Image credit:White Crucifixion (detail), Marc Chagall, 1938, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
"The Cross"
"Sacred Images"
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
In Jesus we have a confluence of three sacred healing images from the Hebrew Scriptures: the Passover lamb, which is the presentation of the innocent victim (Exodus 12); the “Lifted-Up One,” which is the homeopathic curing of the victim (Numbers 21:6-9); and, finally, the scapegoat ritual, wherein the rejected victim, bearing the community’s sins, is beat into the desert, to die (Leviticus 16).
The victim state has been the plight of most people who have ever lived on this earth, so in all three cases we see Jesus identifying with humanity at its most critical and most vulnerable level. We see God in radical solidarity with all the pain of the world “since the blood of Abel” much more than an omnipotent deity who, with a flick of the hand, overcomes all pain. Let’s unpack these rich images of compassion and transformation. Today we’ll focus on the Passover lamb, then we’ll look at the “Lifted-up One,” and next week we’ll delve into the pattern of scapegoating.
Every year, on the tenth day of Nisan, each family was to pick out a perfect little lamb without any spot or blemish and take it to their home and then, on the fourteenth day, kill it (Exodus 12:1-14). In the Passover commemoration, we have an image of the death of something good and innocent. All suffering is unjust, undeserved, tragic, and nonsensical. We will never find any logic to it, but we try to fit it inside of some ledger of accountability when we blame or accuse someone else. This is the pattern. It is universal, but most do not see it.
I believe the innocent lamb symbolizes the ego or the privately constructed self. It is not bad; in fact, it feels like “me.” And it is. But not the full or deepest me. It is who I think I am; it is what I have learned that I cannot live without. But when we let go of this temporary imposter, we break through to a much deeper level of our own life! But it always feels unjust and unnecessary. It is always a risk, just like Jesus being carried into the tomb.
Jesus on the cross is not an image of the death of the bad self but, in fact, the self that feels right and necessary—but isn’t! Jesus had been misunderstood and misinterpreted. He had every good reason to play the victim or the blame card, but he did neither. This is astounding when you consider the main story line of history is exactly the opposite to this day.
To understand Jesus in a whole new way, you must first know that Christ is not his last name, but his eternal identity both before and after the Resurrection. The raising up of Jesus is not a one-time miracle that we must believe, but a revelation of the constant and only pattern. Nothing has to die permanently! Many scientists now say nothing does die. Or as the Catholic funeral Mass puts it, “life is not ended, but merely changed.”
Jesus became the Christ, which is to include all of us in this eternal movement through time and death (see Acts 2:36). That’s why Paul creates the new term “the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12), a corporate image to communicate what is happening to all of us too. Jesus dies, Christ rises. The small vehicle must die so the more inclusive vehicle can rise. Thus Paul’s most common shortcut phrase is en Christo, which he uses 164 times. “Unless the single grain of wheat dies, it will remain just a single grain of wheat, but if it dies it will bear a rich harvest” (John 12:24). If you prefer a different language, the small identity must surrender its ego boundaries to fall into the Larger Identity.
I think this is Jesus’ major message: there is something essential that you only know by dying. You really don’t know what life is until you know what death is. Death, which seems like our ultimate enemy, is actually the doorway. This is how Jesus “overcame” and even “destroyed” death.
Gateway to Silence: I am crucified with Christ.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 189-191.
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Richard Rohr Daily Meditation: The Universal Pattern: Loss and Renewal from Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States "Jesus takes away the sin of the world by exposing the real sin." for Monday, 24 April 2017
Image credit:White Crucifixion (detail), Marc Chagall, 1938, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
"The Cross"
"The Universal Pattern: Loss and Renewal"
Monday, April 24, 2017
I believe that the Mystery of the Cross is saying that the pattern of transformation is always death transformed. Death and life are two sides of one coin, and you cannot have one without the other. The theological term for this classic pattern of descent and ascent was coined by Saint Augustine as “the paschal mystery.” We now proclaim it publicly at every Eucharist as “the mystery of faith.” But why?
The pattern of down and up, loss and renewal, enslavement and liberation, exile and return, transformation through darkness and suffering is quite clear in the first Bible of Nature and in the Hebrew Scriptures; you do not need to wait for the New Testament. Jesus uses the Jonah symbol and says, “it is the only sign he is going to give” (Luke 11:29). Jonah in the belly of the whale seems to be Jesus’ own metaphor for what would later become the doctrine of the cross.
So how does this happen? How does the victim transform us? How does the Lamb of God “take away the sin of the world” (John 1:29; note that “sin” here is singular)? How does Jesus “overcome death and darkness,” as we often say? Is it a cosmic magic act? Jesus is saying, “This is how evil is transformed into good! I am going to take the worst thing and turn it into the best thing, so you will never be victimized, destroyed, or helpless again! I am giving you an internal victory over all that might destroy you!”
