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Faith

The Gospel: Part 1, Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA)

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I’d like to start a series of posts exploring the question, “What is the Gospel?”

What is interesting, and perhaps more so, frustrating, is that nowhere in Scripture do we get a nice, concise answer to this question. Or perhaps, more pointedly, none that explains, to our satisfaction, what precisely happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Most of the time, we are merely told that the gospel is simply the good news that these things happened. The gospel is that Jesus died for us and that he was raised for us. This is what we see in the most straightforward account of the gospel we have in the New Testament.

1 Corinthians 15:1-7:

1 Now I want you to understand, brothers and sisters, the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, 2 through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.

3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures 4 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

The gospel here is equated with three essential events: Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. And these events are attested to by witnesses to whom the risen Christ appeared. Whether these references to Christ’s post resurrection appearances are part of “the gospel” is unclear. What is clear is that the gospel is centrally about the fact that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and then was raised on the third day; and all of this according to the scriptures, which is itself another conundrum — nowhere in the Old Testament does it plainly say the Messiah would die or be raised on the third day.

But aside from the question of how the gospel is “in accordance with the scriptures”, what many of us are looking for is why. Why did Jesus (have to) die? Why was Jesus raised? Why is any of this good news for us?

Penal Substitutionary Atonement

By far the most familiar explanation, at least in Evangelical circles, is known as penal substitutionary atonement (PSA for short).

It goes something like this: 

  1. We are all sinners.
  2. And because of our sin we are deserving of God’s wrath, which is God’s just and righteous response to sin.
  3. But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus comes to take our place. Instead of God taking out his wrath on us, he takes it out on Jesus. This is why Jesus had to die. Jesus came to die as our substitute.
  4. If you believe this, that Jesus died for you, then God will count his death on your behalf and you will be reconciled to God.

This account of the gospel is “penal” because it is largely about punishment. The sinner must be punished for the sins they have committed against a holy God. The only punishment severe enough to satisfy God’s wrath is death, which leads to the substitutionary part.

It is “substitutionary” because Jesus takes our place. He dies so that we don’t have to. His death satisfies God’s wrath and substitutes for ours.

Lastly, it is “atonement” because through Jesus’ death we are made “at one” with God (this is what atonement literally means — “at-one-ment”). We no longer live under the condemnation of God’s wrath. Our sins have been paid for and we are now brought into a new relationship with God.

In short, PSA says that Christ died for us (substitutionary) to take upon himself the just punishment for our sins (penal) in order to reconcile us to God (atonement).

I imagine for many of us, this just is the gospel. There isn’t really anything to talk about.

What This Series is About

But for others, you may have questions about this particular understanding of Christ’s death. In my case, there have been things about it that have always made me uneasy. At first it had to do with the notion of God requiring (human) death as payment for sin. But later it also had to do with whether this account is “in accordance with the scriptures.” On this last point, there has been more and more debate among scholars as to whether PSA is the best way to account for the biblical witness.

This series will be my attempt to collect my scattered thoughts and findings into one place to help me (and hopefully anyone reading this) come to a better understanding of what Scripture seems to say is the good news announced to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

One final note for this introductory post: I don’t want to belittle PSA. Hopefully I have done it justice in explaining its key tenets above. My intent is not to attack PSA, but rather to explore how holding only to PSA as the entirety of the gospel can end up alienating us from other passages in Scripture that may be pointing in other directions regarding what God has done for us in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

With that, feel free to comment below about your own thoughts/observations/questions about PSA or the Gospel as you have come to know it.

Virtues

Hope: Part 3, Hope and Despair

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As we saw in our last post, hope is not to be mistaken with optimism. If this is the case, then neither is pessimism to be taken as the opposite of hope.

Both optimism and pessimism depend upon possibilities latent within us to affect the future. The optimist places more stock in human potential while the pessimist not so much.

But hope operates on a different register. It does not traffic in human possibilities, but rather in the God who is “able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). What this does is reconfigure our usual way of understanding how the present relates to the future.

We often envision the future as the end result of a long chain of cause and effect events. But the logic of hope does not work from past and present conditions to forecast the future. It does not build a prospectus of what will be based on what can be reasonably deduced from what is. Hope works in precisely the opposite direction. It imagines the present in light of the future. Hope trusts in a future that is received as a gift not of our own making and lives according to the expectation that that future has the power to erupt in and disrupt the present.

The Substance of Hope

Hope does not extrapolate from our current circumstances to discern a plausible future, but rather, extrapolates from what faith holds to be true to envision a future that transcends what we assume possible.

This, I think, is what is meant by the curious phrase found in the King James translation of Hebrews 11:1 — “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Faith is the substance. It holds the pieces that point us to the future. Through faith, we confess that God raised Jesus from the dead and before that, delivered Israel out of Egypt. These are not the result of human achievement. These are the works of a God who has possibilities beyond what we can empirically expect. As such, these are the “stuff”, the substance, of hope. They are glimpses of what God has in store for us that give us “reason” to hope. And so what we believe to be true through faith is, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, the evidence of a future we cannot yet see.

