Moving Downward
Jesus’ state was divine, yet he did not cling to equality with God, but he emptied himself.
—Philippians 2:6–7
Father Richard Rohr reflects on Jesus’ surrender to God through a path of descent:
In the overflow of rich themes on Palm Sunday, I am going to direct us toward the great parabolic movement described in Philippians 2. Most New Testament scholars consider that this was originally a hymn sung in the early Christian community. To give us an honest entranceway, let me offer a life-changing quote from C. G. Jung (1875–1961):
In the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve. [1]
The hymn from Philippians artistically, honestly, yet boldly describes that “secret hour” Jung refers to, when God in Christ reversed the parabola, when the waxing became waning. It starts with the great self-emptying or kenosis that we call the incarnation and ends with the crucifixion. It brilliantly connects the two mysteries as one movement, down, down, down into the enfleshment of creation, into humanity’s depths and sadness, and into a final identification with those at the very bottom (“took the form of a slave,” Philippians 2:7). Jesus represents God’s total solidarity with, and even love of, the human situation, as if to say, “nothing human is abhorrent to me.”
God, if Jesus is right, has chosen to descend—in almost total counterpoint with our humanity that is always trying to climb, achieve, perform, and prove itself. This hymn says that Jesus leaves the ascent to God, in God’s way, and in God’s time. Most of us understandably start the journey assuming that God is “up there,” and our job is to transcend this world to find God. We spend so much time trying to get “up there,” we miss that God’s big leap in Jesus was to come “down here.” What freedom! And it ends up better than any could have expected. “Because of this, God lifted him up” (Philippians 2:9). We call the “lifting up” resurrection or ascension. Jesus is set as the human blueprint, the oh-so-hopeful pattern of divine transformation.
Trust the down, and God will take care of the up. This leaves humanity in solidarity with the life cycle, and also with one another, with no need to create success stories for ourselves or to create failure stories for others. Humanity in Jesus is free to be human and soulful instead of any false climbing into “Spirit.” This was supposed to change everything, and I trust it still will.
Releasing into New Life
Experiencing loss creates opportunities to practice releasing our attachments to who we think we are. Richard Rohr writes:
Some form of suffering or death—psychological, spiritual, relational, or physical—is the only way we will loosen our ties to our small and separate self. Only then does the larger self appear, which we could call the Risen Christ, the soul, or the true self. The physical process of transformation through dying is expressed eloquently by Kathleen Dowling Singh, who spent her life in hospice work: “The ordinary mind [the false self] and its delusions die in the Nearing Death Experience. As death carries us off, it is impossible to any longer pretend that who we are is our ego. The ego is transformed in the very carrying off.” [1] This is why so many spiritual teachers say we must die before we die.
The overly defended ego is where we reside before these much-needed deaths. The true self (or “soul”) becomes real to us only after we have walked through death and come out much larger and wiser on the other side. This is what we mean by transformation, conversion, or enlightenment. [2]
The civil rights leader Rosemarie Freeney Harding offered a compassionate example of not clinging, even to life itself. Her daughter Rachel recounts how Freeney Harding sat with the dying:
Mama would go sit with the ones who were leaving here. Keep them company. Take food and stories and family and silence, so they could remember something beautiful in their final hours.
Death is not the end of everything. What comes after death is just as important as what comes before. Practice Dharma to leave a strong imprint of positiveness at death.
Knowing too how to make the separation: The last conversation. The last morsel of food. One has to separate completely.
When Daddy [civil rights activist Vincent Harding] died, Mama sat at the side of his bed and he asked her if she would go with him. She whispered to him, “No, fool! Are you crazy?” She was kissing him and crying and holding his hand. She told him no. Everybody tried to make him as comfortable as possible when he passed. But he had to go alone. They were waiting on the other side—Mama Catherine and them—Daddy’s people. My mama knew that.
(In my father’s house are many rooms. I go to prepare a place, that where I am there you may be.) Buddha went ahead to discover what is real. Mama brought reality into our home, gave us an example and sent us into the world to practice. [3]
Richard Rohr concludes:
Anything less than the death of the false self is useless religion. The manufactured false self must die for the true self to live, or as Jesus himself puts it, “Unless I go, the Spirit cannot come” (John 16:7). Theologically speaking, Jesus (a good individual person) had to die for the Christ (the universal presence) to arise. This is the universal pattern of transformation. [4]
Coming to Terms with Life
| MARK LONGHURSTAPR 13 |
Etty Hillesum had every reason to despair. A forward-thinking, Jewish intellectual, Etty Hillesum lived in German-occupied Amsterdam and wrote her now-famous diaries between 1941 and 1943. She witnessed her fellow Jews first singled out and identified by being forced to wear the Star of David on their right arms. She experienced the gradual hatred and intimidation towards Jews by the ever-present Gestapo. She lived through the antisemitic laws that forbade Jews from going to certain grocery stores, which created a curfew. At first, it was not clear where her friends were being transited to, even though rumors of mass murder were in the air. She watched as friends were loaded on trains, and eventually, she and her family were deported to camps in Poland and Germany, meeting death.
