“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
So says the White Queen to Alice.
I confess to finding myself turning more and more to Alice as, with each year passes, the Good News of the Gospel seems to become just a little more absurd. And I’m not talking about doctrine, here. That a human body, crucified, dead and buried was not simply reanimated, but transformed and made fit for life with God, such that the Risen Lord could appear and disappear, could, indeed, ascend into heaven, has strained the credulity of Christianity’s critics from its earliest days. The preaching of the Cross, says Paul, is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks.
No, Christian doctrine has always been difficult.
What I mean is the Christian ethic. The ethic announced every Maundy Thursday: A new commandment I give you, that you should love one another. An ethic symbolically expressed every Maundy Thursday with a basin, a towel, and some water. This love is not a warm fuzzy, but a love that stoops to serve. A love, that Chrsitians ostensibly believe, really does not simply serve friend and enemy a like, but a love that is woven through the fabric of all creation, a love, as Dante says, that moves the stars.
That ethic, as much as the doctrine to which it gives voice (no, you don’t get to divorce Creed from practice), is, every day, just a little harder to see, just a little harder to hear, just a little harder to believe.
What is in its place? Although Christendom’s ghost still haunts our culture and our imagination, in place is an ethic that worships power. In such an ethic, political leadership is the ability to thwart the aims of your opponents and then continually humiliating them in defeat, reducing them both professionally and personally to laughing stocks. This approach to politicial leadership—explored and endorsed by Warren Kinsella in his book, Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics—knows no party bounds. All decry it; all practice it.
Although Christendom still haunts our imaginations, it is an ethic that says torture of our enemies is justifiable. Or, if we hate torture because it is up-close-and-messy, we’ll contract it out to others whose hypocrisy level is decidedly lower. Or, worse, we’ll ask our leader to sign a piece of paper that permit a solider in Virginia to pilot a drone in Pakistan that will launch a missile that will kill not only one man, but all the people in his house, it will not discriminate on age, sex, or criminal activity, because he might—MIGHT—be planning a terrorist attack against us. The current President, and I know many admire him in Canada, came to the White House promising to turn a critical eye on such practices. He has done. And he has expanded them beyond the most feverish dreams of the most hawkish Republican.
The worship of power in politics is not a party problem. It is our problem. We are, all of us, implicated.
Of course, picking on politicians is a safe move—even if I pick on politicians we might happen to like. But Christian observance is no different. The Duke University theologian and ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas, who is, by the way, a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an episcopal parish in North Carolina, is fond of saying that mainline Christians, having given up on the doctrines of the faith being true, still want to harness what is useful for their social agenda. Just so we’re clear, he’s speaking from the inside. Much the same could be said for more conservative Christians who might not have not given up on the truth of Christian faith, but for whom that truth doesn’t often impinge upon an increasingly peculiar social and political vision. We—now you know which “inside” applies to me—may continue to assent to the Creed, but the reality of our confession stops at the church door, Sunday at noon.
Christians too have found their witness compromised by drinking from the same poisoned chalice as the wider culture.
Power is the object of devotion. Religion is useful in the service of power. We are all neo-pagans now. We are back in pagan Rome. And we, with each day, find it that much harder to believe that the world could be any other way. We find it that much harder to think and act as though it’s not violence all the way down to very quanta of our universe.
At our best, we are like Edie Stall in the movie, A History of Violence, who prays and serves meatloaf and tries to maintain the illusion of peace in the family. At our worst, we are like her husband, Tom, who knows that if that illusion of peace is to be maintained, he has to be willing to be just that much more ruthless than his enemies. We’re not bad people. We don’t want to eliminate our friends. We’re just like Michael Corleone in the Godfather II, who gives us a glimpse into his own leadership style when he says to his consigliere, Tom Hayden, “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies.”
Edie Stall—horrified at her husband’s capacity for killing, but prayerfully acquiescing to its necessity. Tom Stall—a peaceful man ready to do what he has to do to protect his family. Michael Corleone—the mobster who can’t get clean because his enemies keep coming. They are cinematic personifications of what the Bible calls the principalities and powers. Those spiritual forces whose power lies in their ability to frighten us to death. Who call us to embrace them because, they say, they will destroy us if we don’t. Who insist that they are not evil. They are just part and parcel of the deepest structures of the world. They are the way the world really is.
And here comes Jesus, with a pitcher, a basin, and a towel. Here comes Jesus saying love each other. Here comes Jesus, showing with a towel, a basin, and a pitcher that our embrace of violence, our love of power, is to embrace literally, nothing. Here comes Jesus, refusing the trappings of power, looking—well really, weak.
And it will only get worse. Tonight—On this very night is how we will pray in just a few moments—he will be handed over to his enemies. On this very night he will remain silent before his accusers. On this very night he will begin his final task.
And what does John say? John says this hour is the hour for which Christ came. John insists that tonight and tomorrow, in the midst of the most horrific violence inflicted on a human being, it is that human being who is in control. John says that when he utters his last words tomorrow afternoon, it is not a defeated, “It’s over,” but a triumphant “It is accomplished.”
John says, here, on the cross, Jesus displays the true power that exposes the false power of the principalities. Here, John says, in the power of self-emptying love, Jesus defeats his enmies, his father’s enemies, our enemies. Here, on the cross, we see the love that is written on the fabric of the universe. The love that is, to borrow from Narnia, the deeper magic that was written before the dawn of time. The love that moves the stars.
The love that comes to us tonight in a basin, a pitcher and a towel. A love that bids us follow. A love that presents a vision of human being that is not just useful, but true.