If we comeback to hope and its opposite, we could say that the proper antagonist of hope is not pessimism but despair. Despair is what happens when optimism must finally admit defeat and pessimism is followed to its utter and desperate conclusion. Despair is what results when we realize that if the only evidence we have of the future is the fruit of our past then we are, as they say, up Shit Creek without a paddle.

We despair, in part, because we have lost the ability to carry within us the very stuff that makes hope possible.

Scripture as a Work of Hope

More and more, as a culture, we are feeling the weight of this despair. Studies suggest there has been a substantial increase in mental health issues in the past decade. Deaths of despair (suicide, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses) are on the rise. Some experts go so far as to suggest that this surge in despair ought to be considered a public health crisis.

Here is where I think Scripture, in its very form, has a word to speak to us. For what we find in its pages is that hope and despair are intricately entwined. Though they may be opposites, hope finds its birthplace in despair. One place we see this is in the very opening chapter of the Bible. Simply put, what God does in creation is bring order out of its opposite, disorder. God makes something out of nothing; brings light out of darkness.

At its core Genesis 1 is a story about a God who brings forth hope out of despair. Despair, like that dark and chaotic void “in the beginning,” serves as the womb from which hope is born. This then sets the stage for the rest of the biblical story.

The Bible is very much a work of hope. It is the concerted effort of a people experiencing overwhelming despair carefully collecting and curating all those glimpses of God’s past work to produce a record of evidence that is the soil from which hope springs forth.

Despair, Scripture teaches us, is the very place in which we find the God of hope.

Virtues

Hope: Part 2, Hoping Against Hope

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The title of this post comes from a verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes the faith of Abraham as “hoping against hope”, (Rom. 4:18).

It is a curious phrase. What does it mean to hope against hope?

The simplest way to understand it is that hoping against hope is “hoping for something that is most likely an impossibility.” Or we could think about it in terms of two kinds of hope. That is, what Paul has in mind is one kind of hope hoping against another kind of hope.

“Natural” Hope

The first type of hope we can describe as a “natural” hope. The kind of hope we have when January rolls around or when we enter a new stage in life. In sports, it is the hope that springs eternal at the start of every new season. We have an expectation that what lies ahead promises something better than what we have today. Hope is born when we marry this expectation with the belief that we have what it takes to bring about that better future.

This kind of hope is largely about reaching a desired outcome and having the grit to overcome any obstacles that come our way. It is tied up with our capacity to attain what we set out to accomplish and our fortitude to persevere through adversity. When the chips are down, hope names our persistence to believe we can still achieve our goals.

Really, this is akin to how we usually think about optimism.

And so optimism, we might say, is the kind of hope we are called to hope against.

“Unnatural” Hope

This second kind of hope is not like optimism in that it is not “natural.” The desired outcome we hope for does not naturally emerge from the character of the present. We do not hope for something that can be reasonably extrapolated from current conditions. Rather our hope is in a future good that only God can give to us. In this way, Christian hope is “unnatural.” Or rather, it is super natural. Super, simply meaning, “above or beyond.” The hope that hopes against hope is a hope that goes beyond or above optimism. 

This kind of hope hopes not only when the chips are down, but even when optimism has lost all reason to hope. It is here where hope is just getting started. Hope begins where optimism ends.

In this way, hope is made possible by faith. As the Apostle Paul would have it, hope is born in the presence of the God in whom we believe, “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist,” (Rom. 4:17). So to hope against hope is to not allow our hope to be dictated by positive circumstances or limited by the promise of human progress. To hope against hope is to keep the hope even when we no longer have sufficient reasons to do so. We hope against what the present data tells us.

Hope is a Hard Ask

And this, of course, is what makes hope so hard. We live in a time where our vision of what is possible is entirely shaped by the hope that science, technology, and reason possess within themselves the capacity to make all things new (but mostly we just end up with all new things). And so, our default setting as a culture is to look askew at any hope that hopes above or beyond what can be achieved through human ingenuity and empirical know-how. We dismiss it as naive or Pollyannaish.

Even as a person of faith, it is difficult to shake the all too glaring question, “What’s the point of hoping for something you can’t accomplish or achieve by your own effort?” At best, it encourages an ineffectual passivity as we bide our time for the great by and by. At worst, it is delusional and traps us in an endless cycle of denial.

These are questions we’ll want to explore in the coming posts.

Virtues

Hope: Part 1, And the Greatest of These is Hope

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In the Christian tradition faith, hope and love are known as the three theological virtues.

To say that hope is the greatest of these may feel a bit off. If you are familiar with the Apostle Paul’s great ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13 you may know that it ends with these words: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Love is the greatest, not hope.

But the point St. Paul was making is that love can be considered the greatest because it will be the last one standing. There will come a time when faith and hope will no longer be needed. Not so with love. There will always be love. Why is that? First and foremost, because God is love. And when that day comes when God is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28) and we are welcomed home into the eternal embrace of God — the everlasting love shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit — that is all there will be. Love.

But until that day arrives what sustains our love is faith and hope. Both traffic in the unseen and the not yet. As we wait for what we cannot yet see and yearn for what we do not yet have, faith allows us to trust in what is promised and in so doing, opens the door to hope. Hope, in turn, animates our lives toward the fulfillment of that promise.

