A New Story At Last--January 13, 2021

A New Story At Last--January 13, 2021

"And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him..." [Colossians 1:21-22]

You know how Batman saves the day?  Probably by punching someone.

Superman--you know what his go-to move is?  A blast from the ol' Kryptonian heat-vision.

The rest of the whole comic book pantheon is a variation on the same theme: Iron Man will blast you with repulsor rays or missiles out of his shoulders, Thor will whack you with this hammer, and Hulk will, well... Hulk smash.

For that matter, we know how the plot of the western goes, too: the white-hatted hero wins the day by being faster on the trigger and shooting the train robbers, the dangerous cattle wranglers, or the supposedly savage Indians.

We know how these scripts go, because they've been fed to us since childhood.  (Perhaps we never stopped to ask if the thinking in them was also hopelessly child-ish, as well....) We know how the story goes, whether it's a superhero comic, an action flick, or a classic western: the hero saves the day by destroying something or someone else.  The fact that it seems so obvious to us is evidence of how pervasively that myth has seeped into our ways of thinking.  We almost can't imagine how a story could go differently, right?  What's Superman supposed to do... NOT punch Lex Luthor?  What--are we supposed to imagine that there could be peace in a frontier town without a sharp-shootin' sheriff and his posse keepin' the banditos and desperados off the streets?

I suppose it depends on whom you ask.  The world's storytellers seem hung up on retelling that same plotline, over and over again, and it goes on redundantly and unchangingly, forever like this:  Good guys punch/shoot/kill bad guys, who are hopelessly irredeemable, and the lesson is that any problem can be solved with enough firepower to keep the undesirables away.

But come, aren't we tired of that story?  Haven't we seen that movie a million times and read the comic a million more?  And haven't we noticed yet that it never really fixes things?  (Or, as a compellingly deranged Heath Ledger's Joker says to a very angry Batman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, "You have nothing!  Nothing to threaten me with! Nothing to do with all your strength!" revealing that indeed, Batman can't punch his way out of every situation.)

Here's the thing: the Gospel tells a different story.  A very different story.  Like radically different.  The Gospel's story is just as dramatic as any comic book superhero movie, just as compelling as any western saga, but the plot--the story of salvation--works differently.  In Jesus, in fact, God turns the whole logic of salvation-by-violence inside out.  The hero we meet in the New Testament saves the day not by killing his enemies or vanquishing those who are hostile to him, but by dying at their hands and transforming them in love through his death.  Jesus at last offers us a new story, beyond the same tired old tropes we've seen before.

The letter to the Colossians makes it clear as well: God's way of redeeming and reigning are not, in the end, to smash and destroy, but to to bear our destructive ways and to endure our seemingly innate determination to smash whatever good things come across our path--even the body of the Son of God.  And notice here, that as the letter to the Colossians sees it, God doesn't wait for us to be "on God's side" to redeem--no, in fact, it's while we are estranged and hostile toward God, that God takes on death and reconciles with us.  The letter to the Ephesians, which feels much like a twin sibling of Colossians in many ways, says in similar terms that we were dead in sins and brought back to life by Christ's cross.  Or as Paul says to the Romans, it was when we were God's "enemies," being "ungodly" and "sinners," that Christ died for us.  In other words, God's way of saving is decidedly NOT to find the ones labeled "enemies" and to destroy them, but rather to absorb our violence into God's own self at the cross, like falling on a live grenade to absorb the blast rather than to let it kill someone else.  

If that sounds preposterous, if our gut reaction is that the "real world" just doesn't work that way, then maybe it is a testament to just how completely we have accepted the story presented to us over and over again in the wider culture around us--the one that says the hero wins by punching or shooting, and that says good guys pummel bad guys into submission to win the day.  The New Testament says that ain't so.  God's way of saving the day... and the world... and us!... is to be killed by the "enemy" and thereby to defuse the enemy's power.  Absorbing death, God breaks death's power.  Bearing our violence, God saps violence of its fearful strength.  And he sets us free from having to play by those rules anymore--God in fact makes us, by the cross, "holy and blameless and irreproachable."

Because that story is so different from the one we've all been fed all our lives, the one we have internalized over and over and over again, we need to keep hearing it and seeing just how frequently it comes up in the Scriptures themselves.  Ultimately it changes our whole understanding of who and what God is if we dare to believe, as the New Testament certainly says, that God is most clearly revealed as the One who dies on a cross at the hands of a riled-up lynch mob and with the blessing of the empire, rather than as some angry bearded fellow who comes to earth locked and loaded.

We need to be clear about this, too, because our understanding of who God is affects who we are as well.  And all too often, people who name the name of Jesus get confused and just take the villain-punching, white-hat-wearing John Wayne type of the movies and we slap the word "God" on it, assuming that God must operate the same way that the heroes of the movies and comics do.  And we end up assuming, too, then, that Jesus needs us to be a part of his posse, like it's our job to "take back" whatever we think needs taking back--all "in the name of Jesus," of course.  Already since last week's siege of the Capitol building there are the predictable (and terrible) hot-takes floating around, all draped in the language of Respectable Religious Folk, that go something like this: "Who says that violence isn't the answer?  Don't we need to recover that old sense of being 'tough'--you know, to make God look strong, too?  Don't the righteous have to fight?" And of course, in reply to all of that, the New Testament itself pretty clearly says, "Are you kidding me?"

If we are going to be people who say that the Bible is important to us, then we are going to actually have to listen to what its voices say, rather than assuming God wants our help smashing things and intimidating our enemies as we wave our weapons in the air.  God does not want that help.  In fact, that is the very thing God absorbs from us in order to free us from the terrible and deathly logic of that tired old story.

Maybe we've been fed the old myth that you can save the world by threatening your enemies enough so many times that we don't realize how it has ensnared and enslaved us.  Maybe we have forgotten that as the Gospel tells it, WE are the enemies and we have been loved into redemption by a God who absorbs all of our violence, hatred, and animosity, but does not want us to use those in supposedly "holy" or "righteous" pursuits for God's sake.  God doesn't need our assistance on some battlefield.  No, like the old saying goes, you defend God like you defend a lion--you get out of its way.

So since these just happen to be the verses that have come up today in our unfolding journey through Colossians, let's let them sink in today.  God's way of redeeming and reigning over all the universe is from a cross.  And if we really believe that is who God is, all the way down so to speak, then it will affect the way we interact with others today--even others we don't know, don't like, or don't agree with.  Maybe we can learn the lesson that there are some things you can't heal with more punching--in fact, there are really very very few.

And maybe we can leave the old childish stories with the discarded things of childhood and decide that today is the day for us to grow up, that we might be indeed "holy and blameless and irreproachable."

Lord God, unstory us from the myths we have been taught, and teach us to follow in your way--the way of the cross.