What is remarkable about Etty Hillesum is not only her chronicle of the unfolding horror in Amsterdam and beyond but also her resolute, nearly incomprehensible choice to choose life and to choose God as long as she had life. She stared at the blood dripping from Nazi Germany’s dragon’s jaws, and she still danced, to use a metaphor from Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn. She wrote about life and death. She wrote about coming to terms with life in the ominous presence of death. And she said:
By ‘coming to terms with life’ I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it… It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life, we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we expand and enlarge it.
Etty Hillesum and Jesus of Nazareth understood each other, I think. Etty lived as death, in its most brutal incarnation, encroached upon and stole the soul of a country. A twisted and (to use a spiritual diagnosis) demonic regime’s actions resulted in millions of lives killed.
Jesus in John’s gospel likewise dances in dragon’s jaws. He tangoes with the elite temple leaders. These are the leaders who have the power to take his life and eventually do. He provokes them. He disputes with them. He claims authoritative teaching even over their teacher Moses, their guide who had ascended heaven’s heights. He distributes bread in a hungry Roman province. He disregards religion’s rules and claims wholeness and healing for the hurt and wounded. He claims oneness with the source of being, a personal divine reality he names Father; he even dares to extend that oneness to his followers.
He faces plots on his life, such as a narrowly-missed stoning. Despite the disciples’ attempt to point out the obvious: “Rabbi, the Jews (Judean temple elites) were just now trying to stone you, and are you going to go there again?” (John 11:8), he goes Jerusalem’s outskirts again. He knows his beloved friend Lazarus will die, and he knows he will bring him back to life to reveal God’s glory, and he knows that he himself will die on the heels of claiming, of all things, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25).
And yet Jesus goes to Jerusalem… in his own time, as usual. He tells his mother at Cana’s wedding that his hour has not yet come (John 2:4) as if to say, “Don’t force my hand, even if it is to save the party by turning water into wine.” Despite his friends Mary and Martha writing a heartrending letter about their brother Lazarus’s near-death illness, Jesus waits two days before leaving to see him (John 11:6), quipping that Lazarus is sleeping, knowing full well that Lazarus is not dozing but soon to be dead.
It’s as if the vision of God’s life has so captivated Jesus’ person that he does not deem ultimate the impending threats to diminish or steal that life. John’s message through Jesus is clear: I have come so that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10). I am the resurrection and the life (John 11:25). For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes or trusts in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Jesus’ life begins now and continues later. Eternal life, or “life of the ages,” is the life of heaven’s realm. It is a new age overlapping with our own. Despite anti-immigrant raids, authoritarian disappearances, economic free-fall, attacks on freedom of speech (under the guise of combating antisemitism), cruel and punishing aid cuts to… everything, including local libraries, not to mention the inherent fragility of our own bodies and the constant and often tortured struggles we carry in our own souls, we are, at this moment, nevertheless, alive!
“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver asks. Her question haunts us in the presence of death and death’s sisters, all those powers and crises that vanquish life. And yet, on the other side of that haunting question is nothing less than liberation. As Etty Hillesum wrote,
As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations that we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.
The disciple Thomas thumps his chest at the imminent danger Jesus and his movement face. “Let us go to Judea, that we may die with him” (John 11:16), treating Jesus’ movement as a test of typical male bravado and well-intentioned, if misunderstood, loyalty. We might laugh at Thomas, but we do the same in the presence of death: we don’t accept it; we “Rage, Rage, against the dying of the light,” to quote Dylan Thomas.
Martha, for her part, makes the mistake that most Christians have made with John’s gospel, which is to think that Jesus’ eternal life is something saved for later. Martha says to Jesus: “I know that he (my brother Lazarus) will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). Jesus replies as if to say: “No, Martha. I’m not only talking about the resurrection at the end of days, I’m talking about the resurrection this day, because, after all, “I am the resurrection and the life” and I’m standing in front of you.” Martha’s mistake is the catastrophic theological mistake that leads various Christians to participate with death in their blatant disregard of life. But such thinking is heretical to true enfleshed and spirited gospel.
John’s gospel turns this logic on its head. Eternal life is not only later, to the exclusion of this life; it’s now and later, embracing this life and all its woundedness and even death itself.
To face death with the courage of life is not to deny death. It is to acknowledge death’s power fully while trusting a more whole vision. Jesus, after having seemingly ignored Mary and Martha’s pleas for him to arrive at once to heal Lazarus, is overwhelmed with grief and anger. As the early doctrinal wars decided, the Logos—the Word made Flesh—is fully human.
In the scene, Mary is weeping, and the Jewish leaders who want Jesus dead are likewise there and weeping (John 11:33-35). The combination of compassion for his deceased friend Lazarus, his grieving friends Mary and Martha, and his fury at the religious leaders’ hypocrisy and gall make Jesus weep, too (John 11:35). Jesus was “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (John 11:33)—the Greek translation of which is connected to outward expressions of anger, often with gestures such as snorting. John’s picture is that Jesus is snorting in full-bodied grief and anger at death’s power and the suffering it creates. It’s enough to galvanize Jesus to switch into full-on action mode, going directly to the tomb, commanding someone to roll away the stone, and finally shouting for dead Lazarus to come out. Which he does, all bound with cloth, as a mummy (John 11:38-44).
Dare we stand in the places of death, the places of our world and lives that diminish life, and choose life anyway? John gives us a courageous vision of resurrection, of life rising again from what we once thought mistakenly was a tomb. As the Sikh activist Valarie Kaur memorably put it, “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”