Without faith, there is nothing to hope for. Conversely, without hope, faith is listless. Or, maybe we can put it this way: faith without hope is dead. So when hope runs dry, our faith begins to languish. But not only does our faith suffer, but also our resolve to act in love. 

A helpful way to see the relationship between these theological virtues is through the analogy of a journey. Among the many routes before us faith is what allows us to see and choose the path marked out for us in Christ; the one Jesus walked before us and continues to walk ahead of us. Love is both what infuses each step we take and the end toward which we walk. Hope is that which keeps us moving. It compels us forward as we anticpate the loving end for which we are destined.

And this, I think, is the greatness of hope. To love in the way Christ calls us to love — namely, to love even our enemies — is an act of hope. It is hope for our enemy and hope in God to vindicate us should our enemy choose to repay our love with hatred and malice. We need hope because hope enlivens us to stay the course (to keep the faith) even when (especially when) the way of love gets hard. 

All this to say, we don’t want to downplay love. Love is indeed the greatest in that it will last through eternity. But there are times in this journey we call the Christian life, where one of faith, hope and love will take on a greater role. Could it be that in our time, when the fulfillment of God’s promises seems so far off and we find it a struggle to keep on keeping on, that the greatest for us is hope?

Good Life

Suffering and the Good Life

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When we think about suffering in relation to the good life it helps to make some distinctions about the different kinds of suffering we experience as well as the different connotations that attend the word ‘good.’

A major component of what we commonly think of as a good life would be the happy life. The happy life, as we are using it there, is a life of comfort and ease spared of any and all kinds of suffering. In a way, it is a natural longing we all ought to have. We all perceive a kind of innate enmity between our happiness and those things that cause us to suffer. For someone to express that they desire a life full of suffering would be cause for concern. We all want to be happy and part of our quest for happiness involves preventing or minimizing our exposure to suffering.

The tragic irony, however, is that in our pursuit of securing the happy life for ourselves, we often end up increasing the possibility of suffering for others. As Americans, we all know those famous words embedded in our nation’s constitution:

Constitution of the United States

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The problem arises when our unalienable right to pursue our happiness is challenged by someone else’s, or some other nation’s unalienable right to pursue theirs. On the global level, most often what happens is war. Nations war against one another for many reasons, but a constant and enduring one is to protect or acquire those resources that will best ensure happiness in the long run. Human history is, in many ways, simply the long, bloody march of one war after another in the pursuit of happiness.

Of course, this plays out often enough in our personal lives as well. The pursuit of our own individual happiness often comes at the expense of someone’s else happiness, whether we are cognizant of that reality or not. The things that bring us happiness — the food we eat, the clothes we buy, the phones we stare at, the list goes on and on — all come to us on the backs of others who must bear the burden of making those goods and services accessible, convenient and affordable for us.

In the Christian tradition we are taught not to think of happiness as a right, but rather, as a gift. It is not something we pursue, but something that comes to us, that we receive. What is more, what we find in the biblical narrative is that ultimately, the truly happy life is unattainable for us living as we do in the world as it is and not yet as it will be. That is, the horizon of human history is the Second Coming of Christ. It is the day the prophets of old testified about:

Micah 4:1-4

1 In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s temple
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
2 and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
3 He shall judge between many peoples
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more;
4 but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid,
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

The prophetic vision of happiness captured in the poignant image of all sitting under their own vine and fig trees is set against the stilling of warring nations. It is difficult to say whether swords are beaten into plowshares because provision has been made such that all can enjoy happiness under their own vine and fig tress, or that all can enjoy happiness because weapons of mass destruction have been turned into tools for fishing. What we can say is that this day that is yet to come is a day made possible through the gracious hand of God. We do not bring this day about by our own ingenuity and achievement. It only comes about through the good and faithful judgment of God.

And until this day comes to pass, the council of Scripture advises us to expect, and in some ways welcome, suffering.

As St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Philippians:

Philippians 1:29

29 For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for him as well,

To be clear, suffering for Christ is not about the kind of suffering inflicted on us through circumstance and sheer dumb luck. As if we are to consider it a privilege to have to suffer through cancer or to suffer the loss of a loved one or to have to suffer the calamitous fallout of a natural disaster. The suffering Paul has in mind is a kind of suffering that comes to us because we have chosen to give up our “right” to doggedly maximize our happiness quotient in this life.

This is not to say that happiness does not matter. The Christian ethic does not follow a kind of stoic denial of pleasures. It is not about detaching ourselves from what makes us happy. What the story of Christ reveals to us is that God desires our happiness and yet we must wait — wait for that day in which all of God’s promises foretold in Scripture will absolutely and fully come to pass. Our lives are lived in anticipation now of God being faithful to that promise then.

In the meantime we are given something of a foretaste. The death and resurrection of our Lord is, as the Apostle Paul puts it, the firstfruits pointing to that long awaited harvest (1 Cor. 15) — that what God did for Jesus in raising him up out of the grave is a kind of down payment assuring us that God will one day make good on his word and do the same for us.

