For What Its Worth: A 2009 Ranking of Graduate Programs in Theology

R.R. Reno, Professor of Theology at Creighton University and an editor at First Things, ranked the best places to do Theology in North America.  This is an explicit evaluation of graduate schools engaged in Orthodox theology.

It is difficult to distill his rankings into a simple, ordered, linear list.  I suggest you read the article:

Duke University

Here is a rough distillation:

1. /2. DUKE University  2./1. Notre Dame (Reno makes a case for why each school is perhaps better than the other)

3. Princeton University/ Princeton Theological Seminary (if considered as a package)

3. Wycliffe College/ Toronto School of Theology

5. Marquette

Other notable mentions:

- University of Dayton

Notre Dame

-Perkins School of Theology

-Baylor

-Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley

-Harvard, Yale, Chicago

Reno refers to a previous article undergirding his rationale, which he published a few months ago.

As for my thoughts:

I am happy to see that Reno praised two of my professors this semester: my OT professor, Dr. Stephen Chapman (AKA: Chaps) and my church history professor, Dr. Warren Smith.   Both are excellent.

The Creed: Forming A Posture of Trust

A wily Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

Rowan Williams, in Tokens of Trust, asserts that the Christian’s faith is a matter of trust, not belief. Although throughout Christian history the words ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ shared synonymity, in modern use the words describe two very different postures for the way we engage God’s existence. Our language is important as it directs our engagement with what we ultimately hold to be true. It is therefore vital that the distinction is made between ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ if we are to allow the existence of God to impinge upon our lives. A sketch of each posture, then, is necessary if we are to explore the significance of Williams’ claim. This will provide a foundation to explore the ways in which a posture of trust gives shapes to how we “take up” the Christian faith. And so we shall see that trust is the vehicle through which the reality of God penetrates our existence, affecting the way we feel about ourselves and about the world .

For Williams belief is primarily a relationship to an abstract idea or thing. Belief answers the question of whether or not something exists out there. It regards the objects it probes as magical or mythical in nature, and so the question of belief in God is similar to, “Do you believe in ghosts or UFOs?” This is a rather impersonal question which is unconcerned with the consequence of whether or not something exists. That is to say, if a ghost really did exist, it would hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things. This kind of belief cannot conquer the crippling effects of suspicion, because it forms a posture incredulous to hope, meaning, and relationship. Suspicion prevents one from participation in celebration, love, hope, and trust. It forms a posture closed to the possibility of God affecting the way we feel about ourselves and the world around us. This kind of posture rests on fallacious assumptions about God.

God is not the kind of being that is out there or ambivalent to what is going in the world. Belief for Christianity is not a question of opinion concerning whether or not God exists, but it is rather whether or not God is to be trusted. Williams makes this plain by turning our attention to the Creed, which draws for our imagination a radically different visage of God—one in whom we are invited to trust from the onset. The Creed is composed of statements that reveal God’s agenda by what God has done. It is therefore impossible to stand with neutrality in relation to God. Belief in God’s existence is inextricably tied to questions like, “Is God reliable? Does God have our best interest in mind?” The very nature of God thus demands that we not think of God in the same category as UFOs or ghosts. Belief is the wrong kind of posture for a God who is proximate and good. It is, then, a categorical mistake to approach God’s existence like one might an abstract being, such as a ghost. To do so is to relegate God to impotence and irrelevance. A posture of trust, however, invites God to make a difference in the way we feel about ourselves and the world around us.

Williams’ insistence on trust, not belief is rooted in the conviction that God is entirely other than that from which concept, theory or principle is constructed. Every mode of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object. Therefore, a God who is wholly other than creation necessitates a different kind of touching, seeing and hearing. Intellectual assent and conceptual postulation will not do. God is eternal and transcendent, but not impersonal or unknowable. God is not an impersonal force like gravity which pushes toward the center of the earth without reason or care; neither is God like a theory, a body of impersonal information to master. We must consider the proper mode of knowledge, or posture that accounts for the Creed’s proclamation of a God who cares, listens and speaks—a God who actually revealed Godself by entering our history as the human, Jesus Christ.

