REV. KENNETH SEMON (The Church of the Holy Faith, Sante Fe, NM): I try to tell people—don’t just come on Sunday, you know, you’ll miss it. You’ll miss everything that this means and all that leads up to it.

They’re called the three solemn days. To go through the experience of the three days is really to go through what changes life for people. And it starts Maundy Thursday with the washing of the feet and the last supper and Jesus’ institution of the Holy Eucharist.

REV. ROCKY SCHUSTER (Episcopal Priest, Taos, NM): Jesus gives the new commandment—love one another as I have loved you, as opposed to as you would have others love you. You serve one another, you feed one another, you take care of one another, even to the point of death. And in the process of doing that, you’ll find new life, you’ll get the Easter experience, you’ll discover what eternal life is really all about.

REV. SEMON: I must tell you, it’s so humbling to wash people’s feet. I cannot tell you what an experience that is, and what a privilege it is really. In Jesus’ day they weren’t necessarily wearing shoes and, in fact, a servant could not be compelled to wash someone’s feet. So you see, it’s even more of an expression of service and humility before your fellows.

We dress in white, so it’s a great change from the purple we’ve been wearing, or the red we’ve worn, throughout Holy Week. When the service is over, after everyone has received communion, we will process into the “Garden of Gethsemane,” which is in our chapel. Jesus says, “Could you watch with me but an hour?” He says that to his disciples. And so people will sit there throughout the night, in prayer of course, silence.

REV. SCHUSTER: We know that he leaves the last supper, he goes and prays, and is captured and taken to trial.

Rev. Kenneth Semon

REV. SEMON: At the end of the service, instead of the final blessing, we strip the altar. We pull everything out of the sanctuary, everything with color. And all the while we are stripping the altar, the choir will be chanting a Psalm of, you know, this is very serious…life is coming to an end.

REV. SCHUSTER: You get the imagery of Jesus being stripped of his clothing and whipped and the rest of the starkness, of the rest of the story.

REV. SEMON: The lights go off. You feel the darkness descend over the Earth, you really do.

REV. SCHUSTER: Good Friday is the ultimate act of loving us. It is the crucifixion, it is taking the suffering that he took under arrest, it is the dying. And so doing these physical things, and acts of contrition, make a lot of sense to people on Good Friday.

REV. SEMON: Pilgrimage becomes a metaphor for life, you know, we’re going to the Holy Place, following our Lord who goes before us. And the tradition here is to go to Chimayo, to this wonderful little place, the Santuario. There’s a tradition that the earth, the dirt in the sacristy, has healing powers. And so it’s a sort of sacred site.

ELIZABETH FRIARY: This is the most religious thing that I do every year because it just feels really holy. And I suppose I could walk it by myself any other time of year, but it wouldn’t be with this crowd.

DONNA LUCERO: We’re going to be tired. We’re going to be very exhausted by the end of the day. But, you know, Jesus did this for us and so we got to give a little bit back, as much as we can. So it is kind of very spiritually uplifting.

REV. SCHUSTER: That physical participation adds an extra dimension. It’s not just sitting in a pew or standing or kneeling. That actual physical activity puts it into your body, so you feel it.

JOSE MIGUEL PACHECO: You’re physically exhausted, you have blisters. And I mean you’re just worn out. And it just gives you such a tiny little taste of what Jesus had to endure for us.

REV. SCHUSTER: When you come to Easter Sunday, our desire is to not just give thanks for what happened two thousand years ago but, in truth, to comprehend the new life that the resurrection­ brings to all of us. That when we love one another as Christ loved us, we actually get to live that resurrected life. And to take that out with us when we leave here—not just to serve one another but to serve everybody we encounter. That whole service represents the joy we can have in the world…the rest of the world…the rest of the time.

The post Holy Week appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During Holy Week, Christians remember the familiar story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But exactly where does that story take place? The Bible offers only a few clues.

REV. MARK MOROZOWICH (Catholic University of America): The Gospels weren’t really written to record a history. They were written to provide a testimony of faith.

LAWTON: According to the New Testament, Jesus was crucified at a spot outside Jerusalem called Golgotha, which in Aramaic means “place of the skull.” The Latin word for skull is calvaria, and in English many Christians refer to the site of the crucifixion as Calvary. The Gospel of John says there was a garden at Golgotha, and a tomb which had never been used. Since the tomb was nearby, John says, that’s where Jesus’s body was placed. The Gospel writers say the tomb was owned by a prominent rich man, Joseph of Arimathea. They describe it as cut out of rock, with a large stone that could be rolled in front of the entrance.

Father Mark Morozowich is acting dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.

MOROZOWICH: At the time of Jesus, when he was crucified, he was not really a significant feature in Israel. I mean, certainly there was jealousy, certainly he had his followers. But there was no church that was built immediately upon his death or to mark his resurrection.