So the suffering we are to expect and, as Paul seems to intimate, welcome, is the suffering that comes to us because we live in eager anticipation of a day that the world is yet unable to see. If we see happiness as something that ultimately will be realized fully in the future, we are less anxious about maximizing our own happiness in the present. But in doing so we may often find ourselves on the other side of the happiness equation. As others pursue happiness, we may feel like we are losing out and, in some cases, may suffer precisely because we have been given the short end of the stick due to the determination of others in securing their own happiness.

This suffering is tied to that sinking feeling we are not getting all that we assume we have a right to. That we are being looked over. That our labor and care in keeping with what we believe is good and right is not being recognized. In Paul’s day, this suffering is synonymous with persecution. In its most extreme form this is the suffering of the martyrs, who gave their lives in service to the promise that what was taken from them will one day be restored; thus, enabling them to risk love of enemy even when such love required them to suffer to the point of death. This is the most extreme response of a world unable to envision the good news at the heart of the Christian revelation about Jesus, the world, and the happy end God intends for us all.

Of course, none of this is easy. We may feel we are nowhere near the example given to us by the martyrs. We may not even think that that ought to be our aim. Whatever the case, wherever we find ourselves, we must have the sober outlook that the good life Christ calls us into will not be devoid of some kind of suffering. “In this world,” Jesus reminds us, “you will have trouble.” But we take heart because we know that Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). This means that though the good life is not one without its share of suffering, we are, nevertheless, carried along by the hope that in the end our happiness will be made complete when we, along with all creation, “will be set free from [our] enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God,” (Rom 8:21).

Amen.

Good Life

What Is Our Summum Bonum?

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The great Christian theologian and philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, once quipped, “It is the decided opinion of everyone who uses their brain, that all people desire to be happy.” It seems a rather dull observation when you think about it. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Why would anyone desire a sad, miserable life? But Augustine points this out not to be Captain Obvious, but to direct us to the all important question we too often fail to ask: “What is it that we ought to desire that will bring us the happiness we all wish we could have?”

The classical name given as the answer to this question is the summum bonum, which is Latin for the “highest” or “ultimate good.” Simply put, the summum bonum is that which we ought to desire in order to be happy.

Of course, this begs the question, what is our summum bonum? What is this highest good that we ought to be desiring?

If you feel the overwhelming weight of this question then you’ll rightly recognize this isn’t a question we can just answer on our own based on our limited experience and knowledge. It seems like a question we could use some help with (to say the least) and in fact what we find throughout human history is that there has been a robust, ongoing conversation dedicated to this very question. It may not be readily evident to us today, but philosophy was originally designed as a discipline dedicated to providing resources around the question of our summum bonum as human beings. The entire philosophical project was about helping us wrap our minds around the massive question of how we can live towards that which will bring us true happiness.

What also may be lost to us today is that this is the question Jesus was most concerned with, as well. Contrary to popular belief, Jesus did not come to tell us how to get to heaven after we die. Rather, Jesus came to reveal to us what he believed was the answer to the question philosophers had been grappling with for centuries before his arrival. To put it succinctly, Jesus came to reveal to us what the good life is by showing us who God is.

This is the rich soil out of which the Christian life grows. To know who God is is the beginning of the good life because God is none other than our summon bonum. That is, God is our highest good, the ultimate end toward which our lives must be directed in order to find true happiness. In this way, the question of who we believe God to be is intimately and inextricably bound up with what we imagine the good life to be. To answer the question of who God is is to answer the question of what (or who) we ought to desire in order to be happy.

In the Christian faith there is God as God is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and then there are all the pretenders. These pretenders are legion and go by many names. Idols and lowercase “g” gods in the Hebrew Scriptures. Caesar and Mammon in the Gospels. The Apostle Paul in his epistles prefers to name them as the “powers and principalities” which he sees as conduits of the greatest threat to our happiness – the devilish duo of Sin and Death.

The human condition as it is illuminated by the biblical narrative is that we are forever finding ourselves settling for the pretenders rather than the summon bonum. This condition is given the name idolatry in both the Old and New Testaments. The problem with idolatry is precisely a kind of settling that leaves us continually restless. And so our problem is not so much that we assent to a set of wrong beliefs, but that we entrust ourselves to things that, in the long run, will leave us empty and disappointed.

If we simply believe God to be a better option to Death or, in the worst forms of Christianity, just a better alternative to eternal conscious torment in hell, we are selling short the goodness of God revealed to us in the wisdom of the cross. The “trick” of Christianity, if we can call it that, is that faith comes to us because we find the person of God revealed in Jesus Christ to be so beautiful and so true that we cannot but help but believe in this God as our summum bonum, the greatest and ultimate good.

This is why so much of the Christian life comes down to worship. We worship what we have come to understand as our greatest good. This happens whether we are religious or not. As many have pointed out, the question is not whether you will worship, but who or what you will worship. And we can end up worshiping any number of “goods” that are constantly on display around us. The constant barrage of sound bites, images and video clips that bombard us on the daily, all promoting some good we should entertain. The work of Christian worship is to say that over and above all these competing goods our summum bonum is the God we find revealed in Jesus Christ and him crucified.

