"Why did Jesus die?" Lessons from a five-year-old

“Mommy, why did Jesus die?” My five-year-old asks me from the back seat on our way to work the other day.  Oh crap, I thought.  What am I supposed to say now?  I wasn’t ready to tell my innocent little girl that “Jesus died for your sins”.  I am not a big fan of atonement theory after all.   I certainly wasn’t going to tell her that Jesus died because God was mad at us, so he sent his own son to die instead.  What the heck was I supposed to say?  After a pretty long pause, I said, “Jesus died because he was human.  All people die.”

There you have it, I realized, Jesus died because he was human, and we all die.  Maybe it is at the age of 97 in our beds, rested and at peace, maybe it is too young after a valiant fight with cancer, maybe it is sudden and tragic, maybe it is quiet and anonymous.  All men die.   Not exactly a shocking statement, but the contemplation of it shocked me into a new realization.  The moment Jesus became human, he was doomed, just like the rest of us.  The moment he breathed his first breath, screamed his first scream, grabbed his first handful of the world, his cells began to decay a little bit, to divide a little bit, to wear down in anticipation of the final wearing down.  The minute we are born, we start to die, all of us.  It is terrifying, I thought, as I trembled a little driving down the road with my babies in the backseat.  It is terrifying, and strangely comforting, that the Lord of Life went with us down this road, too.

I came to Christ by working backwards in time.  Entranced by the idea of grace and redemption in the Holy Spirit, I found my way back to the church during Lent.  Instead of finding the party of forgiveness for which I longed, I found the road of denial and the desperation of the cross.  Good Friday broke my heart open in grief, as the love of Christ poured out over me, healing the tender spots and scarring the tough spots in my soul.  Easter came and I resurrected into new life as a once-again-Christian.  My new Christian insight didn’t bother much with the incarnation and nativity story.   I didn’t care so much how he got here; I cared what he did.  Until, I realized, it is exactly how he got here, and why he came, that allowed him to do what he did.

When God divine becomes wholly human, God takes on all the nitty-gritty, mess, pain, glory, despair, triumph, love, and death, of the human experience.  There was no way out for Jesus, except through a grave.  There is no way out for any of us except through a grave.  The difference about this human is that he didn’t deny it, fear it, or live his life trying to escape it.  He lived his fully human life in full knowledge of the pain that lay in store for him.  (Whether he knew the exact nature of the crucifixion is a little beside my point.  He clearly knew that he would die.)  He didn’t put on some human skin to teach us a few lessons and then head back to divine unity with the ultimate ground of being, where he would be above all this pain.  He didn’t sustain a young, healthy, unbroken body through his power.  He didn’t transcend the suffering of life through spiritual awakening.  He jumped right into the filthy, dirty, beautiful world, and he loved it to the end and back again.

When he went to death, he felt all the pain, horror, and despair of all the deaths of the world.  He bore it right down into hell.  And he came back, changed, unrecognizable, but still the same.  He came back, still hungry, still real, and he met his old friends and asked them, “Hey guys, have you got anything to eat?”  They didn’t even figure out who he was until he brought out the fish and the bread.  They couldn’t see him in the divine transfigurement; they saw him in the humanity and the hunger.  Fully human, fully divine, fully hungry.  Jesus died because he lived, as do we all.  Jesus died so that we may learn to live as if we’re not afraid of death, so that we may learn to love his filthy, beautiful world and all the filthy, beautiful people to the end and back again.

The Betrayal and Scandal of Easter

The people who say the church is only a feel-good anesthetic for unhappy people, or instructions on how to enter heaven, haven’t attended Good Friday mass at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church.  We take our sorrow palpable, raw, and real.   In the past, I’ve met grief and salvation in the darkened sanctuary.  This year, Good Friday brought me to my knees, literally and metaphorically.  After we read Mark’s gospel with various speakers, our priest confessed how difficult it is to truly act out the passion, to really take on the characters of Jesus, or Judas, or Peter, or the crowds screaming, “Crucify!”  It’s hard to really, truly, BE those people in their time.  We know the ending and we don’t want to hang out in the sadness of Good Friday.  Even those of us who love the darkness and find profound meaning in the loss, still know that the sun will rise on Easter Sunday, the stone will be rolled away, and the tomb will be empty.  We pretend to be shocked, sorrowful, angry; we call upon those feelings, with varying degrees of effort.  Is it a betrayal to pretend we are betraying God?

Betrayal--what does it mean?  How does it feel?  What have I betrayed? Sitting in the dim, quiet church, I watched my mental movie of the nasty things I’ve done in my life, the bullying, the gossiping, the playing-the-victim, the lying, the denial (even to myself), the moments where I stood in the middle of self-made chaos, with tears in my eyes and my helpless hands in the air, saying, “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”  I watched the moments I’ve hid deep down come to the surface, waiting for me to acknowledge them.  I felt at one with the screaming, blood-thirsty crowds, with weak Peter, who denied the Lord three times before the cock crew, with traitor Judas, who, because of greed, jealousy, demonic possession, or God’s great plan, betrayed his master and friend for a pocket full of silver.  I sat in the dim sanctuary, shaking, lip quivering, tears rolling down my face, wishing it was even darker so I could be free to kneel and sob without anyone noticing.  Once again, I was laid low and stripped bare in the eyes of the Lord.