LAWTON: In the fourth century, as Emperor Constantine was consolidating the Roman Empire under Christianity, his mother, St. Helena, traveled to Jerusalem. According to tradition, she discovered relics of the cross upon which Jesus had been crucified. The spot had been venerated by early Christians, and she concluded it was Golgotha. Constantine ordered the construction of a basilica, which became known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

MOROZOWICH: Now people throughout history have debated was it really there, or was it here? Traditionally in that fourth century time that was so amazing, they found this rock and this tomb not far from one another as we see even today in the church you know they’re just a short distance from one another.

LAWTON: Over the centuries, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed, rebuilt and renovated several times. There have been numerous power struggles over who should control it, and even today, sometimes violent squabbles can break out among the several Christian denominations that share jurisdiction. But it is considered one of the holiest sites in Christianity, a massive place of pilgrimage and intense spiritual devotion. At the entrance, visitors can kiss the Stone of Unction which, according to tradition, marks the place where Jesus’ body was washed for burial. The dark chapel commemorating the crucifixion is in one upper corner, and the place marking the tomb on the other side.

MOROZOWICH: What more of a moving place to walk in Jerusalem, the place of the crucifixion, to meditate at Golgotha where Jesus Christ died, the place where he rose from the tomb. So they are very beautiful and very moving moments when a person can have a very deep relationship with God.

LAWTON: During Holy Week in particular, the Holy Sepulchre is the center for special devotions, such as the Holy Fire ritual, where flames from inside the tomb area are passed among the candles of worshippers.

MOROZOWICH: The bishop brings out the light from the tomb and this illuminates and plays on this whole sense of the light of the world coming forth again.

LAWTON: But despite the history and devotion, some question whether that indeed is the true spot. Some Christians, including many Protestants, believe Jesus could have been crucified and buried at a different place in Jerusalem known as the Garden Tomb.

STEVE BRIDGE (Deputy Director, The Garden Tomb): The tomb was discovered in 1867. For hundreds of years before that it had lain buried under rock and rubble and earth and things had grown on top of it.

LAWTON: Steve Bridge is deputy director at the Garden Tomb, which is located just outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate. He says this site was promoted in the late nineteenth century by British General Charles Gordon, who argued that the hillside with the features of a human skull could be actual crucifixion site.

BRIDGE: When we’re looking, now we’re looking side on, and you can see maybe what looks like the two eye-sockets there on the rock face. The Bible tells us Jesus was crucified outside the city walls at a place called Golgotha, which simply means the skull, and so many people believe that Skull Hill is Golgotha, the place of the skull where Jesus died.

LAWTON: This Skull Hill looms over an ancient garden, with cisterns and a wine press, which could indicate that it was owned by a wealthy person. In the garden was a tomb, hewn from the rock.

BRIDGE: The tomb itself is at least two-thousand years old. Many date it as older than that. But it’s certainly not less than 2,000 years old. It’s a Jewish tomb, it’s definitely a rolling stone tomb. That means the entrance would be sealed by rolling a large stone across.

LAWTON: Inside the tomb is a 1300-year-old marking of a cross with the Byzantine words “Jesus Christ, the Beginning and the End.”

BRIDGE: So there’s burial space for at least two bodies, probably more. That, again, matches the bible description. It was a family tomb that Joseph had built for himself and his family.

LAWTON: Bridge says Christians are deeply moved by this visual image of where Jesus may have been placed after he was taken down from the cross.

BRIDGE: On that day, as far as people were concerned, that was the end of the story, that was the end of one that they had hoped would be the Messiah, because a dead Messiah is no good. But three days later, we believe God raised Jesus to life and that was the start of what we now call Christianity of course.

LAWTON: According to Bridge, the Garden Tomb is not trying to set up a competition with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

BRIDGE: There’s no doubt that historically, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has the evidence on its side, and we certainly wouldn’t want to do or say anything that would suggest that we think they’re wrong about the site or that we think that we’re right. What we say we have here is something that matches the Bible description.

LAWTON: And Bridge says, for him, it doesn’t ultimately matter where the actual place is.

BRIDGE: That’s very secondary to Jesus himself, who we believe he is, and why he died, and, you know, on that score us and the Holy Sepulchre would be exactly the same, telling the same story but on a different site.

LAWTON: Father Morozowich agrees that, especially at Easter time, Christians should focus more on what Jesus did, rather than on where he may have done it.

MOROZOWICH: Where he walked is very, very important. At the same time though, we know that Jesus is more than this historical figure that walked the earth, and in his resurrection, he transcends all of that. So he is as real and present in Mishawaka and in Washington, DC as he is in Jerusalem.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

The post Where Was Jesus Buried? appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet and Anglican priest who died a little more than a decade ago, left a body of work that is slowly becoming recognized as among the best and most important religious poetry of the twentieth century.

Like the century itself, however, it is not easily orthodox or pretty. Its bleak moods and near despair reflect the pull of doubt that defined those decades for many, including believers. As such, it stands outside the mainstream of the dominant, God-affirming, sacramental poetry that looks back to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s affirmation that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

Yet Hopkins was also the poet of the “terrible sonnets”—bitter spiritual laments that Thomas described as “but a human repetition of the cry from the cross”: My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Thomas’s own prolific poetic outpouring explored this very question, and his work continues to resonate with compelling freshness and urgency as a new century of uncertainty unfolds.