Jesus takes away the sin of the world by dramatically exposing the real sin—ignorant hatred and violence, not the usual preoccupation with purity codes—and by refusing the usual pattern of vengeance, which keeps us inside of an insidious quid pro quo logic. In fact, he “returns their curses with blessings” (Luke 6:28), teaching us that we can “follow him” and not continue the spiral of violence. He unlocks our entrapment from within.
Jesus has set the inevitable in motion. Both the problem and the strategy have been revealed in one compelling action on God’s part. It is not that Jesus is working some magic in the sky that “saves the world from sin and death.” Jesus is unveiling a mystery that redefines the common pattern of human history. Jesus is not changing his Father’s mind about us because it does not need changing (as in various “atonement theories”); he is changing our mind about what is real and what is not. The cross is not a required transaction (which frankly makes little sense), but the mystery of how evil is transformed into good.
Jesus on the cross identifies with the human problem, the sin, the darkness. He refuses to stand above or outside the human dilemma. Further, he refuses to scapegoat, and instead becomes the scapegoat personified (as we’ll explore in greater detail next week). In Paul’s language, “Christ redeemed us from the curse . . . by being cursed himself” (Galatians 3:13); or “God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him [together with him!] we might become the very goodness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Is it beginning to make sense?
Loss and renewal is the perennial, eternal, transformative pattern. It’s like a secret spiral: each time you allow the surrender, each time you can trust the dying, you will experience a new quality of life within you: “How we do not know; of its own accord, the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear” (Mark 4:27-28). Paul calls this “the hidden wisdom of God . . . predestined to be for our glory before the ages began” (1 Corinthians 2:7). Only the humble and the patient recognize the redemptive pattern, it seems.
Gateway to Silence: I am crucified with Christ.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Dying: We Need It for Life” and “The Spirituality of Imperfection,” Richard Rohr on Transformation, Collected Talks, Vol. 1, discs 4 and 2 (Franciscan Media: 2005); andThings Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 188-189.
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Richard Rohr Daily Meditation: The Mystery of the Cross from Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States "Jesus’ life, death, and raising up is the pattern of reality and our lives." for Sunday, 23 April 2017
Image credit: White Crucifixion (detail), Marc Chagall, 1938, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
"The Cross"
"The Mystery of the Cross"
Sunday, April 23, 2017
It is a wisdom that none of the masters of this age have ever known, or they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.—1 Corinthians 2:8
Jesus’ life, death, and raising up is the whole pattern revealed, named, summed up, and assured for our own lives. It gives us the full trajectory that we might not recognize otherwise. He is the map. The Jesus story is the universe story. The Universal Christ is no threat to anything but separateness, illusion, domination, and the imperial ego. In that sense, Jesus, the Christ, is the ultimate threat, but first of all to Christians. Only when we follow Jesus through his life, death and resurrection will we have any universal and salvific message for the rest of the earth.
The lead up to and the follow up from the cross is the great interpretative key that makes the core pattern clear. It’s no accident that we have made the cross the Christian logo, because in the revelation of the cross, many great truths become obvious and even overwhelming, even though we do not want to see them.
Those who “gaze upon” (John 19:37) the Crucified long enough—with contemplative eyes—are always healed at deep levels of pain, unforgiveness, aggression, and victimhood. Contemplative gazing demands no theological education, just an “inner exchange” by receiving the image within and offering one’s soul back in safe return. C. G. Jung is supposed to have said that a naked man nailed to a cross is perhaps the deepest archetypal symbol in the Western psyche. [1]
The crucified Jesus offers, at a largely unconscious level, a very compassionate meaning system for history. Without such cosmic meaning and soul significance, the agonies and tragedies of Earth feel like Shakespeare’s “sound and fury signifying nothing” or “a tale told by an idiot.” The body can live without food more easily than the soul can live without such transformative meaning.
If all our crucifixions are leading to some possible resurrection, and are not dead-end tragedies, this changes everything. If God is somehow participating in the suffering of humans and creation, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that also changes everything—at least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively.
We Christians are given the privilege to name the mystery rightly and to know it directly and consciously, but in many ways we have not lived it much better than other religions and cultures. All humble, suffering souls can learn this from the flow of life itself, but the Christian Scriptures named it and revealed it to us publicly and dramatically in Jesus. It all depends on whether you have “gazed” long and deep enough at the paradoxical mystery of life and death.
Gateway to Silence: I am crucified with Christ.
References:
[1] See Jerry Wright, “Christ, a Symbol of the Self,” C.G. Jung Society of Atlanta Quarterly News (Fall 2001), 6-8. Jung wrote extensively about Christ as archetype; Wright’s essay offers a brief overview of key ideas and resources. Available at http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/fall01-crist-symbol-of-self.pdf
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 185-187
Transformation means to change form, move across, or “shape-shift.” To be transformed is to look out at reality from a genuinely new source and center, seeing things in a larger and more holistic way. —Richard Rohr
The Spring 2017 issue of Oneing features both scholarly reflections and stories of transformative experiences from Paula D’Arcy, Wm Paul Young, Cynthia Bourgeault, Sam Shriver, poet David Whyte, and many others.
Order a limited-edition copy at store.cac.org.
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Center for Action and Contemplation
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