I waited, listening to the quiet sounds of crying and sniffling around me; I waited to kneel and pray.  Someone turned the dim lights to fully dark and I let it go.  Kneeling, I sobbed quietly, only praying, “Forgive”.  Fr. Tim’s message, his reason for taking us into the dark corners of our soul, is that Jesus went there, too.  We cannot understand the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” until we recognize the times we have forsaken God.  We cannot understand the grand sacrifice of the Son of God dying as a criminal, until we acknowledge the criminal within us and allow those dark, hidden, moldy, disgusting parts of our soul to be loved.  Jesus died for the people who screamed for his blood, for the disciple who denied him, and the lost one who betrayed him.  He descended into hell; he can descend into our own hell, too.  When we go there honestly, we can find God.

I slowly walked forward and kneeled before the cross, praying, “Forgive…”  Forgive me for the things I’ve been carrying, the sins of which I cannot speak, the sins which I constantly attempt to live down, the buried pettiness, the thirst for the blood of my perceived enemies.  Forgive…  and forgiveness was granted.  It was always there; I just needed to find the courage to ask for it.

The thing I love about worship in the Episcopal church, is that it’s personal and corporate.  I had a mystical, profound, personal experience between myself and God, initiated by common prayer and the words of my friend and priest.  I sat weeping, bare and naked before my God, but I was not alone.  In my community, a group of people wept with me in the darkness, crying for forgiveness of whatever transgressions lay heavy on their hearts.  As I laid my heart open to God, my fellow Christians enveloped me in shared grief, in shared repentance, and in shared love.

That’s the incredible scandal of the cross and the unbelievable salvation of grace.  Christ knows us each personally, separately, in all our triumphs and failures, in all our loyalty and all our betrayal.  Christ knows us all personally, yet he died for all of us, corporately, together.  We are individuals, but we are not alone.  The only thing I can do in the face of this scandalous love is kneel down and accept it, and rise to walk out of the dark, embraced by my friends, my community, and my church.

Alleluia, He is Risen!  Happy Easter!

Grief, God, and Good Friday

Grief and God live close together in my heart.  It may be strange to associate the ultimate love in which we live and move and have our being, the ultimate dance of life, with the pain and loss, but the feelings echo each other, deep in my gut.  Both grief and grace begin with an overwhelming emotion that strips me bare, leaves me weeping and honest, and makes me new, again and again.

Grief came to me first through the loss of my father.  By most accounts, my father’s death at the age of 59, after a long and valiant fight with cancer, was not a tragedy.  My dad died surrounded by his family and at peace with the world.  He was so peaceful and wise that the hospital chaplain stopped by multiple times, just so Dad could cheer him up with his good humor and clear, witty vision.  My dad didn’t die in turmoil; we knew he loved us and he knew we loved him.  But he still died, and it still sucked--big time.

The moment I got the call, the one we were waiting for, the 3:00 am phone call to say, “Don’t rush home; he’s gone.  Take your time and make arrangements,” grief enveloped me.  It hurt, physically squeezing my heart in a cold, death-grip.   I felt like someone ripped open my guts and twisted them.  Although I knew the time was coming, I wasn’t prepared for the gut-punch and the heartache.  All my defenses crumbled and I was raw, open, naked to the emotion.  Somewhere in the midst of the pain, I thought, “This is what it feels like.”  I curled up in a ball and sobbed.  

In the midst of gut-wrenching grief, I also felt grace. During the days following my father’s death, I felt held in a divine grace.  I couldn’t figure out what was holding me together, but something was stitching my pain into scars to cover the holes in my soul.  Something was caring for me--I have to believe it was God.  Over time, grief mellowed; I became used to it like an ache.  An ache that stabs sometimes.  The death of a friend or a beloved pet kicks up the grief again, sharp and quick.  Sometimes, it comes without provocation; from the middle of nowhere, grief knocks me down, with a vengeance and very little warning.  When the pain surprised me, I recognize it.  I think, “Here it is again.”

When God invades my life, it follows the same pattern.  God-filled moments begin by knocking me down, breathless, as I think in the back of my mind, “This is what it feels like.” At first it is a shock, and later it reverberates with the same vibration.  The first time grace shocked me silent was on Good Friday.  Good Friday and Easter have an extra personal pain for me; it is the last time I saw my father alive.  Between Holy Week and May 7, the anniversary of his death, I hold my personal period of remembrance and mourning.  So, on my first Good Friday in the Episcopal Church, I was ready for the grief.  And through the pain, came God.

As I sat in the darkened, bare church, listening to the Gospel reading and the moving sermon, I was overcome. In the image of Jesus’s final sacrifice for all of mankind, I could feel my grief and the grief of the world, bound by love.  God-made-man, the divine incarnate, gave up his power to the evil of the world, laid down his life in scandalous surrender, crying out for his God.  Within in this exquisite pain, there was no rationalization, no mental gymnastics, no search for meaning.   I wept, my throat closed up, and my heart broke open.  The only real thought in my head was, “make me worthy of this sacrifice, Jesus.”  I knew Jesus had saved me, with all my pettiness, selfishness, and brokenness. I longed to be worthy of the immense gift of God’s love.  As I listened to sounds of soft crying in the dark, God held me in my grief, stitching my scars together with love.

Since then, grace overwhelms me at unexpected moments, cracking me open to let in the light, tearing my crutches away.  Sometimes it knocks me over, breathless.  Sometimes grace pins me down, holds me momentarily in eternity, vulnerable and raw, in order to accept the love of God.  Sometimes it is an ache, a longing, that calls me out of my worry and preoccupations into connection with the divine. In my busy, daily existence, sometimes I have to be knocked sideways by emotion, in order to notice life. I need that heart-opening, overwhelming, twisting in my gut in order to pay attention. Moments of grief and grace reverberate through my life, but especially during Holy Week. On Good Friday, as I contemplate the scandal of the cross, the death of meaning, the shared grief of fellow Christians twists open my clenched heart, and the grace of God flows in, readying me for resurrection.