His is, in many ways, an appropriate poetry for Good Friday, exemplified by his emblematic but enigmatic phrase, “The cross is always avant garde.” The line is from The Echoes Return Slow, a long autobiographical piece written in alternating pages of prose and poetry, and it suggests that for Thomas the cross always goes before us, and it presents a radical challenge to any easy resolution of the tough questions of faith.

A cluster of recurring images, symbols, and metaphors mark Thomas’s religious poems: silence, prayer, kneeling, waiting, watching, empty churches, a wound, the pierced side of Jesus-God-the natural world, a bare tree—and the cross, repeatedly described by Thomas as empty or “untenanted.”

Thomas is mostly interested in God’s silence or absence, the deus absconditus or hidden God, and what that means for forging an identity in the modern world. What language might be used to address such a God in a meaningful way? As Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written, R.S. Thomas was—like one of the poet’s spiritual mentors, Soren Kierkegaard—a “great articulator of uneasy faith.”

An early poem, “In a Country Church,” from the 1955 book Song at the Year’s Turning, announces some of the themes that would dominate Thomas’s later poetry:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

The opening stanza is a powerful image of silence. The only sounds comes not from words but from the wind, not from the wings of angels but of bats. While there is no word from God, the poet gropes for a signal of grace and wrests from the silence a vision of a wintry image of love and crucifixion—perhaps a divine response.

“In Church,” a poem from Thomas’s 1966 book Pieta, returns to the theme:

Often I try
To analyze the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

This poem, with its hard-won final images, is far more powerful, complex, and successful than “In a Country Church.” It confronts the paradox of presence and absence, faith and doubt in a profound way. Philosopher of religion and critic D.Z. Phillips, in his book R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God, reads the last lines as a realization that the poet-priest “has to die to his old questions. It is only by dying to the old questions that wonder can come in at the right place.” Baylor University professor of English William V. Davis, in R.S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology, offers a more orthodox reading: “If…the cross is empty, untenanted, as it is in the Protestant tradition, this is not to deny the fact of the crucifixion but the truth of the resurrection.” Davis sees Thomas suggesting that “Jesus, as Christ, even in his absence—indeed, perhaps because of, and by, his absence—symbolizes and thus affirms his continuing presence.”

Crucifix by Eric Gill, circa 1913

It may seem a strange and contradictory stance for a poet who is also a priest, standing as it does in the face of so many people’s comfortable orthodoxy, but throughout his long career Thomas insisted he found no contradiction in his two vocations, even as he acknowledged he was not especially orthodox. “A lot of people seem to be worried about how I combine my work as a poet and my work as a priest,” he told the BBC in 1972. “This is something that never worried me at all.” He went on to insist, echoing Matthew Arnold, that “in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry” and “Christ was a poet, the New Testament is a metaphor, the resurrection is a metaphor”—explaining metaphor as “an attempt to convey an experience of a kind of new life, an eruption of the deity into ordinary life, a lifting up of ordinary life into a higher level.”

At other times Thomas acknowledged, “I’m obviously not orthodox, I don’t know how many real poets have been orthodox. …I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my Savior and that sort of thing.”

Yet throughout his long career, Thomas showed no desire to leave the priesthood and continued his priestly functions administering the sacraments, preaching the word, including, at one church, delivering a sermon in Welsh once a month. He served many rural parishes before he retired at Easter in 1978. He was also an outspoken Welsh nationalist, a pacifist involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a tireless critic of what he took to be the despoiling of the Welsh countryside by English developers.

Thomas’s poetry confronts not just the absence of God but what literary critic J. Hillis Miller has termed “the disappearance of God.” For Miller, the nineteenth century and its experience of the eclipse of God was a major turning point in the spiritual history of humanity. It is a perception described powerfully by Matthew Arnold in his essays and poetry, most famously in “Dover Beach,” where he portrays Victorian religious experience as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith.

For Arnold and a poetic tradition that runs at least up through American poet Wallace Stevens, the temptation was to substitute poetry for religion. “More and more,” Arnold wrote in his famous essay on “The Study of Poetry,” “mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”

Arnold’s experience was not the happy exuberance of a Nietzsche and his proclamation that God is dead. It was, rather, that God has withdrawn. “Our duty,”’ Miller says of Arnold’s view, “is to testify bravely to the existence of God in a time when our dwelling place is in the desert.”

This confrontation with the absence of God comes to the forefront of Thomas’s poetry in the 1970s. The first poem in his collection H’m begins: “God looked at space and I appeared / Rubbing my eyes at what I saw.” In “Petition,” the speaker, seeing the “rueful acts” of theft, murder, and rape committed by human beings, says, “I have said / New prayers, or said the old / In a new way / Seeking the poem / in the pain.” The poem concludes with a sense of disappointment: “One thing I have asked / Of the disposer of the issues of life: that truth should defer / To beauty. It was not granted.”

