April 6, 2007
Good Friday
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
The Second Word: Today, Paradise
Thank you for inviting me and my congregation, Judson Memorial Church, from downtown to be with you on Good Friday. This is a new experience for all of us - and therefore I want to honor the newness of it by saying something that might be new, or at least something old stated in an even older way. You have given me the words of Jesus from the cross, which say, "Today, I will be with you in Paradise." I think he meant it. I think he meant it not just about that day but about this day, too. I think he meant nothing less than the presence of heaven on earth. I think the great mystery of our faith is the incarnation and that we have only begun to imagine what it means that heaven is on earth, that spirit is body, that time is eternity, that treasure takes on earthen vessels, that the ordinary is the extraordinary, and that life follows death, not vice versa. We have only begun to understand that our politics and our bodies are holy. We have only begun to understand how good we are, by the grace of God.
We have turned the heaven and hell conversation into a moralistic, muddy, do-I-get-in-or-not conversation. The punishmentalists in all of our faiths (fundamentalists make them sound too good) have acted as though heaven is a reward and earth a punishment that is the prelude to hell as punishment. I don't think Jesus said this or meant this. Instead, he said, Today, paradise.
Why is our heaven so small? Why do we all have candidates for those who get in and those who do not? Sex offenders obviously don't get into heaven, right? (Implication: certainly none of us good married people have ever abused our bodies or others. We are better than them.) Certainly undocumented, illegal people deserve to be detained or deported. They, unlike us, don't have "Citizenship." The person who ripped us off or stole our mother's purse: he or she is not a candidate for heaven, right? The moral distortions about heaven and hell often deteriorate into self-righteous, let-me-put-you-down-so-I-can-look-good conversations. They are not from Jesus. Today, paradise, you, me, he said. He did not ask you to present a resume before you could get in, unless that resume included letters of recommendations from the poor.
Our facile appreciation of paradise, our moralistic and self-serving distortion of it, is based in a larger and more serious theological error. Many erroneously see this holy day as the day that Jesus died for our sins. I think not. I think Jesus died with our sins. There is a big difference. In the one, Jesus is not really human but instead God, the pure and holy. In the other, Jesus is really human and has his own faults, which he takes to his death. In "atonement," everybody is a bad guy, with Jesus overdoing his virtue, and humanity under-doing its. In "At One Ment", there is room for that great character, the shadow, who is often eliminated from both Christian and American plays. Indeed, one guru says, "The problem with America is that it thinks it has no shadow." The problem with many people's Good Friday is that they hog the shadow: "We are so bad that Jesus had to die because of it." Why not share the wealth of the shadow? There is wealth in shadow: it is the wealth of not needing to be self-righteous. It is the wealth of genuine humility, not faked modesty but the real thing. It is plain old ignorance about how we should deal with people who cross the border or people who rape - but not immediately going to the distorted or distancing place. Jesus was God because he tried to get close to sin. He didn't say that border crossers should go away so much as that we should enlarge our hearts in hospitality. He didn't tell prostitutes at the edge of the city to stop working. He had a meal with them. He was bad at self-promotion. He was Godly in the way he refused to distance or distort humanity. He was also human. Why not let Jesus be human and have a shadow, too? Fully divine and fully human is what the early Christians at Chalcedon agreed he was. By this path we also become one and bring along our goodness and our humanness. "At One Ment" is an important human moment, as well as a divine one. We have to go way back in our own histories to be new!
As one who gives a lot of eulogies, I have come up with a formula. The formula is this: three virtues, one vice. The better the person, like Jesus, the harder it is to give a good eulogy. Recently, a matriarch of my acquaintance died after wowing us at her deathbed with what at first glance was a virtue. She was intibated, could not speak, but could write. She wanted desperately to tell us something; you could tell by what was left of her body and its language. We gave her a pad. On it she scrawled, "water." We thought she was thirsty. We told her she was fully hydrated, just not by mouth. We thought we had comforted her. We were wrong. She returned to her vigorous "no" head turning. We tried again. She scrawled, "Water …the plants." Even on her deathbed, this last of the Samurai was telling us what to do and for whom and what to care. You could call it a virtue; I call it a vice. On our deathbeds, those of us who think the point of life is to care for others, which it is, might learn to receive care. In fact, the people who can't receive often can't really give. We often oppress the poor by not equalizing the giving and receiving in charity. Thus, Jesus: the ideal human. The best one I know. In my terms, my savior. But not necessarily perfect. He knew anger and turned over a table or two. He wasn't as good at receiving as he was at giving. I think he'd be very hard to live with on a daily basis. His shadow was the excess of his virtue. And such it often is.
When I beg for Jesus to have his own shadow, I am also begging for room for each of us to do the same. We can get over that Atlas thing and let somebody else water the plants from time to time. The late William Sloane Coffin put it this way: "I'm not ok and you're not ok and that's ok." The second our great nation realizes it is not perfect we will not have to fight so many wars to save the world. We will permit ourselves to be ashamed and to have shadows, instead of projecting them onto the "dark" world that needs our help. From there we can be forgiven; from self-justifying, self-promoting perfection we cannot.
God permitted Jesus to be human. The great spiritual gets its hands dirty. God becomes human. Encarnacion. Christ con carne. Christ in the meat. God is in the meat of things. There is now treasure in earthen vessels; the world is no longer divided into the pure and the impure, the spiritual and the material, the eternal and the temporal. Our bodily lives are no longer so dirty. Politics, money, and sex are not bad: they are earthly experiences meant to be holy. God came down to kiss the world and be with it and in it. That's why we say Jesus is fully human, fully divine in the Chalcedon formulation. The Kenotic tradition of Russian orthodoxy, with its emphasis on the meat, flesh, and grounded-ness of Christ goes even further, saying an even louder yes to today, here, now, Paradise.
When Jesus said, "I thirst", on the cross, he meant it. When he said Today, Paradise, he also meant that. Amen.
