Okay, folks, it's Holy Week and I have some opinions.
First of all, for those of you just tuning in, a brief run-down of the different days of this week, what's generally happening.
PALM SUNDAY - Last Sunday, March 24th. Jesus comes to Jerusalem, encounters crowds of adoring fans waving palm branches and taking off their clothes. They greet him as a king, as the person who is going to save their people. (yes, he is… but not like they expected…)
MAUNDY THURSDAY - So… what the heck is a "Maundy" and is it related to a "Shrove"?! Maundy comes from the Latin "mandatum", meaning "commandment". This is the day of the Last Supper, where some important things happen. 1. Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, as a gesture of humility and love, and explains it by saying, "I give you a new commandment--you shall love one another as I have loved you." 2. Jesus establishes what is now known as communion, or the Eucharist, the eating of bread and drinking of wine in remembrance of him. 3. Judas betrays Jesus, setting the whole thing in motion for the ending of the story. Peter denies knowing Jesus. So the night starts off great and then takes a particularly intense downward spiral for Jesus, who is betrayed and abandoned by his friends, with the crowd that cheered is entrance into Jerusalem on Sunday now screaming for his crucifixion. Ouch.
GOOD FRIDAY - The day of Jesus' crucifixion and death. He's shuffled back and forth between judges for a while, due to where he's from and what religion he is and whose jurisdiction does he really fall under anyways, but is eventually flogged, forced to carry his own cross up to the hill, is nailed to it, and suffers a pretty awful death. With people mocking him. Right after his friends abandoned and betrayed him last night. Yep.
We've reached the time in the church year that really is the basis of the whole religion. Despite the popularity of Christmas, Christianity is NOT about Christ's birth. It's about Christ's death. And for those of us who have a large part of ourselves steeped in the church, it's these major events that are the spark for most Christian theology.
Now, I must confess I am a theology nerd. I was really excited whenever I got to sit in on a Systematic Theology class when I visited seminaries. So the criticisms I'm about to level on more traditional theology are meant with love, and what I love about theology is pretty much the same thing I hate about it.
Here's my beef with a lot of the traditional theology I've encountered: it seems to be about solving problems, fitting things into systems, figuring out how to justify the claims of religion within the reality of the world. A classic example is the problem of sin existing in the world after Christ's death and resurrection. If Christ's sacrifice paid the price for all sins up to that point--what do we do with the fact that we keep sinning? Does Christ have to keep dying? Was that one death enough? How do we absolve ourselves from our sin in the post-resurrection world? In the heyday of the Medieval church, they had one answer--through the sacrament of communion, where Christ appears in the bread and wine, literally, through transubstantiation (the bread and wine actually BECOMING the body and blood of Christ) his sacrifice is made again and we are once again absolved from sin. Of course, this raised a whole different set of theological questions, like how do you deal with the actual body and blood of Christ, and how terrible are we as we perform the mass if we are constantly re-killing Christ?
A very largely accepted theological point that I cannot stand is known as "substitutionary atonement". It arises from the idea of a God who demands sacrifices, and the gist of it is that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and has paid the price for our sins. It makes perfect sense that this language is all over the Bible--the time was a time of burnt offerings, of appeasing angry gods, and even in the monotheistic culture of the Old Testament, God demands and accepts sacrifices--and even rejects the ones that are not pleasing. So it makes sense to have that language helping to fix that particular theological point, and yet something about it, now, seems cheap to me. I don't like the primary story in my religion to be one of a transaction for my soul--it seems too simplistic. Having grown up in the church my entire life, I know the "right" answers. When asked how I am saved, I can respond that it is through no action of my own but only through the grace of God through His Son Jesus Christ, who I profess as my personal Lord and Savior. I can talk about faith and works, I can quote the right passages, but frankly, I don't believe that salvation is about finding the right answers and believing the right things. I don't think there ARE any right answers, or that there is one belief set that will get you to heaven, and honestly? I'm not sure "salvation", by which people tend to mean "getting to heaven" is a good end goal.
So let's cut out the theological stuff for a moment, and I just want to think about this story--not even including the resurrection, yet. Let's leave out the miracles too, right now, let's just focus on things that humans are generally physically capable of. This is the story of a man who cared deeply about those who were left out or thought to be unclean and therefore unloveable. It's the story of a guy who shocked people by acting so outside of the social standards, which he did really to show outcasts that they have value--and show those who look down on them that there's something more there. It's the story of someone who lived a life that focused on helping others, who modeled a way of life that even today we still find weird and slightly repulsive. If you don't believe me, will you try this with me--will you think of the kind of person you find the most off-putting? For some people, it might be those who are outwardly gay, for others it might be militant atheists, but thinking about the general readership of this blog, I think it's more likely that, for you, it might be those who are outwardly outspoken AGAINST the GLBT community. It might be the Westboro Baptist Church. Will you think of that kind of person, and can you imagine having a conversation with them--not an argument, not a debate, but a conversation where you listen to them and try to understand why they think the way they do, without judging them? Can you imagine working with them? Collaborating with them? Or, on a different kind of example, imagine the people you avoid on the street, or the subway--someone of a different ethnic group who seems suspicious, or the homeless man smelling up the subway who probably also has issues with mental illness. Would you invite them to dinner? Let them into your home?
It is THAT kind of extravagant care that this man lived with. He led this crazy lifestyle, and believed in it so much that he died for it. Moreover, he died in order to show just how much he cared for everyone.
I don't believe that you have to believe in the Christian God in order to be a good person or go to "heaven". I don't believe in heaven as a physical place. I don't even really know what that means. I don't think you have to be "saved".
But will I call that man my savior? Absolutely. Because I am continually inspired by his example to work towards living a life that value others, in finding ways to connect with those on the outside, and work to live that commandment to love others as this man did, and if that's not saving me from the self-absorbed, greedy life that I naturally gravitate towards (proven by the fact that even with this great example I too often slip back to that!)… then I don't know what is.