“The Coming” alludes in its own fashion to the Good Friday story:

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

In the poem “Pieta” Thomas writes:

Always the same hills
Crown the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene
And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
of a maid’s arms.

In “The Combat,” Thomas invokes the Old Testament story of Jacob wrestling with God to comment on a major twentieth-century theme of the failure of language to adequately express religious insight or experience: “You have no name. / We have wrestled with you all Day, and now night approaches …. For the failure of language / there is no redress.”

Sometimes the failure belongs to God, as in Thomas’s poem “Nuclear”:

It’s not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognize
as speech

John Powell Ward, one of Thomas’s most astute readers, has written that in the poetry “the biblical symbol that most gets rewritten is that of the wound in Christ’s side,” becoming “a new symbol of great significance.” But it is not just Jesus’ wound. In “Soliloquy,” God says “the sun was torn / from my side.” Powell also points to the poem “God’s Story,” where God “fingered the hole / in his side, where the green tree / came from.” According to Powell, “If the wound in the side can be so universalized, it becomes something of a rupture at the heart of existence itself, the very mark of identity.”

The absence of God also means Thomas at times rejects any easy sacramental sense of God’s presence in the natural world, as he writes in “Threshold”:

I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them.

I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on

this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
the light. To look forward? Ah,

what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What

to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?

But the absence of God does not mean the nonexistence of God. Many of Thomas’s poems dwell on the immediacy of God’s absence, an absence in which God has just been missed, as in these lines from “Pilgrimage”: “Such a fast / God, always before us and / leaving as we arrive.” Or in the poem “Adjustments”: “We never catch / him at work, but can only say, / coming suddenly upon an amendment, / that here he had been.”

Thomas does not offer an easy resolution of the paradox of absence and presence, but in the long encounter he waged with doubt and silence—often on his knees, as many of the poems tell us—he seems to have won his way to a rugged kind of faith, an affirmation of love as the meaning of the cross, and a posture of patient waiting. On the theme of waiting William V. Davis finds some provocative connections between Thomas and his contemporary, theologian Paul Tillich. In The Echoes Return Slow, Thomas wrote of faith: “You have to imagine / a waiting that is not impatient / because it is timeless.” Davis sees this as the same sentiment Tillich expressed in a sermon on “Waiting” in his 1948 collection The Shaking of the Foundations: “He is God for us just in so far as we do not possess Him. … We have God through not having him.” Later Tillich adds, “Waiting is not despair. It is the acceptance of our not having, in the power of that which we already have.” For Thomas, the struggle was to learn just that: waiting is not despair.

Thomas was a poet who lived with questions, not answers, as described in the final lines of the poem “Pilgrimages”:

It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

Here the quest for God is also the pilgrimage into one’s self, and the lesson learned is that in embracing the mystery of God “out there” one begins to understand the mystery “in the finitude of the here and now.”

Rowan Williams, in his essay “R.S. Thomas and Kierkegaard” in the collection Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R.S. Thomas, argues that a kind of complex love begins to address, not resolve, this paradox. He cites a passage from The Echoes Return Slow:

But love answers it
in its turn: I am old now and have died
many times, but my rebirth is surer
than the truth embalming itself
in the second law of your Thermo-Dynamics.

The lines point a slow coming to a kind of faith, a faith in the poet’s own resurrection of some sort that he posits, at least momentarily, is as certain as the dead laws of science and technology. There is in the poem something of the dying to self in order to be born again. Williams concludes that “God, for Thomas, is both the frustration of every expectation and the only exit from despair. And that God is encountered only in the embrace of finitude.”

In a 1981 radio broadcast, Thomas said that in the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ God has given the answer to suffering. But the poet’s emphasis remained on the cross, trusted and finally understood, according to Tony Brown of the University of Wales, in his volume R.S. Thomas, as “the ultimate demonstration of love defeating time and mortality.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. In 2009, he wrote for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Easter and writer John Updike.

The post R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Cross appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, an overwhelming number of Americans — 83 percent — believe that Jesus rose from the dead. This Easter season, Mel Gibson’s controversial movie THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST has provoked unprecedented national conversation about the crucifixion. But some Christian theologians believe those conversations have not gone far enough. Kim Lawton sat down with prominent author and Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge to reflect on crucifixion and resurrection.

KIM LAWTON: The styles and traditions may vary, but on Easter Sunday, all Christians celebrate a central tenet of their faith: that Jesus Christ was crucified and three days later, he rose again. The story may be 2,000 years old, but Christians believe it still has meaning today.

Reverend FLEMING RUTLEDGE: Jesus is alive. There’s never a possibility of the event fading into the mists of the past because this is about a living God who acts and speaks in our own time and will continue to do so.

LAWTON: Over the centuries, the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection has been told, and retold, through art, music, and drama. And public interest hasn’t waned.

