the first day, there have been countless expressions and demonstrations of radical humility, compassion, confession, consecration, and surrender unto the Lord. We are witnessing the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
Some may worry that the strongly personal nature of the Asbury Outpouring excludes concerns beyond the self like racism, social justice, global conflict, and the fate of the planet. However, nothing I have seen or read so far suggests that these young people disconnect personal transformation from social change. Surrendering to God is inseparable from a lifetime of service to neighbor and world. One’s own soul is too small a kingdom for the Lord of history. The collective witness and shared compassion of the Outpouring bears witness to that truth.
As for the abundance of deep feeling, vulnerability, open-heartedness, and the ecstatic willingness to be swept away, we need more, not less of that in the Christian life. Those kids are singing and praying and testifying as if their lives depend on it; as if God matters more than anything; as if Jesus will wipe away the tears from every eye; as if a new reality is breaking through the cracks of our broken world.
But can it last? The particular happening in Asbury’s chapel is winding down this week. The university needs to resume its institutional mission, and the town of Wilmore, hospitable as it has been, can’t handle the crowds forever. “It is not ours to hold alone,” Brown says. “We are not the keepers of this movement … Pray that what is happening here will spread.”
Although it seems a bit sad that this foretaste of heaven—singing around the throne for all eternity—must come to an end in the temporal world, the Holy Spirit blows where it will. Outbreaks of public Christian fervor and collective spiritual passion may turn up elsewhere, take new forms, or return to a dormant state until the next eruption. Revelation, not longevity, is the point of epiphanies. They have their moment and vanish, but their impact—and the truth they manifest—endures in hearts and minds and communities.
I have no doubt that many of those who are living through this experience will be forever changed by it, as will the worlds they inhabit and the people they touch. Professor Baldwin, recalling similar revivals at Asbury in the 1950s and 1970s, notes that “people still talk about those [past] moments in revival that shaped the trajectory of how they chose to live for the sake of the Lord onward from that. That’s a hope that we would have for this.”
Even watching online from afar, I have found myself deeply moved by the Spirit-filled assembly. I especially love the heartfelt singing and the manifestation of shared joy. One of my favorite parts was today’s invitation for people to come forward and recite their favorite verses from Scripture. When a small African-American boy read from the prophet Joel (2:28), delivering that luminous text with his boyish voice—innocent as Eden—I was blown away:
Then I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old ones shall dream dreams, and your young ones shall see visions …
Joel’s prophecy has taken flesh at Asbury, day after day since the eighth of February—all those beautiful young faces, shining with God’s future. Like the rest of us, they will lose it and find it again and again. But they have set their feet upon the sacred Way. God bless them.
The words of Clint Baldwin, Asher Braughton, Lauren, Lena and Kyle (the youth minister) are taken from a February 12 conversation with Shane Claiborne on his YouTube channel, Red Letter Christians: “Update from the Asbury University Revival”
The words of Asbury President Kevin J. Brown can be found at the Outpouring link above.
To the Name that brings Salvation Honour, worship, laud we pay.
— John Mason Neale
Aelfric of Eynsham, an Anglo-Saxon monk around the turn of the first millennium, thought January 1 a poor choice for New Year’s Day because it lacked the inherent significance worthy of time’s annual renewal. The birthday of Jesus on December 25, or late March, when the land starts to wake from Winter’s sleep, seemed more propitious, and were each widely observed in the Middle Ages as the year’s true beginning. In the Church calendar, the year began in late autumn, on the First Sunday of Advent. In Britain, the First of January did not become the officially accepted New Year’s Day until 1752.
As Eleanor Parker explains in Winters in the World, her charming study of early English understandings of the seasons, monastic writers like Aelfric “wanted to read and interpret the natural world, to learn to recognize the meaning God had planted in it. They saw time and the seasons, from the very first day of the world, as carefully arranged by God with method and purpose—so they believed it should be possible to organize the calendar not according to the randomness of custom and inherited tradition, but in a way that reflected that divine plan.” [i]
But January 1 did mark a singular event in the life of Jesus. As the octave, or eighth day of Christmas, it was the date of the Christ Child’s circumcision, based on Luke’s description of the timing (“When the eighth day came …”— Luke 2:21). The Feast of the Circumcision was celebrated in Spain and Gaul as early as the 6thcentury, but Rome, reluctant to associate with the chaotic excess of popular New Year celebrations, waited until the 11th century to adopt the feast. While modernity has found the circumcision of Jesus a peculiar choice for liturgical celebration (it was finally suppressed in the Roman Catholic calendar revisions of 1969), the Middle Ages saw significance in the first shedding of the Savior’s sacred blood. It not only proved his fully vulnerable humanity; it also foreshadowed the sacrificial offering of Calvary.
