David,
I am so honored that you take the time to read my Daily Meditations! As I grow older and limit my travel, they are one of the most meaningful ways I can continue teaching and ministering.
You may wonder, as many have, if I am personally writing and sending these emails precisely at 12:00 midnight U.S. Mountain Time each day. Well, let me assure you I do not have to do it alone! A dedicated team from the Center for Action and Contemplation helps me curate the meditations, bringing new life to previous writings, clarifying and fact-checking, and incorporating other authors I deeply respect. Every week I edit and refine each meditation before it goes out to you.
While all religious language is metaphor, I believe that words are important. We have all seen the damage that a mis-use of the Bible can cause. The words I use aren’t dictated by any religious institution or outside influence. I simply try to be a conduit (as my German last name suggests) of Spirit and share my evolving understanding of Scripture, the Christian tradition, and my own experience. I believe the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better, even when it’s unpopular.
We have you and over 320,000 people around the world in mind—and prayer—as we craft messages that we hope will heal your heart, challenge your thinking, and move your body toward compassionate action. I know that each person comes from a different perspective, be that religion, age, or geographic location. And yet, somehow, we are all connected and part of the universal Body of Christ.
Twice a year we pause the Daily Meditations to ask for your support. Take a moment to read our Director Michael’s note below about how you can help. Tomorrow we’ll continue reflecting on Jesus’ crucifixion as we look forward to Easter.
If you’ve been impacted by the Daily Meditations, please help the Center for Action and Contemplation continue this labor of love. To the team that helps me publish these messages day in and day out, thank you! And to you, a reader and supporter, thank you for making our work possible!
Dear Friends,
Father Richard often describes his work as keeping God free for people and keeping people free for God.
In this year’s Daily Meditations, he’s helping us move beyond harmful ideas about God that have locked us in fear and violence. At the same time, he’s reclaiming timeless wisdom from contemplative Christianity to help us connect with our truest selves, each other, and God. Will you help us keep the Daily Meditations free with a donation?
I love this familiar saying Richard quotes in his new book The Universal Christ:
Everything will be all right in the end.
If it’s not all right, it is not yet the end.
Sometimes it’s hard to hold out hope for our politics, our planet, and even our faith tradition. Thankfully, we’re still in the midst of evolution. This is not the end.
I can’t predict the future, but I know that our participation fundamentally matters. Our community’s past generosity helps us keep resources like the Daily Meditations free for hundreds of thousands of people. You fund scholarships for our conferences, online courses, and Living School. You help us provide a living wage for our staff and help us create free resources to help spread transformative teaching, like our newly released Universal Christ podcast and companion guide.
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As director of the Center for Action and Contemplation, I hope to see this work protected and continued to serve future generations and to help shape a more transformative and hopeful Christianity.
Thank you for being an agent of peaceful change in this ongoing evolution of Christianity and the world!
Peace and Every Good,
Michael Poffenberger
Executive Director, Center for Action and Contemplation
P.S. Please consider making a contribution to the Center for Action and Contemplation (tax-deductible in the United States). We invite donations of any size! You can donate securely online at cac.org/dm-appeal or send a check (USD only) to CAC, PO Box 12464, Albuquerque, NM 87195. Learn more about charitable giving at cac.org/support-cac.
Doing the Victim Thing Right
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
The deep-time message of Jesus’ death is presented through a confluence of three healing images from his own Hebrew Scriptures: the scapegoat whom we talked about on Sunday; the Passover lamb which is the innocent victim (Exodus 12); the “Lifted-Up One” or the homeopathic curing of the victim (Numbers 21:6-9) who becomes the problem to reveal the problem.
Numbers 21:6-9 New International Version (NIV)
6 Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.
8 The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.
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 vulnerable level. It is God in solidarity with the pain of the world, it seems, much more than God the omnipotent who, with a flick of the hand, overcomes all pain. But Jesus walks the victim journey in an extraordinary way. He neither plays the victim card himself for his own aggrandizement, nor does he victimize anybody else, even his murderers. He forgives them all.
In the Hebrew tradition, the Passover lamb was a perfect, unblemished sheep or goat that apparently lived in the family home for four days before it was sacrificed (Exodus 12:1-8). That’s just long enough for the children to fall in love with the lamb. What could this symbolize? I personally think it is an image of the first (false) self that is thought of as good, adequate, and even innocent. It is who I think I am before I do any shadow work and see my own dark sides. It is when religion stops at the “cleaning up” stage and never gets to “growing up,” “waking up,” or “showing up” for others. Only when we let go of our attachment to any good, superior, or innocent identity do we begin to grow up spiritually.
It is precisely the beloved and innocent “lamb” that must die. We must accept that we are all complicit and profiting from the corporate “sin of the world” and no one is pure or innocent. “No one is good, not even one,” as Paul daringly quotes Psalm 14:3 (Romans 3:10-12). This is an offense to our ego, and is precisely the status that Jesus accepts and allows. This is a huge but necessary recognition and surrender for most people.
The “Lifted-Up One” is the image of the bronze serpent that Moses lifted in the desert which has become a symbol for doctors and healers to this day. YHWH tells Moses to raise up a snake on a standard, and “anyone who has been bitten by a serpent and looks upon it will be healed” (Numbers 21:8). The very thing that was killing them is the thing that will heal them! This is the nature of vaccines and other medicines that give us just enough of the disease so we can develop a resistance and be healed from it. The cross was meant to be an inoculation against all sacralized violence and hatred. The cross dramatically reveals the problem of ignorant killing to inoculate us against doing the same thing.
Jesus becomes the seeming problem and the cure for the same—by exposing it for what it is, “parading it in public” (Colossians 2:15) for those who have eyes to see, and inviting us to gaze upon it with sympathetic understanding. The prophet Zechariah calls Israel to “Look upon the pierced one and to mourn over him as for an only son,” and “weep for him as for a firstborn child,” and then “from that mourning” (five times repeated) will flow “a spirit of kindness and prayer” (12:10) and “a fountain of water” (13:1; 14:8).
I believe we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified and to realize that God the Father suffers with Jesus. This softens our hearts toward God and all of reality. We see that God’s heart has always been softened toward us, even and most especially in our suffering. This softens us toward ourselves and all others who suffer.
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