How Christianity can make life meaningless

Life must not be a preparation for death, but victory over death, so that, in Christ, death becomes the triumph of life…. When it considers life only as a preparation for death, Christianity makes life meaningless, and reduces death to “the other world,” which does not exist, because God has created only one world, one life.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Journals, Entry for September 16, 1974

“Like a strong man who shakes off his wine”

When the Hero slept on the cross and trampled on death, after three days His sleep departed and He rose strengthened; while He rested for three days His burden was lightened and He was awakened after His labour without corruption from His wounds.

David His father saw Him when He came forth and ran before Him and touched the strings of his lyre and began to sing in prophecy: The Lord has awakened like a strong man who shakes off his wine and has struck His enemies and delivered His friends who were mourning.

The Bo’ootho of St. Jacob, taken from Saphro (Morning Prayer) of the Sunday of the Resurrection

He did not come to die

Several years ago when The Passion of the Christ was released, I remember seeing posters for the film with the tagline: “Dying was his reason for living.”

It wasn’t.

Jesus didn’t come to die. He came that we might have life; He came to give his flesh as bread for the life of the world; He came to trample Death by death; He came to renew creation by the power of His Resurrection.

But He did not come to die.

It is not death that is the essence of sacrifice, but rather the offering of life. I think this is suggested by the economy of animal sacrifices that we see in the Torah. Slaying the animal doesn’t do it; it is the ascending of the animal in smoke (in part or in whole) that makes the sacrifice. What is offered to God is not the animal’s death, but its very life.

I think this has implications for how we understand the cross. Jesus’ crucifixion was not the terminus of the cross, but rather a fitting prelude to its inversion, its emptying, its shame. He submitted Himself to it so that He might, among other things, show us that nothing can stand in the way of the One who offers Himself to the Father. No power on earth, not even the greatest threat imagined and concocted by the most powerful empire in the world, can sabotage the one whose life is an intentional gift to the Author of Life.

The Resurrection, then, is not some kind of reversal or cancellation of the sacrifice of Jesus’ life, since sacrifice does not consist in death alone. Rather, this event is the extension—can one say “magnification”?—of that sacrifice. Just when we thought He had given all a human being can give in self-offering, He was raised up on the third day so that He might live as an unending sacrifice. His ascension to the right hand of the Father is the “completion” of that act, which I think is why He told Mary Magdalene to not cling to him: “for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20.17). But the time for the “completion” of His self-offering would soon come: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20.17).

This ascending offering of the Son of God—the self-emptying which encompasses His whole life, which includes His death, His Resurrection and His Ascension—is the very movement which unleashes the Spirit into the world. It is this same Spirit Who descends on the bread and the wine at each Eucharistic celebration, fulfilling their destiny by changing them into the very Body and Blood of Jesus so that, by eating and drinking these Gifts, His Body might truly become what it already is: the transforming presence of the Kingdom in the world. And out we go, into the world, breathing that same Spirit into creation so that, like that bread and that wine on the altar, all of it might be filled with Christ. This, I think, is why Paul can call the Church “the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1.23).

Dying wasn’t his reason for living. Living was his reason for dying.

So I think.

Christianity without Jesus’ death and resurrection?

David, in his usual bold and thought-provoking way, has been wondering what Christianity would look like without Jesus’ death and resurrection, suggesting that perhaps an inordinate focus on these events has distorted our ability to learn from Jesus’ life itself. Below is a comment I posted on that thread. You can jump in on the discussion going on at David’s blog, or just bat (or bash) around what I’ve said there, here.

And, in case anyone’s wondering, no, I don’t like The Passion of the Christ. I couldn’t make up my mind after I saw it twice, but it’s a done deal at this point. Now you know what I won’t be doing this Great Lent.

Anyways, to David I responded:

I agree with you on the need to interpret Jesus’ death (and, I would add, his resurrection) in terms of his life. I don’t think he came to die; I think he came to redeem, and while dying was one of the “acts” in that drama, it certainly wasn’t the whole point of it. As I was reading St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation several weeks ago, I was struck by how much attention he paid to the redemptive significance of Jesus’ life (though his death was of course highlighted as well).

I would say, though, that while the disciples didn’t follow Jesus because they believed that he would be crucified and rise on the third day, the Gospels suggest that they expected him to inaugurate the Kingdom in some fashion. Whatever they understood their Teacher to be, they were certainly disillusioned about his death because they perceived it as a kind of failure: “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel.” I think this is where Jesus’ death and resurrection become pivotal, at least from the perspective of the early Church: it is these events that unleashed the Kingdom into this world (a position I would argue is deducible from the Gospels alone).

Apart from this Pascha, the Kingdom would’ve remained a moral ideal, a kind of utopian society about which he preached but never cosmically established in this world. I’m compelled by the evidence to conclude, though, that his disciples believed that Jesus brought that Kingdom into the world by his life, especially by his death and resurrection (without any need to separate these events from his life as a whole).

As for your examples of King and Gandhi, don’t you think that their respective deaths also embodied the very nature of their proclamation? I mean, if King or Gandhi had killed someone in self-defense, their legacy would’ve been very different. To that extent, their witness in the world necessarily included their death. I think we can see Jesus’ death in the same way—as a renunciation not only of the Jewish revolutionary agendas but also of the concept of power that drove the Roman machine and countless other empires in the history of humankind. Schweitzer, as I understand it, interpreted Jesus’ death in this way.

On the fear of hell and the love of God

The human conscience finds unbearable the inhuman, the unspiritual and immoral traits, almost beastly traits, ascribed to God, the Creator of the world. Only an obligatory fear, a transcendent terror, can swallow up the questioning of conscience and consciousness. But the time of religious terror is expiring. In former times it was possible to maintain order in the Church by the frightenings of the eternal torments of hell. This frightening was quite in accord with the pedagogic method of the times; it raised up a barbaric mankind. But now the scaring with the eternal torments of hell hinders people from coming into the Church.

Nikolai Berdyaev, “A Consideration Concerning Theodicy“

 

… It is noteworthy that Isaac does not think that the idea of the end of torment [in Gehenna] leads to laxity and the loss of the fear of God. Quite the contrary, this idea, according to him, causes love of God in a person, and repentance that comes out of the measureless mercy of the Creator. The notion of God as a careful father gives birth in a person to a filial love for, and adherence to Him, whereas the notion of God as a chastiser can only cause a slavish fear and dread before Him.

Bishop Hilarion of Vienna, “St. Isaac of Nineveh and Syrian Mysticism“