St. Paul’s spiritualization of the physical ritual, making it an interior, metaphorical image of severing ourselves from the old body of death (“circumcision of the heart”—Romans 2:29), helped perpetuate the liturgical observance beyond the Middle Ages, but our own era has found more profitable meaning in the other thing that happened on the octave of the Nativity: Jesus got his name.
When the eighth day had come and the child was to be circumcised, they gave him the name Jesus, the name the angel had given him before his conception (Luke 2:21).
The Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus is celebrated on various dates in early January, but the Episcopal calendar, following Luke’s account, puts it properly on New Year’s Day. And while many of us usually spend January 1 watching the Rose Parade and bowl games instead of keeping the sacred feast, whenever the year begins on a Sunday, the secular traditions are transferred to January 2, leaving Episcopalians free to gather on January 1 to observe Holy Name.
Although the Hebrew name “Yeshua” (“Iesus” in the 4th-century Latin Bible, becoming “Jesus” in the 17th-century Geneva Bible) was fairly common in 1st-century Palestine, it was given special weight by divine authority (both Mary and Joseph were told by God’s messenger, “You must name him Jesus.”) And its literal meaning, “Yahweh is salvation,” became fully embodied and expressed in the life, death and resurrection of the son of Mary. Jesus is the one who saves.
St. Paul defined Christians as “those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Cor. 1:2). The whole New Testament attributed great power to the name of Jesus. The first Christians prayed in his name (John 14:14), baptized in his name (Romans 6:3), and healed in his name (Acts 3:6). The Prologue to the Fourth Gospel declares that “to all that received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12). And in Paul’s famous tribute in Philippians, no other name can compare:
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2: 9-11),
Medieval theologians sang exuberant praises of the Holy Name. St. Bernard wrote: “The name Jesus is food. Are you not strengthened every time you recall it? What else builds up the spirit of the one pondering it as this name does? What so refreshed the tired heart, strengthens the virtues, fosters chaste loves?” Richard of St. Victor said that “Jesus is a sweet name, a name of delight, a name that comforts the sinner, a name of blessed hope. Therefore Jesus, be to me Jesus!” And Peter of Ravenna equated the name with the effects of salvation: “You shall call his name Jesus—the name that gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, walking to the lame, speech to the mute, life to the dead; and the power of this name drove all the might of the devil from the bodies of the possessed.” [ii]
Eastern Christianity developed a repetitive recitation of the Holy Name into the transformative practice of centering prayer.[iii] And countless hymn writers have hailed “the power of Jesus’ name.”
John Newton (1725-1807), author of “Amazing Grace,” celebrated the Holy Name’s healing power:
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds In a believer’s ear! It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, And drives away his fear.[iv]
Even at our end, he believed, “the music of thy name” will “refresh my soul in death.” An expanded list of the Name’s effects was given by John Mason Neale (1818-1866):
Name of gladness, Name of pleasure, By the tongue ineffable, Name of sweetness passing measure, To the ear delectable.
‘Tis our safeguard and our treasure, ‘Tis our help ‘gainst sin and hell. ‘Tis the Name for adoration, ‘Tis the Name of victory;
‘Tis the Name for meditation In the vale of misery: ‘Tis the Name for veneration By the Citizens on high.
‘Tis the Name that whoso preaches Finds its music in his ear: ‘Tis the Name that whoso teaches Finds more sweet than honey’s cheer …[v]
Such praises of the Holy Name do not mistake its invocation as a magic charm detached from any concrete meaning. When we say “Jesus” with prayerful, sacred attention, we call up a vast array of transformative forces, from the salvific events of the gospels to the abiding energies of divine presence. As a young Palestinian woman put it to me once, in her imperfect but brilliantly accurate English:
“Jesus is a big word. You can never come to the end of it.”