Since God lovingly cares for us, we are faced with the decision to receive or ignore God’s love for us. Care is the kind of thing that is only received when the source of care is trusted. It doesn’t matter how much God loves us, if we do not trust him, we cannot receive God’s love. A posture of trust is one of dependence and vulnerability in a relationship. Trust is germinated by its object when there is evidence that the object is working for one’s good and— of course—possesses the power to bring that good to fruition. We are compelled to trust that God is for us when we see God’s agenda made clear: peace and praise. This is most prominent in the cross where God suffered as a human in this world to set people free from fear and guilt to live a new life.

How then does a posture of trust shape the way in which we take up the Christian faith? If God is not an object of neutrality, but one who is relational and active for good, then abstract belief or intellectual assent will not do. And if the Christian life is a function of trust, not merely belief, then the task of spiritual and theological formation is to entrust our lives into the holy hands of God instead of amassing a framework of information. For this reason, the Creed’s theology is ultimately concerned that we entrust ourselves to the God it articulates. As we live our daily lives then, we must be attentive to situations in which we fail to trust God. We are often aware of external sin, but Williams’ emphasis on trust begs us to turn a critical eye to whether or not we, at a given moment, trust that God is perfectly loving, infinitely wise, and totally sovereign. We must ask ourselves, “Are my thoughts and actions indicative of trust in the God who is always and wholly for me?”

The Life-and-Death Contest

I think a Bonhoeffer quotation is far past due:

“Thus at the very beginning of Christian fellowship there is engendered an invisible, often unconscious, life-and-death contest.  “There arose a reasoning among them.” :  this is enough to destroy a fellowship.

Hence it is vitally necessary that every Christian community from the very outset face this dangerous enemy squarely, and eradicate it.  There is no time to lose here, for from the first moment when a man meets another person he is looking for a strategic position he can assume and hold over against that person.  There are strong persons and weak ones.  If a man is not strong, he immediately claims the right of the weak as his own and uses it against the strong.  There are gifted and ungifted persons, simple people and difficult people, devout and less devout, the sociable and the solitary.  Does not the ungifted person have to take up a position just as well as the gifted person, the difficult one as well as the simple?  And if I am not gifted, then perhaps I am devout anyhow; or if I am not devout it is only because I do not want to be.  May not the sociable individual carry the field before him and put the timid, solitary man to shame?  Then may not the solitary person become the undying enemy and ulitimate vanquisher of his socialbe adversary?  Where is there a person who does not with instinctive sureness find the spot where he can stand and defend himself, but which he will never give up for another, for which he will fight with all the drive of his instict of self-assertion?

All this can occur in the most polite or even pious environment.  But the important thing is that a Christian community should know that somewhere in it there will certainly be “a reasoning among them which of them should be the greatest.”  It is the struggle of the natural man for self-justification.  He finds it only in comparing himself with others, in condemning and judging others.  Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pg. 90-91

But to Correct a Flood, One Does Not Want a Drought

Amy and I are reading Thomas Howard’s Evangelical is Not Enough.  What began as a post directed toward the book’s main thrust–the worship of God in liturgy and sacrament–has found its way to what has always been an intriguing topic to me:  the division between “sacred” and “secular”.  I am planning to compose something closer to the center of Howard’s fascinating book later, but until then…

Evangelicalism has rightly pointed that the locus of true spirituality lies in the heart.  In an effort to protect piety, a distinction has been made between the sacred, that which is spiritual, and the secular, that which is non-spiritual (and merely physical).  In the former, Sunday worship, Bible study, and prayer matter more than what takes place Monday through Saturday in the latter, washing the dishes, cooking, work, ect.  Within this rubric, prayer is a more spiritual labor than cooking a meal as it only deals with the physical aspects of our humanity.  Ministry deals with “souls” and thus matters most.  Conversely, the worth of a secular marketplace job springs from its use as a channel for evangelism, or when part of one’s salary can be tithed.  It is against this that Thomas grimly asserts:

“False religions perpetuate the great divide between flesh and spirit, rather than between good and evil where Christianity says it lies.”

