Wrestling with Christ

It's time for a confession

Confession is good for the soul, goes the saying of old, attributed to an old Scottish proverb. There is also a reference in the book of James 5:16. Well, I've got a confession to make to all of you.

I've been wrestling with Jesus Christ. Not just of late, but for 43 years. I started in the summer of my baptism.

When asked to name my favorite Bible verse, I invariably default to the Genesis epic of Jacob wrestling with the angel along the banks of the river Jabbok. That depiction of a flawed man encountering and wrestling with a divine messenger has captured my imagination all these years. However, in his commentary on this passage, Martin Luther remarks that Jacob is not just wrestling with any angel. He is wrestling with Christ. When I first read that, I stood up in the library at Union Theological Seminary and shouted, “Yes, Yes, Yes." Only to be quelled by my fellow students preparing for finals.

Jesus Christ is illusive. On the one hand, I am utterly attracted to his teachings, story, and life. Yet, on the other hand, I'm repulsed by the church, scholars, and especially contemporary media portrayals of him. Let's start with the latter and then return to the former.

There is a scene in the 1986 movie “Hannah and Her Sisters” in which the late Max Von Sydow says about fundamentalist TV preachers, “If Jesus Christ were to come back and see what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.” This critique resonates with me every time I see or hear some absurd or offensive use of Christ by a politician, a preacher, or some ignorant person at the end of the bar. It makes me cringe with embarrassment and angry with righteousness. Perhaps, this explains why we, who are Christians always want to add an adjective at the front end. Somehow the addition of a defining word like progressive, open-minded, or Lutheran is necessary so that we are not lumped in with a perverted form of Christianity such as fundamentalist or, even worse white nationalist or dominionism.

I want to scream (at times) or at least clearly state, “That’s not the Jesus Christ I know.”

So who am I seeking to follow? What about the Christ figure compels me not to relent in my quest for meaning, connection, and wholeness in this world?

I think of three intriguing aspects of Christ that tug at my soul. Incarnation, Ethics, and Crucifixion/Resurrection. Those fond of the liturgy could see in this the Christmas, Epiphany, and Lent/Easter seasons.

Incarnation – The sheer splendor of the eternal entering the temporal makes my heart sing. Beyond the Hallmark card version of the baby Jesus lying in a manger is the mystery of God becoming all bound up in our humanness. Even as a child, I was intrigued by the Christmas story. Though I never talked about it, I became captivated by this paradox of God (whom I did not and still don't fully grasp), choosing to live into or, more precisely, birth into this world.

I recall listening to the late Alan Watts, former Episcopal priest and teacher of Buddhism to the west, lecture on radio station KPFK. One of his lectures described the reaction of Lucifer, the angel of light peering into the divine godhead and seeing the intentions of the eternal one's plan to become a human being. Acting in Lucifer's voice, Watts said something like, "I'll have nothing to do with that act. I don't want to get mixed up with all that humanness. I want pure light." And then Lucifer turned his back on God.

Two intriguing ideas came to me in my early adolescence from this vignette. The first is the concept of the timeless becoming wrapped up in the time-bound. Eternal and the temporal living together at the same time. How is this possible? T.S. Elliot tried to get at this idea in the Four Quartets.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present  

The second idea my teenage brain investigated centered on Lucifer becoming the adversary because he rejected the incarnation. In other words, the angel of light wants only pure light, pure abstraction, and pure spirit. He (though the pronoun here is not meant to imply gender) desires an existence separate from the muck and mire of lived earthly experience. But God wants to be involved in the muck and mire. So much so that God is willing to be born in the barn. Here the muck and the mire host many semi-domesticated animals. No wonder the angels sing, "Glory to God in the Highest." They could have added a refrain and "in the lowest depths."

For me, this lifelong wrestling match with Christ finds joy, comfort, and companionship in the eternal, entering the temporal. God wants to know what it's like to be human. That means that we also want to experience God. The incarnation makes this a reciprocal relationship. Therefore, when I sit in contemplative meditation and silence, take a walk in a nearby wildlife refuge, or sing along with "Silent Night," I'm engaging in something that connects me with the holy.  