Episcopal theologian William Porcher Dubose (1836-1918) made the same point this way:
“Jesus Christ is to me, not a name, or a memory or tradition, nor an idea or sentiment, nor a personification, but a living and personal reality, presence, and power. He is God for me, to me, in me, and myself in God … And ‘in His name’ means ‘in Him,’ and ‘in Him’ means ‘in his death and resurrection.’” [vi]
The attempt to grasp the reality represented by the Holy Name is vividly imagined by Charles Wesley (1707-1788) in the figure of Jacob wrestling with the Divine stranger whose name he struggles to know:
Come, O thou Traveller unknown, Whom still I hold, but cannot see! …
I need not tell thee who I am, My misery or sin declare; Thyself hast called me by my name, Look on thy hands, and read it there.
But who, I ask thee, who art thou? Tell me thy name, and tell me now.…
Art thou the Man that died for me? The secret of thy love unfold: Wrestling, I will not let thee go Till I thy name, thy nature know.…
The wrestling with the nameless Transcendent continues, and even though its ungraspable essence departs with the dawn, there is a personal, relatable presence that remains, and can be named.
I know thee, Savior, who thou art— Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend. Nor wilt thou with the night depart, But stay, and love me to the end …
And in this abiding, enfolding presence, the poet discovers yet another name behind (within?) the name of Jesus. It is the Holy Name above all others:
[i] Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 76.
[ii] The quotations are cited in the 13th-century collection by Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, Volume 1, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 73.
[iii] The “Jesus Prayer” (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me) is often synchronized in its repetitions with a pattern of slow, deep breathing.
[vi] Wiliam Porcher Dubose, The Reason of Life (London 1911), cited in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, eds. Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, & Rowan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 493.
[vii] Charles Wesley, “Wrestling Jacob.” The original biblical story is in Genesis 32:24-33.
Our Lady of the Angels (Robert Graham, Los Angeles cathedral, 2002)
Gaudete! Gaudete! Christus est natus Ex Maria Virgine. Gaudete!
Rejoice! Rejoice! Christ is born of the Virgin Mary. Rejoice!
So goes the joyful refrain of a late medieval carol, and even though the celebration of the Divine Birth is still two weeks away, the note of rejoicing (Gaudete! Gaudete!) is already beginning to dispute the wintry gloom in our Scripture readings, our hymns, and our expectant hearts.
For many centuries, the Third Sunday of Advent has been called Gaudete Sunday—Rejoice Sunday. In the Advent wreath, the somber blue is replaced by a brighter, warmer shade of rose. Churches lucky enough to have rose vestments will be using them today. And in the Common Lectionary cycle of readings, the word “rejoice” turns up in each of the three years.
In Year C, the prophet Zephaniah exhorts his disheartened people, “Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem” (Zephaniah 3:14). And St. Paul, overflowing with the Spirit, urges the first Christians to make joy a constant spiritual practice: “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he said. “Again I will say, Rejoice (Philippians 4:4)
In Year B, Isaiah tells us, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my whole being shall exult in my God; for God has clothed me with the garments of salvation” (Isaiah 61:10), while Mary’s heart pours out the Magnificat’s ode to joy: “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior (Luke 1:47).
And now, in Year A, Isaiah promises that even the most barren and forsaken places will become a paradise in God’s future: “The desert shall rejoice and blossom,” he assures us. “God’s ransomed exiles shall return …Gladness and joy shall come upon them, while sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).
Such hopeful refrains lift up our hearts and light a bright candle in the dark. But we also heed the voice of St. James, who curbs our enthusiasm with his “Not so fast! The Kingdom doesn’t come all at once. We’ve got to be patient” (James 5:7).
And we know he’s right. We still abide in a severely damaged history which seems to repeat itself rather than make real progress toward the horizon of God’s future. We have been shocked in recent years to see such seemingly outdated sins as overt racism and anti-Semitism come roaring back, like the alarming return of “conquered” diseases like polio and measles.
The French thinker Jean Baudrillard wrote about the myth of human progress just before the Millennium, critiquing the optimistic talk of a New World Order by reminding us that humanity continues to have a serious waste disposal problem (theologians would call this Original Sin, the persistent flaw that burdens and bedevils every human endeavor).