The life of faith is that life shaped and formed by the worship of this God who comes to us in the person of Christ through the work of the Spirit. Simply put, the good we worship is the good we become. This is the logic at work for us Christians as we pursue the life that is drawn ever more fully into the life of God, where true happiness is found in the one who is our summum bonum.

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Lent 2023 | Week 6: Holy Week and the Mimetic Cycle

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Mimetic Rivalries

Last week we began to hint at how the implications of mimetic desire might lead to the events leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion on a Roman cross. There is a kind of domino affect. When we desire what others desire and others desire what we desire, this can give way to rivalries. We are all going after the same thing and therefore we are tempted to see ourselves in a competitive relationship with one another.

We see this most clearly in sports, which is often what we probably think of first when it comes to rivalries – Lakers vs Celtics, Yankees vs Red Sox, Giants vs. Cowboys. These teams are all going after the same thing – to be the last team standing. Their rival is the one that refuses to let that happen.

Rivals are those we come to recognize as the biggest threat to our getting what we want. But not all rivalries are bad. Sometimes they push us to heights we otherwise would not have been able to reach had it not been for the competitive fire fanned into flame by our rival. But rivalries, as we all know, also have the potential to bring out the ugliest parts of us. What begins as friendly competition can quickly turn into hostility and violence.

Building on the work of the French thinker René Girard, Luke Burgis, in his book “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life,” provides a kind of roadmap as to what happens in society at large given our penchant for imitation. We might call it the Mimetic Cycle.

If our mimetic desires set us against one another and we see each other as rivals going after the same thing, this can lead to enmity and conflict. The life of the community is threatened if there is no way to resolve the escalating cycles of hostility and resentment caused by mimetic desire. As Burgis points out, what Girard saw was that throughout human history this kind of crisis was resolved by singling out a particular person or minority group against which all the people could be united. As a result, the violence of each against all is able to give way to the violence of all against one.

By sacrificing this one person or group, there is a kind of catharsis, the “air is cleared”, and peace is achieved. But this peace is only temporary. There is a lull in the mimetic machine, but then the engine starts up again. Our desires slowly begin to be drawn toward the desires of others. New rivalries arise, conflict ensues and the cycle continues with another sacrifice needed to calm the erupting volcano of hostility. All are united in blaming him, her or them and on and on it goes, repeating itself ad nauseam.

What is important to note is that this tendency toward ganging up on a sacrificial victim happens unconsciously. That is, we don’t know we are doing it. If we were aware of what was happening it wouldn’t produce the kind of catharsis needed to keep us from societal implosion.

This is why it is called a scapegoat mechanism.

Clearly, those we sacrifice are not guilty of the blame we pile on them. We are scapegoating them, heaping upon them our violence and hostility for reasons of expediency. But if we knew that that was what we were doing then we would know that what we were doing was unjust and wrong. And so this act of scapegoating happens beneath surface. It is a mechanism triggered unconsciously in us during moments of terrible crisis. We don’t think about it. It just happens.

This leads us to Good Friday. One way to understand the events that unfold in Jesus’ last week is that this scapegoating mechanism is triggered – in the crowds, in the religious leaders and in the Roman officials. These parties which have shown to be at rivalrous odds with one another are somehow all united by week’s end. What brings them together is these joint decision to execute a lowly carpenter from the marginalized town of Nazareth.

And so we hear the religious leaders say, “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish,” (John 11:50). We find the crowd, who were proclaiming Jesus as the long awaited Messiah only a few days ago, screaming, “Crucify him!” (Matthew 27:22). Then there is Pilate, who we see give in to the mob for the sake of political expediency (Mark 15:15).

And at the end of it all, we hear Jesus pray from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” (Luke 23:34).

The Last Scapegoat

What we find in this way of reading the events leading up to the crucifixion is that Jesus fulfills the need for a sacrifice. But it is important to recognize who it is that is demanding a sacrifice. To put it more sharply, God is not the one demanding the sacrifice. Jesus dies not to satisfy God’s desire for a sacrifice, but our desire for a sacrifice.

In this video clip, Irish writer and thinker Pete Rollins, gives a concise and eloquent summary of this way of understanding what is accomplished on the cross.

Scripture

We now come to our sixth and final reflection on Matthew 20:20-28. In past weeks we have pointed out how the disciples are prone to imitate the desire of “the Gentiles and their high officials.” These, in a sense, are their mimetic models. And what do the disciples see these models doing? As Jesus tells them, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them,” (Matthew 20:25).

This is the desire behind James and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right and left in verses 20-21.

In response, Jesus tells them, “Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Mimetic desire becomes problematic when what is desired is something only a few can have. This is what turns our neighbor into a competitor and where rivalries are born. Notice in our passage that this is precisely what happens with the disciples. The others learn about James and John’s requests and Matthew tells us they are indignant. They are offended. Why? Presumably because they were each jockeying for the same thing. They had not yet understood the vastly different model confronting them in the life and teaching of the one they called Lord. And as a result, a rivalry was brewing among them.