Howard observes that many Christians embrace this false dichotomy between flesh and spirit when they read St. Paul.  For St. Paul, the spiritual is not the “disembodied”, nonphysical; there is no distinction between the spiritual life and regular, ordinary living.  To understand what St. Paul meant, we must briefly revisit the garden of Eden.

In the beginning, the universe was a single tapestry woven harmoniously together.  All things were interwoven, overlapping in proper relationship with one another.  Creation was whole, blazoned with God’s Glory; it seamlessly and continually lauded its Creator.  As Howard points out, “The distance lay not between the “physical” and the “spiritual” so much as between the created and the Uncreated”  (30).  But humanity’s grab for the apple tore the tapestry of creation saying, “this much of it will be mine.”  We wrecked it all in our commodious swipe and, “The poor remnant we clutched in our fists was secular, in the most tragic sense of the word:  that which is not acknowledged as God’s.  It is a noncategory of course, since nothing that exists belongs to anyone but God” (30).

The vast splintering of creation alienated us humans from the Creator, from one another, from the rest of creation, and it even divided our self from its true identity.  We are not yet through reaching.  We grab at what does not belong to us in every relationship, whether it be a romantic interest, pleasure, resources, money, a job, fame,  a church–and even at God!  Because we struggle to relate properly to God, we are prone to worship the created, or claim it as our own.  As a result, we see too dimly to rightly acknowledge what is God’s, and worse, we wrongly adjudicate what are his good creations as culprits of evil.

So what about St. Paul?  Thomas delineates:

“To be spiritual for Saint Paul was to have brought everything back to God where it belongs and where it was in Eden.  It is to have had one’s life knit back together so that it is no longer secular and divided, but whole… ‘The flesh,’ as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature.  The ‘carnal’ spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblations to God.  The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such is fevered, restless, and divided… The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical.  They may look alike and weigh the same.  The difference lies, rather, between one’s being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to the giver.

It is the demand for things that Christ sets us free from, not things themselves… Once again we may stand in our proper relation to things, as lords over them and not as their slaves.”

The challenge is to learn, or rather, relearn how to relate properly to all things.  Although creation is good, we have the witnessed incalculable corruption of it.  The abuse of  authority, food, sex, and humor show us that it is a dangerous thing to handle and touch what God has made.  We must be very careful, for we are easily mastered.

There is something in us that would rather not engage in the reweaving of a world reordered in subordination to Jesus’ rescue of God’s creation.   Instead of correction, we often choose prohibition.  It is easier to hide from the task to relate properly.  “But to correct a flood, one does not want a drought”, cautions Howard.   This dictum parallels the stern warning St. Paul issued to the Colossian church:

“Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belong to it, submit to its rules:  ‘Do not handle!  Do not taste!  Do not touch!’?  These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings.  Such regulations indeed have the appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence” (2:20-22).

Busyness: The Enemy of Spirituality

A friend handed me a photo-copied and coffee stained interview with Eugene Peterson published in 1991 in The Wittenburg Door (I just visited the website of the aforementioned magazine and found it to be reprehensible; a magazine brandishing satire to chop down to size those religious leaders it considers pompous is unfortunate).  Peterson struck a chord with me; his words resonate with my own attempts at spirituality and ministry.

I am posting a few excerpts which are, for me, both a hearty call for repentance and an affirmation of  some of my suspicions about the contemporary protestant Church.  Peterson’s insights are the fruit of a long, faithful pastoral service, thoughtful introspection, and the prophetic viewpoint of a person entrenched in Scripture with one foot in the here and now of the Church and the other in God’s future kingdom.