As Baudrillard put it, “The problem becomes one of waste. It is not just material substances, including nuclear ones, which pose a waste problem but also the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas which continue to pollute our mental space. Historical and intellectual refuse pose an even more serious problem than industrial waste. Who will rid us of the sediment of centuries of stupidity?” [i]
I ask that question every day when I see the news! But the genius of Advent is its ability to perform the difficult dance of honesty and hope. It doesn’t deny the darkness, but it also refuses to accept the black hole of unredeemed history as an inescapable fate. “Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness,” we pray, “and put on the armor of light”—not just in some distant utopian future, but “now, in the time of this mortal life.”
Now, now, now. But also not yet. Gaudete, but also Kyrie eleison. Rowan Williams, borrowing an image from Diadochus, a fifth-century bishop, describes Advent spirituality as the practice of “looking east in winter.”
“Looking east in winter we feel the warmth of the sun on our faces, while still sensing an icy chill at our backs. Our divided and distorted awareness of the world is not healed instantly. But we are not looking at the phenomenon from a distance: we do truly sense the sun on our faces; and we have good reason to think that the climate and landscape of our humanity can indeed be warmed and transfigured.” [ii]
The next time there is a sunny morning, go stand somewhere on our island’s eastern shore. Feel the chill at your back, and the warming sunlight on your face. Do it without words. Let those contrary sensations of cold and warmth be your Advent prayer.
Not every morning brings a bright sun, of course. Sometimes the warmth of hope is a matter of faith, not immediate experience. Yet even when we can’t feel it, God is redeeming the time and preparing the dawn. And when we pray, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us,” the Holy One is listening.
“Stir up your power” is such a striking prayer, a bold cry of the heart to the One who saves. [iii] And because it is always the Collect-prayer for this day, Gaudete Sunday is also known as “Stir up” Sunday. But what do we mean when we call upon divine power? What does the power of God look like in the world we inhabit?
Well, it looks a lot like what happened when Jesus arrived: “The blind see, the lame dance, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor receive good news” (Matthew 11:5). It’s not a violent head-on clash with the powers of this world—meeting them on their own bloody terms—but the liberation of the faithful into a new form of being, enabling the friends of God to “plant the seeds of resurrection amid the blind sufferings of history.” [iv]
In Roberto Rossellini’s film, Europe ‘51 (1952), Ingrid Bergman plays a wealthy woman who gives up all her privilege to serve the poor and vulnerable. Rossellini, who had made a joyful film about St. Francis two years earlier, wanted to explore what would happen if someone behaved like St. Francis in the contemporary world. As it turns out in Europe ‘51, Irene (Bergman’s character) is judged to be insane by her husband, her social class, her doctors, and her Church, and the film ends with her locked away in an asylum. The powers-that-be have decided that there is no place in the world for the impracticality of unconditional love.
But even as Irene suffers this sad fate, we see her continue to be who she is, embodying God’s compassion for her fellow inmates. Like the incarnate God enclosed within the finite space of the Virgin’s womb, she can still practice heaven within the confines of the asylum. As she comforts a despairing woman who has tried to commit suicide, we see Irene, in a close-up reminiscent of an icon, speaking the words of Christ: “You are not alone. Don’t worry. I am with you. I will not leave you.” She becomes, in that moment, what we are all invited to become: an image of Christ for others.
“I am with you,” Irene (Ingrid Bergman) tells a distressed woman in Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51.
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. But God’s idea of “great might” is not the way the world understands it. No lightning bolts. No legions of angels. Just a babe in a manger, a tortured man on a cross, a disciple locked in an asylum. As W. H. Auden said in the Advent portion of his Christmas Oratorio: “The Real is what will strike you as really absurd.” Or as an old carol puts it, “Weakness shall the strong confound.” [v]
In another of his poems, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Auden suggests that poetry operates much like divine power. Poetry “makes nothing happen,” he says. In other words, poetry doesn’t force its will upon the world, but in offering an alternate perspective for engaging reality, it makes the world different nonetheless. Auden describes poetry as if it were a stream, making its own way through the landscape.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
In his analysis of this poem, John Burnside notes that poetry’s work is “to survive—not in some dogged but enfeebled fashion, hanging on, though barely noticed, in an indifferent world, but actively, on its own terms—that is, ‘in the valley of its own making.’” The ‘executives’—the powers-that-be—take no notice. It means nothing to them. But “poetry flows on, through and away from ‘the busy griefs’ and the ‘raw towns that we believe in and die in,’ its business is more fundamental, its true nature more elemental” than the ‘executives’ can imagine.[vi]
And just so does the power of God flow through the world. Not to force anything to happen in a blunt cause-and-effect way, but to exist, like the waters of baptism, as an inviting and life-giving reality: “It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”
We find this same image of the flowing, living water in today’s passage from Isaiah: “For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sands shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water” (Isaiah 35:6-7).
