Becoming...

Ash Wednesday

February 10, 2016

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

To paraphrase the apostle Paul here he says: “For our sake God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”  

I suspect this is one of the Scriptural bases of the early church motto, expressed by both St. Irenaeus and St. Athanasius: “God became human so that human beings might become God.”  In other words, in Christ, God self-empties and becomes flesh, taking on the broken, distorted, ego-centric, false selves we think we are.  He identifies with us so completely in order that we may identify with him, and thus in him realize our own true nature as God’s Image and even participants in the divine nature itself.

So there is a two-fold movement here.  In Christ, God comes “down” into our existence; and in Christ we are “raised up” into God’s life.  It is the same two-fold movement that we reflect in the Sacrament of Baptism.  We go down into the water in a symbolic death; we are raised up out of the water in a symbolic new life.  

Jesus Christ comes into the world to reveal our true nature to us, and to reveal, and give us access to, who we truly are.  In doing so, he absorbs, takes on, and bears away all the lies we habitually tell ourselves about ourselves.  The lies that we are worthless, insignificant, ugly, diseased, broken, lost, rejected, doomed, weak, and unfree: he takes them and wears them on like a garment.  We all do.  The difference is that we don’t know they are lies.  We choose to exist by our fear, anger, and shame, and build a world based on these lies.  

He comes to witness to and endure the horrible consequences of those lies, which are the kind of systemic, institutional violence he meets in the Roman Empire — representing all human political and economic orders based on exploitation, victimization, extraction, domination, threats, and force.  The supreme manifestation of this hellish regime is the practice of crucifixion, the excruciating execution of someone by torture and humiliation, reserved for individuals who challenged the regime’s power.  Crucifixion was an organized lynching, designed to inspire terror in an oppressed population.  

Jesus joins the ranks of the damned.  He willingly becomes one of the scapegoats that society regularly grinds up and spits out, as a way for human leaders to artificially create unity.  He takes all of this on, like the way the goat on Yom Kippur has all the people’s sins placed on its head by the High Priest.  As the goat in that ritual was then driven out into the wilderness to a demon named Azazel, so also Christ goes down into death, even to hell.  So there is no place in human experience or possibility that he does not inhabit.  There is nothing we can go through that is so horrible and inhuman that Jesus Christ is not there.  There is nothing that is able to separate us from the love of God.

And by the sheer weight and substance of his truth, goodness, and beauty, Christ liberates, restores, redeems, and saves everything he touches.  When the early church confesses that “God saves what God becomes,” they mean that by taking on human life, by becoming human in Jesus Christ, God is revealing our true nature as saved, blessed, cherished and loved creatures.

To follow Jesus Christ is to follow on this particular journey.  It is to venture into the darkness.  It is to recognize and acknowledge our own complicity in the horror we have turned the world into.  For we are not passive spectators of what Jesus does; we are participants with him.  That’s what he means when he instructs every disciple to take up a cross and follow him.  He means that the superstructure of lies that has spread like cancer across the consciousness of every human will have to be crucified, that is, it will have to be scraped, chipped, scoured, scrubbed, dissolved, bleached, sanded, and peeled off.

That is another meaning of the image of baptism: washing.  Purification.  The removal of dirt and defilement.

That’s why Paul lapses into a catalogue of suffering here: “afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger….”   Not because he is a masochist who loves pain, or because he hates the body, or any such nonsense.  But living in conformity to your truest deepest Self, revealed in Jesus, will put you in collision and out of synch with the world.  Paul says this discontinuity is to be met “by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness….”

He is basically saying that the old self does not go easily or quietly.  But one way or the other, it will go, because it isn’t real.  We need to attach ourselves to Jesus Christ, who reveals and represents our true nature, who leads us through into the Light.

And Paul insists that this is something that is happening now, and needs to be happening now.  If we wait until we are dead to know salvation, we are lost.  If we wait until the end of time when Jesus returns to know the Kingdom of God, we are finished.  “Now is the acceptable time!” he exclaims.  “Now is the day of salvation!”  

The living present is the only time we have; it is the only time that is real.  If we simply remember Christ as a historical figure from the past then he isn’t real to us; if we only look forward to his Coming in the future, then he isn’t real to us.  If we want to get real we have to follow him and know him now, in this moment.

The season of Lent is given to reconnect us to the now of Christ.  Not this this isn’t something we are doing all the time.  But we have these liturgical seasons as reminders of the different dimensions of the spiritual life and journey.  In Lent we get in touch with the downward movement of this journey, and of the need to relinquish and renounce the destructive falsehoods in our lives.  Even Jesus had to take these on so they could be offered up.  We too have to recognize how far we have strayed from the truth of our blessed and good created nature.

In the end we will see all that immolated and evaporated on the cross of Jesus, and we will see how we emerge with him in the new life of resurrection.

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