PETERSON: “Busyness is the enemy of spirituality.  It is essentially laziness.  It is doing the easy thing instead of the hard thing.  It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God’s actions…It is an either/or situation.  Busyness has nothing to do with activity, and spirituality is not the absence of activity.  You either enter into what God is doing or you don’t.  A busy person is a lazy person because they are not doing what they are supposed to do.”

DOOR: “It seems like most pastors we know are just like you have, described.  Busy, busy, doing the work of the Church.”

PETERSON: “Most pastors want to run a good church and they will do just about anything to make that happen.  We pastors have a good nose for the market.  We sense when people are getting a little bored and we jazz things up a bit, challenge them with a new project, and we use Sunday morning ‘worship’ as the stage to do that.  I am convinced that pastors don’t give two cents about worship.  They really don’t.  And there’s a good reason for it.  True worship doesn’t make anything happen.  It is a losing of control, a weaning from manipulative language and entertainment.  It’s tough to practice that reality because give the choice between worship and dancing around the golden calf, pastors know people are going to dance.  Pastors sense if they really practice worship they are going to empty out the sanctuary pretty fast.”

“…The pastor’s primary work is leading the people in worship on Sunday morning, proclaiming the word of God, being knowledgeable in theology and scripture, and being committed to a pastoral chair which does not have the therapeutic model for its structure…Pastor’s pray a lot.  Prayer is hard work, but the prayer should be the distinctive about us.  We should have a deliberate or a conscious, intelligent, personal relationship with God which is articulated in prayer.”

DOOR:  “You mentioned earlier that your model for ministry is spiritual direction…What would [that] look like?

PETERSON:  “It doesn’t have a very exact definition, but classically, it is a friendship or companionship which enables another person to recognize and respond to God in their lives in detail, not in generalities.  It takes a lot of leisure.  You can’t do it in a hurry.  It requires extensive knowledge of your people.  You do this over a number of years, not a number of days.  It has no goal in the end.  It is not counseling.  Counseling has a goal, but there’s no goal in spiritual direction.

There is a great story in Moby Dick .  They are in the whale boat and they are chasing Moby Dick.  The sailors are rowing furiously and the sea is frothing, but there is one person in the boat who is not doing anything.  He is just sitting there, quiet and still.  It’s the harpooner, ready to throw the harpoon.  Melville has this great line:  ‘To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpoonists of this world must start to their feet out of idleness and not out of toil.’  For a long time the harpoonist appears to be ‘non-productive’.  But that is only so that when the right moment comes he can be productive.”

DOOR:  “So spiritual direction is a slow process that looks idle and inefficient.”

PETERSON:  “It’s subversive.  I’m a subversive, really.  I gather the people in worship, I pray for them, I engage them often in matters of spiritual correction, and I take them on two really strong retreats a year.  I am a true subversive.  We live in a culture that we think is Christian.  When a congregation gathers in a Church, they assume they are among friends in a basically friendly world (with the exception of pornographers, ect.).  IF I, as their pastor, get up and tell them the world is not friendly and they are really idol worshippers, they think I’m crazy.  This culture has twisted all of our metaphors and images and structures of understanding.  But I can’t say that directly.  The only way that you can approach people is indirectly, obliquely.  A head-on attack doesn’t work.  Jesus was the master of indirection.  The parables are subversive.   His hyperboles are indirect.  There is a kind of outrageous quality to them that defies common sense, but later on the understanding comes.  The largest poetic piece in the Bible, Revelation, is a subversive piece.  Instead of being a three point lecturer, the pastor is instead a storyteller and a pray-er.  Prayer and story become the primary means by which you get past people’s self-defense mechanisms…

If the church member actually realized that the American way of life is doomed to destruction and that another kingdom is right now being formed in secret to take its place, he would be pleased at all.  If he knew what I was really doing and the difference it was making, he would fire me.

True subversion requires patience.”

DOOR:  “This sounds so… well … opposite of what most people think a successful pastor should do.