The concluding words of Auden’s stanza, “a mouth,” may strike our ears jarringly after the metaphor of a quietly flowing stream, but both poetry and God are given to speech: In the beginning was the Word.
And in the same way that the “Stir up” prayer beseeches the God who saves, Auden’s poem, written on the eve of World War II, calls upon the poet to speak a word against all the dark sorrows of the world:
In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate …
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice … [vii]
There’s that word again: rejoice. We have prayed for a word of power today, and what we are given is: Gaudete! Rejoice! God’s power will never compel us to rejoice, or to hope, or to love. But it will always seek to persuade us, until the end of time.
Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span sing my favorite version of Gaudete.
[i] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 26
[ii] Rowan Williams, Looking East in Winter:Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), 8.
[iii] The Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent in the Book of Common Prayer: “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.”
[iv] I can’t locate the source of this quote from an old homily, but it may be from either Paul Evdokimov or Olivier Clément.
[v] Auden’s line is from “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (Collected Poems, Random House, 1976, p. 274). The carol line is from Gabriel’s Message (trans. J. M. Neale). Like Gaudete, it is in the famous Piae Cantiones collection of 1582.
[vi] John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 23.
[vii] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Collected Poems, 197-198).
The Enthronement of Christ (Bamberg Apocalypse, early 11th century).
The extremists in American politics say that God is on their side, but such statements are lacking in content. Their “God” is not really expected to supply any concrete assistance, such as plagues or angelic legions, to carry them to victory. “God-on-our-side” language is just a dramatic way to say that “we are right and you are evil.”
However, a new video ad is selling the startling idea that God has indeed, in these latter days, directly intervened in history by anointing a human messiah to enforce divine will through political power. Over God’s-eye aerial views of land and sea, we hear a caricature of Charlton Heston recite a text with biblical cadences and a lot of reverb:
“And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.… God said, ‘I need someone to be strong, advocate truth in the midst of hysteria, someone who challenges conventional wisdom, and isn’t afraid to defend what he knows to be right and just.… someone who will take the arrows, stand firm in the face of unrelenting attacks.’”
As we hear these words, photographic images of the Chosen One fill the screen. The new messiah is revealed to be—wait for it—Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida! I knew he had presidential ambitions, but now he’s in the running for the Antichrist! Are there really enough rubes out there to fall for the old false messiah gag? [i]
About 60 years ago a southern preacher named Clarence Jordan liked to ask his fellow Christians: “What’s the biggest lie told in America today?” He’d let that sink in for a bit, and then he’d say, “The biggest lie told in America today is: ‘Jesus is Lord.’”
In other words, if you say “Jesus is Lord” and foster racism, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and support white supremacy, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and foment bigotry and hate, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and afflict the vulnerable, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and do harm to your fellow beings, you’re a liar.
Someone recently posted a short video on the internet depicting Jesus as the incarnation of our worst politics. It shows Jesus teaching his disciples in a variety of settings:
“I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. And behold: Now I’m all lazy and entitled. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“What is a man profited, if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul? A lot! He has profited a lot. One soul for the whole world, that is an amazing deal!” [ii]
Sad to say, some people would prefer the anti-Jesus who does nothing but reflect their own pitiful values. In any case, as the song says, “You gonna have to serve somebody: Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gonna have to serve somebody.” [iii]
So who’s it going to be? Whom do we serve? Who—or what—rules our life? To whom do we belong? To what do we surrender?
