“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.
No comments:
Post a Comment