PETERSON:  “Pastors should not give people what they want just because it brings in customers–which it does.  The biggest enemy to the Church is the development and proliferation of programs to meet people’s needs.  Everyone has a hunger for God, but our tastes (needs) are screwed up.  We’ve been raised on junk food, so what we ask for is often wrong or twisted.  The art of spiritual leadership is not to tell people that they can’t have what they want, but to give them something of what they’ve asked for and not let it go at that.  You try to shift the dimensions of their lives slowly towards what God wants.”

If you are interested in reading the whole article, which I encourage you to do, then click here: original article.

Let Justice Roll Down: Evangelicals & Civil Rights

Retro cover. Forever sassy.

John Perkins’ autobiography is a glimpse into the black struggle for equality, opportunity and justice against the formidable social structures of oppression.  Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, it’s also the story of a black Christian caught between two churches polarized by color, and his devotion to the whole Gospel revolutionizing both.  Moreover, it is an account of the Gospel disarming the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Col. 2:15).

——————-

Soon after his conversion, the rumblings of conviction surfaced.  Perkins knew that his own plans for a “good” Christian life were not God’s good plan for his Christian life.  His life was no longer his own and God quickly issued a decree: Return to Mississippi with the whole Gospel for your people, those you know are “zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge” (Rom. 10:1-2).

So, John Perkins moved his family back to a very familiar place of segregation, hollowed out by injustice and blighted by oppression.  His goal was to use the Bible to teach to a church devoid of knowledge of God that same truth that captured his heart.  First, Perkins founded Bible classes at several local black high schools and a junior college, none of which had ever been exposed to the Scriptures.  In conjunction with this, he traveled around the county using a tent as a meeting place where the Bible could be expounded.  Throughout all of these endeavors, Perkins ministered to the problems of those who sat under his teaching.  After all, he and his family shared their same economic and political woes.

Perkins also knew that in order for the Gospel to take root in this community, it would have to become a visible truth.  The collection of believers with Bible knowledge would need to become a church, the body of Christ; a witness of Jesus Lordship fleshed out in social action.  This led to the organization of Voice of Calvary Bible Institute (VOC) and the creation of community development initiatives, such as: food and housing co-ops, voter registration, free healthcare, fair lending, and an effort to boost the quality of education.

Procuring the funds from both white and black churches in California to finance these projects proved to be a laborious effort.  Perkins laments the absence of the evangelicals during the civil rights movement:

“How sad that so few individuals equally committed to Jesus Christ ever became a part of [the civil rights] movement.  For what all that political activity needed–and lacked– was spiritual input.  Even now, I do not understand why so many evangelicals find a sense of commitment to civil rights and Jesus Christ an “either-or” proposition.

One of the greatest tragedies of the civil rights movement is that evangelicals surrendered their leadership in the movement by default to those with either a bankrupt theology or no theology at all, simply because the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians ignored a great and crucial opportunity in history for a genuine ethical action.  The evangelical church–whose basic theology is the same as mine–had not gone on to preach the whole gospel.”

This was the evangelical response to what was perceived to be a liberal movement.  Perkins’ interaction with black evangelicals reluctant to join the civil rights movement lays bear the true reason for evangelical precaution:  this was just a pretext to avoid personal involvement, to escape responsibility.  Christians invented this perception as an excuse for our inaction, to escape the gospel’s call to answer the question: What should the Church do?  What should I do? The stark reality of evil necessitated that Christians do more than sigh, sympathize, vote, or give money.  What was needed then–and is still needed today–is a life oriented around the self-donation of the cross.

Evangelicals continue to employ this tactic to elude the Lordship of Jesus Christ, to keep their lives rather than loose it for the sake of the gospel (Mark 8:35).  Are there things today that you and I, in a surreptitious attempt to maintain security and control, label as “liberal” to evade the truth that Jesus is Savior and Lord?  For me, it is an ongoing battle to surrender entitlement, no longer hiding behind theological quandary, to follow Jesus into the radical ordinariness of nitty-gritty, everyday living of loving my neighbor.

And to do this, maybe we must emulate God’s love  for us , who as Eugene Peterson puts it,  “became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14).