Rather than climb higher, Jesus advises the disciples, and us, to reverse course. When we climb higher up the pyramid we find that there is less room for others and so, out of necessity, we need to knock off those who are above us and kick down those below us. But if we go with the way of downward mobility we find there’s room for everyone.

At the bottom we find that we don’t need to scapegoat anyone in order to bring peace to our enmity, because we have already done away with our enmity by receiving one another as friends.

What God does in Jesus is replace the mimetic cycle of scapegoating with one that begins and ends with the example of Christ.

We still begin with mimetic desire, but our model is no longer “the Gentiles and their high officials,” but Christ himself. And rather than invite us into a world of scarcity, Jesus graciously invites us to gather around the abundance of his table; a table where there is always room for more. At this table we are not afraid of losing our spot. So instead of looking at the speck in our rival’s eye, we are able to look at the log in our own. Rather than find a scapegoat to blame we are able to confess and receive one another as friends and in so doing, live into the peace made possible through Christ’s body broken for us, his blood shed for us.

This is the mimetic cycle according to Jesus.

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Lent 2023 | Week 5: Imitation

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Imitation is the Real Deal

Throughout the season of Lent we have been thinking about the theme of desire. Last week we took a detour to discuss the importance of contemplation. This week we’ll look at one particular question we need most to contemplate which is, “Who am I imitating?”

Who we imitate is inextricably tied to the question of what we desire. Working off the keen insights of the French thinker, René Girard, we have seen that our desires are mimetic. Simply put, our desires mimic the desires of others. To help us answer the bewildering question, “What do I want?” we look to others to give us an answer. So when we scroll through Yelp to figure out where to eat, we filter for those restaurants not just with the highest rating, but with the most reviews. We don’t know what to eat so it helps to let others decide for us.

This happens in all phases of our lives. For better or worse, it is just how we are wired. At its best, mimetic desire is what makes it possible for the development and flourishing of human cultures. It is what allows us to learn to speak a language, to come to agree on basic values that hold us together and to live toward general goals that we hold in common. At its worst, mimetic desire turns us against one another. It fragments us into hostile rivalries, turning our neighbor into an enemy to be overcome because we know they want what we want and they know we what we want they want. If this kind of enmity is not held in check, jealousy and envy can quickly turn into violent aggression.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. For now, we want to recognize that we often look to models to help us navigate the question, “What do I want?”. When we are born, our parents are our primary models. And then in school, our teachers become models for us. As we grow up, different people come into our lives like coaches, counsellors, advisers – all of whom we may call mentors – who guide and shape our desires in various facets of our lives.

Advertisers know we are always in search of models and they are more than happy to provide us with some. And of course, with the rise of the internet, we now have a new category of model – social media influencers. It is big business to help steer or manipulate our desires in certain directions.

The point is not to say we should not have models. As we said, for better or worse, our desires are mimetic and therefore, we are drawn to models. So the question is not whether we will imitate someone. Rather, the question is, “Who to imitate?”

As we head toward Holy Week and Good Friday, we want to start considering what all this talk about desire has to do with Jesus’ life in general, and his death on a cross in particular.

One way to see Jesus’ life is to receive it as a model. Jesus is our exemplary model. The human model par excellence. Jesus, in short, is God’s answer to the question, “What do I want?”.

You don’t know what to want?

Try Jesus. I think he may have more followers than Justin Bieber.

Show Me What I’m Looking For

One of my favorite songs, the title of which, I think, is one of the best prayers we can pray. Given our time and place, in which we are bombarded with desire upon desire placed on top of desire and there are more models than we know what to do with, it is not a bad idea to pray this simple prayer daily, “Show me what I’m looking for, oh Lord.”

Interestingly enough, as I was looking up this song, the YouTube algorithm suggested a song I’ve never heard of entitled the American Dream by the Federal Empire. The song automatically played and well, turns out, it captures to a “T” all that we’ve been talking about in terms of desire gone amuck. Check it out:

The song reminds me of an old blog post Timmy wrote on desire years ago (Lent 2016!). You can read it here.

Faith and Imitation, Imitation and Faith

Christianity is a believing and a very particular kind of existing corresponding to it—imitation. We can put faith first and imitation second, inasmuch as it is necessary for me to have faith in that which I am to imitate. But we must also put imitation first and faith second. I must, by some action, be marked in some measure by conformity to Christ, and thus collide with the world. Without some kind of situational tension, there is no real opportunity of becoming a believer.

— Søren Kierkegaard

This is a wonderful quote by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on the relationship between faith and imitation. I think we intuitively get what it means that imitation follows faith. As we have been saying, we must have faith in and desire that which we are to imitate. But what would it meant for imitation to precede faith? Kierkegaard talks about the need for faith to “collide with the world.”

  • What do you think Kierkegaard means when he says, “Without some kind of situational tension, there is no real opportunity of becoming a believer”?

Scripture

It might help to think of Kierkegaard’s quote in terms of the Scripture passage we have been looking at throughout Lent: Matthew 20:20-28

As we looked at last week, James and John, ask for these positions of power next to Jesus even after hearing Jesus teach them about how actually things work in God’s kingdom. Namely, that the last will be first and the first will be last.