(To Rev. Rutledge): What is it about the story that still intrigues us?

Rev. RUTLEDGE: If you’re not a believer, it’s a cultural phenomenon of some sort. It’s related to the history of art and the history of warfare. But if one is a believer, then this is the story that never dies, because this is the story of God’s decisive, once-for-all intervention, on behalf of his creation, to save it.

LAWTON: Fleming Rutledge was one of the first women to be ordained in the U.S. Episcopal Church, and she has been called one of America’s best preachers. A popular Holy Week speaker, she has written widely about crucifixion and resurrection themes. She says visual depictions such as Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST cannot convey the full Easter story.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: The meaning of the cross can’t be found in looking at the beating and the flaying and the nailing. The meaning can only be grasped through very deep engagement with the various portions of Scripture where this is proclaimed. It is the word, the words, the message that brings life.

LAWTON: In Gibson’s depiction, virtually the entire film focuses on the crucifixion and the violence leading up to it; only a few seconds at the end are devoted to the resurrection.

(To Rev. Rutledge): Can the crucifixion be understood apart from the resurrection?

Rev. RUTLEDGE: The crucifixion and the resurrection were a single event. The incredible discrepancy between the horrible obscenity of the crucifixion and the glory of the resurrection is very important. It’s that contrast that gives the story such power. Otherwise it’s just another story about a dying and rising god. There are zillions of those. But this is a story about a historical event that was then reversed.

LAWTON: Differing streams of Christianity have at times placed more emphasis on one over the other. Theologians have criticized many Protestants, and particularly Evangelicals, for jumping too quickly to the happy ending of Easter without first meditating on the grief and horror of Good Friday.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: That is what makes Easter Day what it is. Easter Day was not just a bursting forth of a dead person from the tomb. Easter Day was the overcoming of absolute nihilism, absolute total dehumanization, degradation.

LAWTON: Other Christians may concentrate on the suffering of the crucifixion without remembering the rest of the story. But Fleming Rutledge says the resurrection vindicates the crucifixion.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: No one would be interested in the crucifixion if it weren’t for the resurrection. We wouldn’t even know that there had ever been such a person as Jesus of Nazareth, if he had not been raised from the dead. That is my view. We don’t know the names of any other crucified victims in history. Something happened. Exactly what it was is a matter of dispute, but something tremendous and unpredictable and unforeseen and unprecedented happened. And it was a victory over sin and death.

LAWTON: Rutledge has preached Holy Week sermons for nearly 25 years. She’s keenly aware of the need to come up with something fresh to say every time. But she says she rarely finds herself at a loss.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: One of my deepest convictions is that the Scripture is ever renewing, and that’s one of the aspects of Christianity that not everybody fully understands. Scripture, the Holy Bible — one doesn’t need to be a fundamentalist at all to understand how there is life that flows from it, new, every day. The challenge is communicating it in a fresh way, so that the old story becomes the new story and people begin to be aware of it: “This is my story, too.”

LAWTON: And once again this year, Christians are indeed celebrating that story as their own.

I’m Kim Lawton in Rye Brook, New York.

The post Fleming Rutledge on Easter appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

KIM LAWTON: It’s the teaching at the core of Christian belief and practice: Jesus suffered, was crucified and buried, but three days later he rose again. For Christians, the cross is an enduring symbol of grace, salvation, and love. But for many non-Christians — and Jews in particular — the cross has long symbolized violence and persecution.

Two thousand years after Jesus’ death, Mel Gibson’s controversial movie, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, has set off a wave of new conversations about who was responsible for Jesus’ death — and why it matters today.

Professor MARY BOYS (Union Theological Seminary, New York): In my business, I would call it a teachable moment. Many people are thinking about the meaning of the death of Jesus, probably in ways they haven’t thought before.

LAWTON: The conversation troubles many Jews, given the long history of Christians persecuting Jews as “Christ-killers.”

Professor Michael Berenbaum, formerly of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, is now with the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He organized a public forum last week where an interfaith panel discussed the crucifixion. More than 450 people showed up.

Professor MICHAEL BERENBAUM (University of Judaism, Los Angeles): It’s a very complex, very long relationship. And Jews have usually been on the losing end of that relationship.

LAWTON: The crucifixion is described in the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels. They are called the “Passion narratives” — passion coming from the Latin word for suffering. The Gospels have differing emphases and offer different details.

In piecing together the story, modern scholars also factor in the historical, cultural, and literary context of the Gospels. Many say the role of the Roman occupiers has too often been under-emphasized.

Prof. BOYS: Crucifixion was one of the modes of capital punishment in the Roman Empire. And, in this case, the death penalty, the crucifixion, was used only against marginal people or people who seemed to threaten the order of the state, which apparently Jesus did.

Prof. BERENBAUM: Crucifixion was never a punishment that Jews used as a part of their capital punishment. The rabbis and the Pharisees of that generation could not engage in capital punishment. We didn’t have the political power, even if we had the will.