At the very least I cannot shirk John Perkins’ pointed inquisition:

“Well, what are you doing to correct these bad things with your ‘good’ theology?”

Let Justice Roll Down: The Conversion of John Perkins

"Maybe evangelical Christians, black and white, were confusing theology with the status quo."

John Perkins’ autobiography is a glimpse into the black struggle for equality, opportunity and justice against the formidable social structures of oppression.  Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, it’s also the story of a black Christian caught between two churches polarized by color, and his devotion to the whole Gospel revolutionizing both.  Moreover, it is an account of the Gospel disarming the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Col. 2:15).

There were two religions of God in segregated Mississippi.  There was the white man’s God who approved of the evils of racism and reinforced a violent system that pinned the blacks in grinding poverty.  And there was the black man’s God, who in Perkin’s mind, was no God at all.  The black church was empty of God; it was nothing more than writhing emotionalism.  Perkins easily rejected both as “just another form of exploitation” (pg. 65).  He had no use for religion that would not acknowledge the reality of southern brutality.

Many years later, after Perkins fled Mississippi and the memories of his murdered brother, he was befriended in California by a few black Christians.  Their God was one of whom he had never heard.  His curiosity pulled him into a serious study of the Bible which slowly put words to his whole experience.  But there was one verse, Romans 6:23, which confronted him with powerful resonance : “For the wages of sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Wage language was John Perkin’s vernacular; wages dictated all of his existence.  He had suffered unfair wages all of his life.  That was exploitation.  Those were the “wages of sin”.  Paul’s vocabulary, albeit familiar, called Perkins’ attention to a strange wage unknown to him.  Perkins writes:

“But was there other sin? My sin?  Back and forth from life to Scripture my mind went that morning…For the first time I understood that my sin was not necessarily and altogether against myself or against my neighbor.  My sin was against a holy God who loved me, who had already paid for my sins.  I was sinning in the face of His love.

I didn’t want to sin anymore.  I wanted to give my life to Christ, so He could take care of my sin.  I sensed the beginning of a whole new life, a new structure of life, a life that could fill that emptiness I had even on payday.

God for a black man? Yes, God for a black man! This black man!  Me!

That morning I said yes to Jesus Christ” (pgs. 71-72).

St. Augustine on the Struggle for Belief

St. Augustine: to renew and exalt the faithful hearing of the gospel of man's utter need and God's abundant Grace.

“…though I could not yet know for certain whether what he taught was true.  For all this time I restrained my heart from assenting to anything, fearing to fall headlong into error.  Instead, by this hanging in suspense, I was being strangled.  For my desire was to be as certain of invisible things as I was that seven and three are ten.  I was not so deranged as to believe that this could not be comprehended, but my desire was to have other things as clear as this, whether they were physical objects, which were not present to my senses, or spiritual objects, which I did not know how to conceive of except in physical terms.

If I could have believed, I might have been cured, and, with the sight of my soul cleared up, it might in some way have been directed toward thy truth, which always abides and fails in nothing.  But, just as it happens that a man who has tried a bad physician fears to trust himself with a good one, so it was with the health of my soul, which could not be healed except by believing. “

St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 5, Ch. 4

Death for Life

Dionysius!

The doctrine of substitutionary atonement can often be an abstraction.  But the idea that Jesus intentionally and willingly took the sinner’s place of judgment on the cross is profound and quite practical.  Its not merely theoretical figment, but a theological reflection on the significance of a historical event.  In Jesus on the cross, we see the supreme act of God’s love to reconcile to himself those who are alienated enemies.  In Jesus’ self-donation, we are compelled to love God in return; we have the intellectual and the spiritual resources necessary to trust that God is good.  Furthermore, Jesus’ sacrifice is also the impetus for our loving action toward our neighbor.

The early church took to heart the conviction that Jesus’ suffered death in the sinner’s place so that he might live.  It was the very soil of out which grew the Christians response to the great epidemic that decimated Rome (251-270 A.D).  Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria wrote this of the pagans (those who observed Roman polytheism):

“At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated uburied corpses as dirty, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease.”