But it doesn’t stop there. It also means I'm engaging in everyday spirituality when I’m doing the dishes, raking the leaves, and waiting in line at Stop n Shop. In other words, everything is now spiritual because of the incarnation.

Ethics – What about the life and teachings of Jesus Christ resonates with me? I've been reading Howard Thurman as of late. He's most well-known for his book Jesus and the Disinherited and his role as the Spiritual Director for Martin Luther King Jr and others in the Civil Rights movement. If you want a fine video documentary on Thurman, I commend you to Backs Against the World. One of Thurman's critical points is an emphasis on Jesus as a human persecuted person in the context of an oppressive Roman empire. He then connects this to Black people in the mid-twentieth century living under unjust laws.

Thurman and many others bring to the front and center the ethical and moral imperative of life. I don't know about you, but this pulls me to care for the poor and the oppressed. I respond to the wisdom of a life of compassion and humility. I am attracted to a call to work and speak for the well-being of all creation. Is it challenging? Of course. Is it hard? Yes. Do I succeed regularly? No, but that does not mean I give up.

Jesus' life and teaching have an imperative on my life, yet another expression of that wrestling match I described earlier. One cannot read the gospels and not see that Jesus profoundly emphasizes healing, justice, and forgiveness. I don't know about you, but I need this call in my life. If I don't have the pull to attempt to live a more compassionate life, I'll likely end up serving the God of my ego and my self-satisfaction.

Folks in AA know this well as they remind us that the Lord's Prayer says, "Thy will be done, not my will be done." Thy means God's will.

So I need Jesus' life and teaching to give my life an ethical tug toward something I'll inevitably fail to achieve. But without that gravitational pull, I'm worthless.

The Cross and the Tomb

Of the few things, we have a high degree of confidence regarding Jesus Christ in his death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, a middleweight provincial governor in ancient Palestine, around 26 to 36 CE. The historian Josephus references it in his writings, along with Tacitus and others outside the church writings. But why? Why is the crucifixion so central to the Christ myth and necessary for modern 21st-century life?

There are many reasons, but you are likely reaching your maximum reading time by now, so I'll limit my thoughts to two. First would be the symbolic value of the cross, and second would be the lived experience of suffering. The cross is one of those ancient symbols that Carl Jung suggests has its origins in humanity's discovery of fire, and as such, is, in reality, a fire symbol derived from rubbing two sticks together to start a fire for warmth, protection, and the creation of tools. This may explain why Jung felt the cross was an ancient symbol communicating life. "I don’t know why it is perceived in such a form; I only know that the cross has always meant mana or life power." (Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, p. 366) I can't explain it, but for me, the cross, especially a Celtic or Jerusalem cross, is a powerful symbol.

It could be because of the second reason, which is its connection to suffering. As the Buddha said, "Life is suffering." We might read that as a depressing statement in our modern US society. I read it as honesty. Anyone who has lived any length of time has witnessed loss, grief, injustice, and harm. From the playground to the battlefield, life is filled with the wounding experience of suffering. Jesus Christ's death on the cross meets humanity at its most vulnerable point. The eternal and the temporal are both nailed to those timbers.

This leads us to the resurrection, perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of Jesus Christ. So often, the resurrection is used as some rational proof for the whole of Christianity. A sort of "look, see, Jesus is alive after he died; therefore, everything he said and did and the church says about him is true." Ugh. Not only is this a form of cheap grace, cheap thinking, and cheap theology, it misses the point. Namely, the empty tomb brings us back full circle to the incarnation. All the Easter scenes, from the walk to Emmaus, to the garden tomb and the fish breakfast at the shore, reconnect the eternal with the temporal. In Jesus' birth, the divine enters the muck and mire of existence through Mary's labor pains. In Jesus' death, the divine experiences the full implications of mortality. By the resurrection, God reconnects the muck and mire with the infinite, and the thin veil between life and death is made so thin that one wonders if it even exists.

Still in One Peace,

(A version of this essay was preached on Christ the King Sunday at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Hanover, New Hampshire)