In a culture of hyper-individualism, the idea of submission to a larger reality, a greater good, goes against the grain. But we are all governed by something, maybe even a whole crazy stampeding herd of somethings, pulling us here, driving us there. Whether we are conscious of it or not, there are voices, inside us and outside us, which direct and rule our hearts in every moment.
A hundred years ago, Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth suggested that “The first duty of every soul is not to find its freedom, but its Master.” And then he added: “If within us we find nothing over us, we succumb to what is around us.” [iv] When that is the case, there is no shortage of impulses, passions, ambitions, ideologies, agendas and distractions to swallow us up and sweep us away.
On the last Sunday of the Christian year, the Feast of Christ the King, we pledge allegiance to the Divine Love that governs the universe. As Frederick Denison Maurice, nineteenth-century Anglican priest and social reformer, reminds us, the reign of Christ extends into every province of our common life:
When we say, ‘Thy kingdom come,’ we desire that the King of kings and Lord of lords will reign over our spirits and souls and bodies, which [belong to God]… We pray for the extinction of all tyranny…; [we pray] for the exposure and destruction of corruptions inward and outward; [we pray] for truth in all departments of government, art, science; [we pray] for the true dignity of professions [and labor]; [we pray] for right dealings in the commonest transactions of trade; [we pray] for blessings that shall be felt in every [dwelling].[v]
“Crown him Lord of all,” we sing at the Feast of Christ the King. But the gospel for the day does not show us a mighty ruler, but only a naked man nailed to a tree. Soldiers mock the pathetic absurdity of his “kingship.” The sign above his head—“King of the Jews”—is a mocking irony. His only apparent subject is the dying thief hanging next to him. “Jesus,” he gasps, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” [vi]
Some kingdom! Some king!
Does Christ’s kingdom exist only in the future? Or is it somehow breaking into the here and now, even in the killing fields of history, where you need the faith of a dying thief to see it?
The question we began with—whose world is it?—is, alas, undecidable within the flux of history. You can’t choose on the basis of the evidence, because for the time being the evidence is mixed, like the wheat and the tares.
But you can decide who’s got the better story—Jesus or Satan. And you can choose which story you want to belong to: The story which overflows with life, or the one that ends in death.
Skylight (1732) for the high altar of the cathedral in Toledo, Spain .
Only a tramp was Lazarus’ sad fate He who lay down by the rich man’s gate To beg for some crumbs from the rich man to eat But he left him to die like a tramp on the street
— Grady and Hazel Cole, 1939
Jesus was a great storyteller. He knew how to use a good story not just to make a point, but to change lives. But today’s story isn’t quite like any other parable. It’s the only one where a character is given a name. The poor man is called Lazarus, a variant of Eleazar, which means “God helps.” The rich man is unidentified in Scripture, but tradition has given him the name Dives. That’s Latin for “rich guy,” so readers of the Latin Bible began to treat it as his proper name.
This is also the only gospel parable about the afterlife.[i] Most scholars suspect it to be a version of a popular Egyptian folk tale widely told the in the first century. The fact that it makes it into Luke’s gospel suggests that Jesus liked the story well enough to use it in his own preaching.
It’s easy to see why people loved the story in a time when economic inequality was as appalling as it is in America today, where the 3 richest billionaires have more money between them than the bottom 50%. In first-century Palestine, the rich had scooped up most of the land and money, leaving tenant farmers with pretty much nothing of their own, while those who hired out as laborers got only starvation wages. So the idea of a great reversal of fortune was an appealing and consoling image.
The reversal theme certainly resonated with St. Luke, whose gospel, more than any other, expresses a “preferential option for the poor.” [ii] We hear this in Mary’s Magnificat: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” And we hear it in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”
A twelfth-century Italian bishop, Bruno di Segni, said of this parable, “These words are most necessary both for the rich and for the poor, because they bring fear to the former and consolation to the latter.” [iii] In Herman Melville’s 19th-century novel Redburn, his protagonist invokes the parable when he cries, “Tell me, oh Bible, that story of Lazarus again, that I may find comfort in my heart for the poor and forlorn.” [iv]
We all love reversal stories, where the bad get their comeuppance and the lowly are given a happy ending. I have to confess that I myself would take pleasure in a story where, say, the governor of Florida is tricked into boarding an airplane, only to find himself dropped in the middle of a burning desert, with nothing but the desperate hope that a passing migrant might appear with a canteen of water. “Oh Señor, have mercy on me! I beg you, give me a drop of your water to cool my tongue!”
