Somewhere, this remains an absurdity. What do I have to do with Nazareth? What do I have to do with someone who lived thousand of miles and centuries away from me? What can his life mean to me, let alone his death? What do those strange Aramaic words mean to me today? How do we make the leap that the punishment imposed on him offers me some form of redemption in the here and now? And what exactly is that redemption?
It is part of general Christian thought that one had to die for the sake of the others. An almost utilitarian idea: one life lost to save the many. But would it really have happened that way in concrete terms? Would I not exist today if he had not died? If he had let the cup pass him by? Or are we not talking about biological, but about spiritual life and death? Or would God, the Wrathful One, have reduced us to dust within the vastness of the universe? Would he have thrown the human project into the nothingness of black holes in the universe? Submerged us once more beneath a final flood?
Or should we turn to the punishment model that God can now love us because this man suffered on our behalf? Would the whip have struck me otherwise? Would the wrath of Rome have scarred my back? If he had not been subjected to the horrors of Roman flogging? No one really says that we are all children of God, and yet we all stand as guilty children in need of discipline. Instead of punishing all, he punished one. God was angry, but his anger was appeased by the suffering of the Nazarene. The neighborhood children watched in sorrow as the father beat his son, while they—not he—shattered every window in the street.
It makes no sense. There may have been a ransom, but only if the deal was not to kill the lives of his disciples, but his life, the life of the leader. A well-known practice in ancient times. Kill the leader and you kill the movement. But did he also die for me? For me, Quint, born in the Netherlands, 2000 years later, ignorant of the wrath of this almighty God? Again, what does this have to do with me?
His death can only mean something to me if his life means something. Otherwise, it doesn't. Jesus is not the pink-colored glasses through which God sees the world. God already wore those before Jesus saw any light of day. Salvation is not the avoidance of wrath, but the emptying of his love, of Love Itself. The image of the invisible God. And while tabernacling on earth, Jesus lived out that image, and that is why he was killed. Not by fate, not by a decision of will or predestination. But because he moved in the focal point of God's love.
We too must live such a life. We will have to respond to the insistent whisper of God's love in our daily lives. Looking people in the eye and being the brother and sister we ourselves long to have. Seeing others as we would like to be seen. We will have to embrace the people who are on the margins of this life, perhaps those who you despise the most. Only then can we be saved. Within God’s love, our hearts are pressed like lemons: yielding, drop by painful drop, the love we cannot yet give. Then there is hope for us. After all, we are already lost, but perhaps there is still hope for our wretched souls.
Then the world will know that he has died because of how he lived, and that he will rise in us once again.
Comments
Post a Comment