And yet they still seek to be first.

What Jesus does in response to their question is to present them with a “situational tension” (in verse 25), where what James and John believe (but not yet truly) is set to collide with the way the world works. Jesus means to provide for James and John, as Kierkegaard puts it, the opportunity of becoming true believers.

Sometimes we don’t know what we believe until we our imitation of Jesus collides with the world. It is only in those moments of collision that we are able to come to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a believer.

  • What are some moments in your life where imitation to Jesus caused you to “collide with the world”?
  • Would you say it helped or hindered your belief in Jesus?
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Lent 2023 | Week 4: Contemplation

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What Does Contemplation Look Like?

I have long been enamored with this scene from the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. The movie explores the difficult and complicated relationship between trauma, fear and desire. In it, Matt Damon plays the titular role of the troubled and misguided Will Hunting. Early on we learn that Will is a natural genius yet he chooses to work as a janitor, cleaning the halls walked by lesser minds at MIT. As the story progresses, we come to find that not only his choice of profession, but almost every decision he makes, is dictated by the extreme trauma he experienced as a child. Will’s parents died when he was young, and as a result he was passed on from foster home to foster home, suffering severe physical abuse — burned with cigarettes, beaten with a wrench, nearly stabbed to death — at the hands of his caretakers.

Needless to say, Will develops a deep seated mistrust of authority figures. Enter counselor and psychologist Sean Maguire, played by the late Robin Williams. Through his own encounters with trauma, Sean sees some of himself in Will. And from this place of shared experience he is able to build trust with Will, who over the years has erected thick barriers to protect himself from having to face all that was done to him.

In this climactic scene, we see those barriers finally start to come down.

This scene reminds me of what we so often need.

To come to a place where we can hear.

Really hear.

For Will, what he needed to hear was, “It’s not your fault.”

And when he finally hears it (really hears it), it is a cathartic moment. Everything that had been stuffed inside for so long comes bursting out. As he is sobbing in Sean’s embrace he says, “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

This all seems very Christian to me.

Translated into the language of faith, “It’s not your fault,” becomes “You are forgiven.”

To know that we are forgiven, allows us to face all the ugly parts of ourselves. This is the logic of the gospel. It is not that we confess in order to be forgiven. Rather, we confess because we already have been forgiven.

Like Will, we know all of this.

And of course, like Will we need to hear it again and again and again because that which we have come to know is always a partial knowing. And so it must be made known to us again and again because we need to know it more and more, until that day when we will fully know even as we are fully known.

All of this to say, this is what contemplation looks like – to hear what we already know again and again so that we may know what has been made known to us more deeply and more fully.

If we come back to Will, by hearing what he had known for years, he is finally able to step out from under the defense mechanisms he used to protect himself for fear of abandonment. Rather than getting the jump on others by discarding them before they get a chance to discard him, Will, in the final scene, is able to “go and see about a girl” (if you haven’t seen the movie, this line is much more poetic in the context of the film).

I suppose this is why we need to continually hear what we already know. We know about grace, but we need to continually hear it. When we don’t our lives so easily come to be defined by what we fear. And fear, if we can define it this way, is a distorted, grotesque form of desire. Fear is the cancerous result when our natural desire for safety and security multiplies uncontrollably and pushes out all other desires. The cure is not simply to suck it up and summon some strength from within to face our fears.

What is given to us in faith is to listen for a word that comes from outside of us.

This word is the word of God spoken to us in Jesus. Whatever word God has to say to us, God says to us in Jesus.

May we hear this word again and again and again. And in so doing, may our fears shrink and our desire to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly flourish within us.

Contemplation and Boredom

On the way to contemplation we will have to fight our aversion to boredom because to contemplate requires quiet spaces of stillness and for many of us that pretty much is the definition of boredom. For some of us we’ll also have to fight that feeling of “I know this already” (like Will). For others of us we’ll have to the fight the opposite feeling of “I don’t know what to think!”.

In this blog post entitled, Let’s Get Bored Together, C. Wess Daniels, who writes about spirituality and theology from a Quaker perspective, asks the question, “What if we saw boredom, or a regular, sustained stillness as a practice of resistance that could reclaim our lives and attention and perhaps our sanity?”.

In the post, you’ll find some helpful books you can read on the topic as well as some activities to try. One thing to note is that contemplation does not have to be about total silence (although it can include it). “Quiet spaces of stillness” in the way Daniels talks about it is more about a prolonged engagement with one thing in contrast to the frenetic and fragmented way we engage so much of our time online.

  • What’s one way you can learn to be bored this week?

Car Radio

I find myself coming back to this song a lot. You can read an old reflection on it here.

  • Take a listen and maybe as a way of prolonged engagement, write down some thoughts that this song may bring up for you.