LAWTON: But the Gospel accounts, to varying degrees, do describe a Jewish role in Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion — a role that has been re-enacted for centuries in Passion plays on stage and in films.

From film THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: If we let him go on in this way, everyone will believe in him. The Roman authorities will take action and destroy our temple and our nation.

LAWTON: In the Gospel accounts, which are read in churches every Holy Week, an assembly of Jewish leaders charges Jesus with blasphemy. The Jewish high priests are portrayed as pushing the reluctant Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to crucify Jesus, while a mob of Jews yells in favor of the crucifixion. For the Jewish community, the story raises sensitive, often painful questions. Are the Gospel Passion stories anti-Semitic? To what extent were Jews involved in the crucifixion?

Professor Shawn Landres, who is Jewish, teaches a class about Christianity to students at the University of Judaism. He says Jews need to remember that the Gospel writers themselves were Jewish and used strong language to convince their divided Jewish community that Jesus was indeed the prophesied Messiah.

Professor SHAWN LANDRES: What do I teach the students about the crucifixion? I teach them that there were Jewish leaders, political leaders, for whom Jesus’ teachings were heretical at best, and politically subversive at worst, and who felt that it would be better for him to be removed from the scene. That doesn’t mean the Jews as a people killed Jesus.

LAWTON: But there’s a complicated history. Perhaps the most provocative account comes in the Gospel of Matthew, when Pilate hesitates in crucifying Jesus. Matthew 27:25 says: “All the people answered, let his blood be on us and on our children.”

Over the course of 1,700 years, Church leaders and individual Christians have assigned a so-called “blood-guilt” blame to the Jews, accusing them of deicide — killing God.

Professor Kathryn J.S. Smith heads the biblical studies department at the evangelical Azusa Pacific University in California.

Professor KATHRYN J.S. SMITH (Biblical Studies Department, Azusa Pacific University, California): Those words taken into a new time and place indeed function in an anti-Semitic way, although I am convinced that the Gospel writers and the communities that produced these did not understand it in that way.

Prof. BERENBAUM: One of the traditional anchors of anti-Semitism has been the accusation that Jews are Christ-killers. If we can murder God, murder the son of God, then there is no limit to the evil and iniquity, to the perfidiousness, to use the word that was used in Good Friday liturgy within the Roman Catholic Church — there is no limit to the perfidiousness of the Jews.

LAWTON: Especially during the Easter season, when the Passion story was recounted and re-enacted, the accusation of Christ-killer was used to justify violence against Jews.

Prof. BERENBAUM: With persecutions, with pogroms, with slaughters, with martyrdom, with forced conversions, with expulsion, and ultimately with the Holocaust.

LAWTON: The Roman Catholic Church did not officially repudiate the Christ-killer notion until the 1960s during the Second Vatican Council. Earlier this month, the U.S. Catholic bishops released a new set of documents reaffirming that Jews bear no collective responsibility.

Bishop STEPHEN BLAIRE (Diocese of Stockton): I think it’s very clear in the teaching of the Church that all of us, by our sins, are the ones primarily responsible for the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

LAWTON: The evangelical American Tract Society takes a similar view in two new brochures, timed for the release of THE PASSION. They ask, “Who crucified Jesus?”

MARK BROWN (American Tract Society): The answer is, God did it. Ultimately, in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 53, it goes to a verse that says he was smitten and afflicted for our sake. And basically that God laid upon him the iniquity of us all.

LAWTON: Today Christians across the spectrum emphasize the doctrine that it was God’s will that Jesus died to take away the sins of the world. So, because of sin, all of humanity bears responsibility.

That may be a satisfying theological answer, but Professor Smith says it’s also one that can too quickly minimize atrocities against Jews done in the name of Christianity.

Prof. SMITH: There’s not a real grappling with, “This is our tradition. We are heirs of this tradition. What are we going to do with it?”

LAWTON: Much of the interpretation of the Passion story depends on what an individual brings to it. Professor Landres says Christians need to be more aware of the memories of persecution the Passion story evokes among Jews — as well as the fears that persecution could be revived. But he says Jews, too, need to deepen their own understanding.

Prof. LANDRES: I have yet to see a true acknowledgment from some members of the Jewish communal leadership that Christians just don’t read the story the same way Jews do.

LAWTON: Christians and Jews alike hope the new discussion about the crucifixion is an opportunity for dialogue, not more division. They agree the implications of Jesus’ death are vitally important, which is why, 2,000 years later, we’re still talking about it.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

The post Who Really Killed Jesus? appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

On Palm Sunday:

I looked back at the account in Luke of Palm Sunday. It’s only there you find it where Jesus, as he approaches the city, looks at it and weeps. Except for the weeping over Lazarus, I don’t know anyplace else in the New Testament where he is shown as weeping. And he weeps because he says, “Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that make for peace.” And he says, “The time is not far off when your enemies will set an encampment against you, and they will dash you against the rocks and your little ones with you and leave not one stone upon the other, because you did not know the time of God’s coming to you.”