In contrast, Dionysius’ Easter letter is a tribute to the heroic nursing efforts of the local Christians, many of whom lost their lives while caring for others:

“Most of our Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another.  Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.“

Christ, in curing us, transferred our death to himself and died in our stead so that we might live.  That reality of God’s gracious love embedded itself so deeply in the hearts of Christians that they were willing to die for strangers–just as Christ died for them.  The cross is the vista by which God’s love confronts us, slowly reconfiguring the very structure of our hearts and minds, our worship and action.

[Quotes from "The Rise of Christianity" by Rodney Stark]

A Reflection on the Empty Tomb: Jesus and his Disciples

To say that Jesus suffered is an understatement.  He crumpled on the cross under the weight of cosmic affliction: the apocalypse of divine judgment and the loss of his most intimate love, God.  Yet on Resurrection Sunday, I was struck by the hardship Jesus endured before he was pinned up on Calvary.  Betrayal bereaved Jesus of his disciples and the friendship of those with whom he shared life.

We find a robust picture of Jesus’ lonesome journey to the cross even in Mark’s economical account of the Gospel story.  In Gethsemane, Jesus’ tribulation is inaugurated:

“he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.  ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!’”

The foretaste of Golgotha wrenched Jesus’ soul, but his closest companions lay asleep while he suffered in solitude.  Three times his dreaming disciples failed to engage with his agony.  Immediately, Jesus was double-crossed for a paltry sum of money by another in his trusted inner circle, Judas, who sealed his arrest with a kiss.

Next, his sleepy friends forsook with the sword all that Jesus had taught them.  The students had abandoned the teacher’s promise that his kingdom would come by way of the cross.   Then in an act of spontaneous determination, his followers fled.  From the prayer vigil that never was to the vigilante resistance that should have never been, desertion marked Jesus’ last hours with his disciples.

Jesus’ captors subjected him to an unjust trial where he was condemned to death by murderous lies.  Peter faced his own trial, but by his murderous lies, he disowned Jesus and exonerated himself.  Jesus’ sentence brought beatings, whippings and humiliation.  He was mocked, tortured and scorned.  He did all of this alone.  It was a stranger, not a friend, that helped Jesus carry his cross to Golgotha; neither were his disciples involved in the burial process.  Jesus cried out alone, and alone he died.

Yet, nothing deterred Jesus’ love for his disciples; betrayal could not squelch his compassion for his friends.  At the tomb, Jesus left an angel with a message for the women who found the empty tomb:

“But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee.  There you will see him just as he promised.”

Jesus message is concerned with one objective:  to make it crystal clear that his chosen disciples are still his chosen–especially Peter.  Jesus wants to teach his disciples a lesson.  He loves them so much that he cares about their feelings of  insecurity, failure, and shame.  In the angel’s message, we see the way Jesus relates to those who have failed him; we see Jesus intentionally protecting his friends from public scrutiny and taking initiative to quell any doubts that his friends might have about where they stand with him.

On the cross, Jesus forgave his enemies, but he also forgave his friends who treated him like an enemy.  Jesus’ absolution is unlike ours.  We forgive in a polite, legal, and customary fashion as we try mightily to restrain disdain.  Jesus’ pardon is generously heartfelt, bursting with compassion and sympathy.  He gushes joy and friendliness with a promiscuity that is uncomfortable for a betrayer to accept.  Jesus goes out of his way to not only forgive, but to affirm the betrayer’s unique place as God’s beloved.  He loves tragically disloyal followers with perfect fidelity.

If while we were his enemies, Christ died for us to bring us to God, how can we not also love our enemies at the cost of our own lives?  And if while we were still his betrayers, Jesus took special care to make it known that we are really forgiven and loved, then how can we not also reinstate our betrayers with that same earnest care.  After all, if Christ no longer counts their sin against them, how can we?