So is Jesus telling a reversal story in the parable of Dives and Lazarus? Or is he doing something else? The Bible certainly can be critical of wealth’s dark side. We’ve heard plenty of that in today’s readings:
Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and for those who are complacent on the mount of Samaria… Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory, and sprawl on their couches, stuffing themselves with lamb and veal, singing idle songs and drinking wine by the bowlful, who anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. (Amos 6: 1, 4-6)
And St. Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, warns that “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” (I Timothy 6:9-10)
But while the parable presents a strong contrast between situations of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, between high social status and low social status, between easy pleasure and terrible suffering, the point is not about changing places, or even about trying to reduce the contrast to some extent—a little less for the rich, a little more for the poor. This parable isn’t about making the game fairer, but about changing the game entirely.
Right now, in our time, our country, the game is so much about individual winning. The lucky ones win the lottery, invent the Internet, crush the competition, or throw more touchdowns than interceptions. The rest must fend for themselves. Dog eat dog. There have been notable attempts to counter the personal, social, and environmental damage of our careless individualism, but in the absence of a more widely supported vision of the common good, it continues to be an uphill battle. Can we order our lives and our society to be more in accord with divine intention? We’d better. As W. H. Auden put it on the eve of World War II, “We must love one another or die.” [v]
We all enjoy the hymn, “All things bright and beautiful,” celebrating the wonderful world God has made: “Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings,” and so on. But one verse—thankfully scrubbed from our hymnal—celebrates an archaic social order as divinely ordained:
The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, He made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.
In the kingdom of God, the economy of God, such sundering of neighbor from neighbor is definitely not bright and beautiful. We all belong to one another; we are all intended to share God’s gifts in just measure. To forget this is to choose death and hell.
Kathleen Hill, an American writer, lived in Nigeria when the traditional cooperative social ethic was being eroded by the lingering effects of colonial rule. She tells of a driver who sped by a hit-and-run victim lying on the side of the road. He didn’t stop because he was afraid that if he put the wounded man into his car, he’d get bloodstains on his new seat covers. “He’d felt no need to apologize,” Hill said, “no need to feel ashamed. It was a culture of money that was growing in Nigeria, a new emphasis on personal wealth.… [N]ow, without the play of traditional values that had connected one person to another, there seemed no limits to self-interest, to the tendency to regard someone else exclusively in the light of one’s own personal imperatives.” [vi]
Where there are no limits to self-interest, no one is my neighbor. Dives feasts inside his mansion, while Lazarus starves on the street. And never the twain shall meet. I think that Jesus would say that Dives was in hell from the start. He didn’t have to die to get there.
But is this state of separation and disconnection the way things must always remain, now and forever, Amen? Is there any chance for the twain to meet? I think the key to this parable is the gate. The rich man is on one side; Lazarus is on the other. In the story, the gate never opens. In fact, its role as a barrier eventually translates into an uncrossable chasm in eternity.
Narciso Tome’s dramatic skylight seems to visualize a glimpse of heaven from a dark abyss, like Dives’ view of Abraham and Lazarus across the great chasm.
In the parable, Dives in hell is able to see, across that chasm, Lazarus at ease in the bosom of Abraham. But the gap between them is uncrossable. If only he had opened his gate and experienced Lazarus as a fellow child of God—not just a tramp on the street—there would be no uncrossable chasm between them now. He wouldn’t be stuck in the lonely hell of self-interest and self-isolation. It turns out that the closed gate keeping Lazarus out has also been keeping the rich man in. Even after death he remains in the prison he built for himself, behind the locked gate preventing the communion for which every person is made.