Scripture

Matthew 20:20-28

It is interesting to note that James and John, who are center stage in this passage in Matthew 20 were also present at Jesus’ transfiguration back in Matthew 17:1-13. The whole point for them to witness Jesus’ transfiguration was so that they could hear the voice of God say to them, “This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

Then in Matthew 18:1-5 we have a scene where the disciples ask Jesus, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus replies, “Whoever takes the lowly position of [a child] is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Now in Matthew 20 they come to Jesus and ask for, in their estimation, the highest positions available in all the cosmos – those found at the right and left hand of Jesus. Jesus replies by saying, “You don’t know what you’re asking.” Meaning, if the kingdom works the way Jesus says it does in Matthew 18 (the lower the greater), then what James and John are asking for is actually the opposite of what they are hoping to get.

This is not to single out James and John, but to simply highlight the common struggle at the heart of Christian discipleship. It was there with the original disciples and it is most certainly here for us trying to follow Jesus some two thousand years later.

It is what prompted former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to say this about contemplation:

Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.

  • What do you make of this statement? Is it an overstatement to say contemplation is a deeply revolutionary matter?
  • What might contemplation look like for you?
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Lent 2023 | Week 3: The Life Giving Magic of Tidying Up Our Desires

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The Multiplicity of Desires

Throughout this season of Lent, we have been looking at the role desire plays in the Christian life. In particular, we want to answer the question, “What is it that I want?”

Part of what makes this question so difficult to answer is the multiplicity of desires that we find competing within us. We want many things and often times we don’t have any criteria to help us order or rank those desires. Our lives end up being overrun by too many desires.

One rubric we have introduced to help tame our desires is to categorize them as thin or thick. Thin desires are those that are here today gone tomorrow. They are attached to things we want that are short-lived, transitory, fleeting. Our closets are filled with the pursuit of our thin desires.

Thick desires, on the other hand, carry more weight. They have to do with the things that really matter to us. They matter more but are harder to quantify. Here we have in mind things like giving ourselves for the sake others, of caring for the least of these, of loving God and neighbor.

To have faith in God is to say that these thicker desires are the desires awakened in us by the work of the Spirit through the ministry of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. In short, our deepest desires are addressed by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

When our thin desires out pace our thick desires this is what Jesus calls living on bread alone. It is what so much of our capitalistic economy is based around. Chasing after bread. Bread in all its forms. So many it is hard to count.

Ours is a culture in which our desire for bread is multiplied to a dizzying degree.

Lent is a time to do some spring cleaning. Like our offices and homes, our hearts, the seat and sanctum of our desires, can get disorganized and overrun by over-accumulation. And so it would do us well to take a look at all the desires that have accumulated in us and take stock of how, perhaps, our thin desires have run amuck, leaving little or no room for our thick ones.

The Christian name for this kind of tidying up is the life-changing magic of renunciation.

Renunciation

Take some time and read this short blog post by Christian psychologist Richard Beck. In it he talks about renunciation and why it is necessary in terms of fulfilling our thicker desires – namely, to love God and neighbor. The big question for us is:

  • What are the desires in our lives that need to be renounced in order to free us up to love?

Scripture

We come again to Matthew 20:20-28. It is interesting to note that Jesus, here, does not eschew the disciples’ desire to be great. To be great, in a sense, is to be exceedingly good. And this is a good thing.

The problem is not our desire to be great, but the multitude of visions of what greatness (or goodness) looks like. Which brings us back to the multiplicity of desires in our life. To believe in a crucified God is to have a radically singular vision of greatness, which provides us criteria to help tidy up (renounce) the many competing visions of greatness constantly being sold to us.

None of this works, however, unless we see faith and desire as more or less synonymous. To have faith in Jesus is to say everything that is worth wanting is found in Jesus. This is the logic of verse 28, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” We serve others “just as” Jesus did. But this “just as” holds no power unless we have found it to be true that all our deepest desires find their fulfillment in this one who came not to be served, but to serve.

If our faith in Jesus does not hold our desires, then everything that Jesus asks of us will feel like duty and obligation. Following Jesus will amount to the never ending frustration of our desires.

  • Does the Christian life feel like a constant frustration of your desires?
  • As the great theologian Marie Kondo says, “The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.” How might tidying up your desires help you see that what you truly desire is found in Jesus?

Idolatry is Always Polytheism

Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.

Pope Francis

Can you relate to the experience of feeling like your life is a “myriad of unconnected instants”? I can’t think of a better way to describe the experience mediated to us through social media. Scrolling through Instagram is pretty much scrolling through “a myriad of unconnected instants.”

The alternative is to find ourselves part of a journey. A journey is one in which our wandering is given a direction and end; a “fundamental orientation” as Pope Francis puts it. The irony is that many of us probably feel the same about our faith as we do about social media. It too feels like a path “leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth”.

  • Brass tacks: Do you experience your faith as a journey or as “a myriad of unconnected instants”?

Part of my own journey, I think, has been to identify how limiting the lesser forms of Truth, Goodness and Beauty (facts, legalism and entertainment, respectively) are to the Christian faith. Moving beyond facts to Story (a truthful story), beyond rules to Character (the character of Christ) and beyond entertainment to Beauty (the beauty of a crucified God) is what helps us find some kind of unifying vision for life. This work of moving “beyond” is not easy. It is one we all embark on together. It is for this work that God gave us the community we call church.