The speaker was animated as he addressed the forty or so clergy gathered in the hall at the cathedral. It was one of those clergy enrichment meetings that the diocese of Rhode Island offers from time to time. The point of this clericus was preaching, but the speaker had little to say about how to preach. He was much more concerned with what gets preached. And I for one think that’s the most important thing -- content, not form.
Most of what that speaker – a priest at St. Columba’s Church in Washington, D.C. – had to say revolved around one core message: God’s passionate love for each and every one of us. Though that may sound fairly tame to you on first hearing, what he was actually saying was quite radical. He wasn’t simply saying “God loves you,” which is the fundamental message that we’ve heard since we were kids. He was saying, “God is passionately in love with you.” How does that strike you, I wonder?
That thought may well cause you to feel some very strong feelings. On one level the notion may appeal to you since all of us want desperately to be loved. But on another level it may well be disconcerting. Women may well be ambivalent about it since it seems to convey sexual imagery. And for that same reason, it may well cause most men to feel revulsion. We’re relatively comfortable with the idea that God loves us as a parent loves children, but for God to yearn for our love as an unrequited lover might is an entirely different matter altogether.
As I listened to the speaker I did what I usually do – half of my mind was devoted to listening and understanding what he was saying while the other half was checking the thrust of his message against scripture and Christian tradition. He didn’t mention any of this, but scripture has quite a bit to say about this, as it turns out. Traditionally, the so-called Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, which is nothing less than a long and rather erotic love poem or love song, has been interpreted as describing in allegorical terms God’s love for His people. But even leaving that debatable interpretation aside, prophets, like Hosea, speak often about Israel being God’s bride or lover – straying away over and over again to other lovers – and that all God’s efforts have been devoted to letting His beloved know His love in order to become reconciled and to restore the love. That image of God – of Christ – being in that kind of loving relationship with people is also expressed in the New Testament writings of Paul and John. Paul describes Christ’s relationship with the faith community, the Church, as that of bride and groom, and that image is also used in the Book of Revelation. So, all things considered, the idea that God is in love with us is not a new invention by that speaker that day.
But the speaker went one step further. He said that the central idea of the faith has been that God is an ultra-righteous and punitive father figure, who can’t help but to constantly tabulate our sins and failures and to punish us for them so that forgiveness is our deepest need and God’s constant effort. Haplessly our speaker correctly described the human tendency, throughout ancient history and in virtually every culture, to offer sacrifices to our various gods. Those sacrifices may have taken benign forms, but more often than not involved slaughtering animals and often even people. He described in vivid terms what worship in the Temple at Jerusalem would have been like, even in Jesus’ time. Lines of men wrestled their animals into the Temple, standing, waiting to get their turn. As they waited they listened to the sounds of animals crying out with their last breath, the smells of excrement released, the sight of Levites carting animal body parts from one part of the Temple to another, while smoke from the holocaust billowed upward toward the heavens. Then came their turns – to hold the bird or animal while its neck was broken by the priest or the celebrant said a prayer and cut the animal’s throat and blood sprayed on priest and supplicant alike, as a Levite mopped away the puddle of blood left behind. It was all to take away the sins of the people or God’s wrath so that God wouldn’t punish them. Rather a vivid and grotesque picture, isn’t it?
Against that backdrop, Jesus’ own passion and death occurred. It was natural to understand it in those very terms, therefore, that Jesus suffered and died to take away our sins – to take our place and our punishment upon Him and to release us from their consequences. But what if, our speaker wondered, Jesus suffered as He did and died for two different reasons – to do away with the sacrifice idea and remove the barrier of our consciousness of sin and instead to demonstrate in vivid terms just how desperately God loves us?
As we approach this coming Holy Week, which reenacts the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, if you find the idea that it was all done for our forgiveness, which I have always believed, to be less meaningful to you, it is possible to consider it from another point of view. You may wish to consider Christ’s passion as an expression of God’s passion – his passionate love for us – to reconcile us to God’s passionate love for us. If you were God and were in love with your human creatures, how would you express it in terms that could be received by the one you loved? You’d tell the one you love. God already did that. You’d give gifts to the one you love. God already did that. You’d try to spend time with the one you loved. God already did that. But what else could you do if that made no abiding difference? Jesus is the answer and Holy Week reveals the fullest extent of God’s passionate love for us. The Triumphant Entry – what we call Palm Sunday – shows us that God loves us enough to offer us the leadership we need. The Last Supper – what we call Maundy Thursday – shows us that God loves us enough to feed and nurture us as in the Lord’s Supper and that God loves us enough to serve us in the most humble of ways as in Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. The passion of Jesus – His torture and crucifixion – on what we call Good Friday show us that God loves us enough to, as they say, take a bullet for us – to give up His own life for us. His burial, which includes what we call the Easter Vigil, shows us that God took His love for us to the grave. And His resurrection, on what we call Easter Day, shows us that God’s passionate love for us can and will never end but lives on forever as Christ rose and lives on forever.
All this gives another meaning to the passion of our Lord – His passionate love for us.
Affectionately in Christ,
Phil +