“Would that you knew the things that make for peace.” He could be saying that just as easily today — would that the world, the United States, knew the things that make for peace. In a way they do, but they don’t somehow live out of those things; they live out of other things, antagonisms and fears and aggressiveness and things of that kind. I thought a lot about Jesus’ tears for Jerusalem, how he would be weeping still, again, today for the same reason: “Would that they knew the things that make for peace.”

It was a pathetic little procession. I think if you had been there, it wouldn’t have amounted to much — somebody from nowhere riding on a donkey into a city. No television cameras, no hoopla, no band. But nonetheless, as his life went, it was his moment of triumph, and people hailed him as the Son of David and [said], “Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.” Yet people are so fickle, as has often been pointed out. Within a week or less than a week of that, they were saying, “Crucify him.”

I can’t help thinking of the stories one hears out of Iraq about the Iraqis running out and embracing American soldiers and giving them flowers. But three weeks from yesterday, who knows what they’ll be doing — shooting at them from windows as we will be shooting at them. Because the world is mad. It’s always been mad — never known the things that make for peace, never acted out of them … or rarely.

On the crucifixion:

There was the crucifixion, this hideous death of this good man with God absent, as far as one can tell. And in the garden, Jesus says, “Would this cup could pass from me,” and sweats blood. “Nonetheless, not my will, but yours be done.” And there’s no indication that God said a bloody thing.

And then again on the cross, that terrible cry: “Why have you let me down? Why have you abandoned me?” And again, no answer. God is either absent or, at least, he is not in evidence, apparently to Jesus or to anybody else. Out of this hideous death and out of this almost more hideous feeling one has that here was this good man, not only being tortured to death but also abandoned by the God for whom, in a way, he was dying — out of this, nonetheless, comes whatever on earth it was that happened two days after the crucifixion, which we use the word “resurrection” for. What happened? Who knows? And in a way, almost, who cares? Because even if somebody had been there with a television camera and taken a picture of Jesus walking out of the tomb, what would that be except, for many people, an interesting historical fact, just as it’s interesting to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492? But what difference does that make to me? So what if a Jew in the year 30 A.D. was brought back from the dead? In other words, what’s important is not so much what happened in the half-light of daybreak on that day in 30 A.D., but what happens now. What matters is not what happened on Easter Sunday, but what happens in my life. Is there any sense that, for you and for me, Jesus exists, or the power that was in Jesus, the power that led people to see him as kind of transparency to holiness itself, to the mystery itself? If that is alive, that’s all that matters, and what happened on that day is of little consequence except in a minor historical way.

On the role of suffering in the life of faith:

Which of us has not suffered one way or another? We’ve all had our crucifixions, where God seems to be absent and light seems to disappear, and the world is dark and terrifying. Anybody with faith or without faith has had somehow to live through that kind of a time. The question is, What comes out of that time?

Suffering plays a role in every life. We’ve all known our dark times; we’ve all felt abandoned by God or felt there was no such thing as God to abandon us — just the emptiness, the craziness of the world. And out of this, faith can often come. In my own life, I’ve never gone through a dark time without eventually somewhere finding a treasure in it — maybe luck, maybe grace, maybe who knows what. But there are others, of course, for whom suffering somehow becomes the executioner, where the suffering is so pervasive and intense and unanswerable that somehow any possibility of faith seems to be destroyed by it. So who knows the role of suffering? We all experience it; some come out of it with a kind of faith in spite of that. The only story we really can tell is our own story. I don’t know about the story of people who have grown up in hopeless situations, in slums, in wartime, in times of hunger and all that kind of thing. I can’t tell their stories. I can only hope that somehow God can find a way to those people. I don’t know about that. I only know about myself — that often it’s in my own darkest times, or out of them somehow, has come a treasure, a glimpse of something beyond or deep at the heart of suffering.

I can hardly imagine anybody not going through a Good Friday, one way or another, going through the darkness, one way or the other. I can’t. In fact, I would be a little bit leery of anybody who felt that he or she had somehow come straight to a kind of faith having had no suffering at all. I’d think, well, you don’t really know what life is all about. You don’t know what faith is all about, if all you know is little goody two-shoes kind of version of reality.

On the darkness of Holy Week:

Darkness symbolizes that out of which faith can arise, that which faith must somehow confront, the darkness that we all experience as human beings, I think, the darkness of doubt and pain and suffering and all that kind of thing.

Also the suffering of Christ — that wonderful Maundy Thursday service where one by one the candles are put out until finally, there is one candle left and that is put out. And the cross is veiled, at least in the Episcopal Church — they put [on] a purple veil, as if the sadness, the suffering of this moment is something one cannot look upon.