New Testament scholar Bernard Brandon Scott says this about the gate: “In this parable the rich man fails by not making contact.… The gate is not just an entrance to the house but the passageway to the other.… In any given interpersonal or social relationship there is a gate that discloses the ultimate depths of human existence. Those who miss that gate may, like the rich man, find themselves crying in vain for a drop of cooling water.” [vii]
“I came that you might have life,” Jesus said, “and that you may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). So is there abundant life in the rich man’s future? Can the chasm ever be bridged by repentance and mercy? Ebenezer Scrooge, after being shown what a mess he was making of his own future, put this question to the final spirit in A Christmas Carol,:
“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.” [viii]
Can there be a different outcome to the story of Dives and Lazarus? A couple of poets have explored interesting options. James Kier Baxter (1926-1972) of New Zealand concentrates on Dives, who is far worse off than Lazarus even before he departs this life:
Two men lived on the same street But they were poles apart For Lazarus had crippled bones But Dives a crippled heart
In an intriguing twist, Baxter leaves Lazarus on earth and puts Dives in the Divine Presence. ‘My poor blind crippled son, [God] said, / ‘Sit here beneath My Throne.” And instead of eternity in Hades, Dives is given a chance to change his life:
‘Go back and learn from Lazarus To walk on My highway Until your crippled soul shall stand And bear the light of day, And you and Lazarus are one In holy poverty.’ [ix]
Canadian William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918) focused his poem on Lazarus, giving him a voice he never had in the original parable. While enjoying the bliss of the afterlife, Lazarus is suddenly troubled by a “piercing cry of one in agony, / That reaches me here in heaven.” It’s the rich man’s anguished plea from hell, drowning out the more amiable sounds of heaven.
So calleth it ever upward unto me It creepeth in through heaven’s golden doors; It echoes all along the sapphire floors; Like smoke of sacrifice, it soars and soars; It fills the vastness of eternity.…
No more I hear the beat of heavenly wings, The seraph chanting in my rest-tuned ear; I only know a cry, a prayer, a tear, That rises from the depths up to me here; A soul that to me suppliant leans and clings.
O, Father Abram, thou must bid me go Into the spaces of the deep abyss; Where far from us and our God-given bliss, Do dwell those souls that have done Christ amiss; For through my rest I hear that upward woe.
Lazarus can’t ignore the sinner’s plea, nor does he want to. In a replication of both the Incarnation and the Harrowing of Hell, he begs “Father Abram” to let him descend to the uttermost depths on a mission of redemptive love. The journey is immense, and when the poem ends Lazarus is still on the downward way, with cries of pain ahead, shouts of glory behind. As he traverses the infinite gap between heaven and hell, we suspect this outward motion of self-diffusive love will go on and on, until that day when the tears are wiped from every eye and “God is all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28).
Hellward he moved like radiant star shot out From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even… Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout…
‘Tis ages now long-gone since he went out, Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls, But hellward still he ever floats and falls, And ever nearer come those anguished calls; And far behind he hears a glorious shout. [x]
It’s a striking image: Love perpetually reaching for the hopeless and the lost, opening every gate, overcoming every obstacle that separates us from God. However, in the original parable, the rich man’s repentance is not off to a promising start. In his cry from hell, Dives doesn’t deign to speak to Lazarus at all. Instead, he asks Abraham, a personage he considers of equal status, to treat Lazarus like a common servant. “Have him dip a finger into cool water and come to me, so he can drip it onto my tongue.” Even in his agony, the rich man’s arrogant self-interest is unabated.
In Luke’s gospel, this parable always ends the same way, no matter how many times we read it. Dives will stay stuck in the prison of his own making for as long as the story is told. If we want a new ending, we must write it with our own lives and times, as we push through the gate into a deeper union, a more loving communion with our fellow creatures. This is not only radically personal work, it is also the collective endeavor of Church and society. In a time when the common good and neighborly love are in acute peril, love and mercy ceaselessly call us to choose the better way.
This homily was written for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
[i] Matthew 25: 31-46 (The sheep and the goats) is also about the afterlife, but many scholars say it does not fit the definition of a parable.
[ii] The term was popularized by Liberation theologians and activists in Latin America in the 1960s as a key element of Catholic social teaching.
[iii] Cited in Stephen L. Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 255.
[vi] Kathleen Hill, She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons (Encino, CA: Delphinium Books, 2017), 57.
[vii] Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 159.
[viii] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave IV.
[ix] James Kier Baxter, “Ballad of Dives and Lazarus,” in Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry, eds. Robert Atwan, George Dardess, & Peggy Rosenthal (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 260-261.
The religious imagineer 