There’s a lot of darkness in Holy Week. I think also of the darkness of the resurrection itself, that morning when it was hard to be sure what you were seeing, where Mary thought it was Jesus and it turned out to be the gardener, this figure in white. She’s not quite sure who she’s seen or what she’s seen — the confusion of it. The account is rather garbled — who got there first and who told whom, all of it taking place in half-darkness anyway, not in a great blaze of light … the darkness and the confusion and the half-light of that Easter morning, where nobody is quite sure what happened. I don’t think anywhere does it describe somehow the sun coming up in a great burst of glory, but in some sense the sun did come up. The most powerful argument for the fact that something extraordinary happened on that Sunday morning is the fact that the church survived, this little band of terrified Jews who were hiding out somewhere. [There is] that famous scene where Jesus appears before them and Thomas is not there, do you remember? And then Jesus comes by. Something happened to galvanize them into a movement that has survived for all these 2,000 years, something extraordinary.

The New Testament doesn’t try to pretend that it happened with flags flying and the light rising to a crescendo. It happens subtly, it happens in half-light, it happens here, it happens there. Jesus comes, then he’s not there anymore, and yet the proclamation is that it was an event of cosmic significance, not only in terms of the whole destiny of the earth but in terms of our own destinies — that somehow this reality, which not even that kind of death could destroy, remains among us and within us and approachable, and something to which one can give oneself and listen to, wait for.

On symbols and metaphors:

All these symbols we use — the image that we are such terrible sinners that we could not possibly atone for our sins so God gave his only son, this innocent man, to atone for us. Well, that’s one way of talking about it, but what kind of a God is that who would visit horrors upon this one holy and beautiful life in order to do whatever it was He thought He was doing? All these metaphors we use for describing the meaning of the death of Jesus are very clumsy ones — the idea that God punished him instead of us, the lamb sacrifice. They’re all useful ways of sketching a kind of outline of it, but if they are taken literally in any sense of the word, they are deadening, they are off-putting very often, I think.

On the resurrection:

I have no idea what happened except, as I say, what really matters is not so much what happened there as what happens now — what happens in your life and my life, what happens in the world, what happens the next five days, five years of human history. Is God making himself known in some powerful and saving way among people, even [people] who don’t give a hoot about God? Is this still a reality which is part of the madness and self-destructiveness and darkness of the world? That’s what really matters.

I’m a terrible pessimist in many ways as far as the state of the world is today, as far as our country is today. In the process of putting down a tyranny in Iraq we have become the great tyrants of the world. We are the ones whose regime is really to be terrified [of]. We have this enormous power, we can do anything, and now already there’s talk about going on into Syria, going on into Iran. What has happened when the role this nation for so long played of a beacon of hope and of civilization becomes the great bully of the world? In this way I’m a terrible pessimist. I shudder to think; we’ve opened Pandora’s Box. We have most of the Arab world against us; most of Europe looks upon us as a greater threat to peace than ever. … Old Saddam Hussein with his California-size country and his few weapons of mass destruction, which have never even turned up. … We are the ones who are the threat to the world. I get very depressed about that.

But, I feel ultimately, that wonderful line from DEUTERONOMY — “underneath are the everlasting arms.” Beneath the level of all the madness and horror and whatever other darkness, whatever other word you want to use, is this saving, life-giving, nourishing, healing, beautiful, mystery is the best word for it — forget all metaphors for it. It is a mystery, a mystery with a capital M — that somehow an elusive, holy plan is being worked out in the affairs of the earth. If it is real, it is real at all times. Easter is a time for focusing on it just because the great opponents, if you want, of darkness and light are brought together within a space of less than a week — the darkness of the crucifixion and the blaze of the resurrection, whatever that was. Out of this comes this triumphant hope.

The trouble is the church is stuck with the same words, the same images, and I find myself, very often, so tired, so frustrated by church because I feel that these same things have been said generation after generation, again and again, and here’s this congregation [and it's] being said again, the same images … and it does become kind of flat and deadening after a time. Not only does the preacher have to find some new way of saying it, but the preacher has to get in touch again with the reality of it in his own or her own life. In other words, not just talk about the resurrection then, but also, in what way has this man or this woman who stands up there in a black gown experienced it himself? — to talk out of that, to set the images aside for the moment and give a glimpse of that which the images are clumsily trying to convey.

On Easter and preachers:

Imagine having to preach as many times as a preacher has to — 48, 49 Sundays out of the year? I can’t imagine doing it; I also can’t imagine, though, the whole business of running a church, all the administrative details. So much gets buried in the way of what one hopes was originally a passion for God, for Christ; that gets buried and, I think, terribly difficult for them. And [there is] a great reluctance in many of them to speak their own human truth — that somehow they think of themselves as having to get up and present something that is presentable to the congregation, whereas what the congregation wants to know is, “How about you? How can you believe all this? Do you still believe it? Tell me the truth about yourself. Do you really think God exists, and if so, why? Why do you think that when there is so much reason to think there is no such thing?” But I think so many of them don’t touch that because they use the old formulas.

One wonders what will become of the church. Certain branches of it are growing, but in so many parts of the world it’s dying, and maybe that’s just as well. Maybe it’s had its day, and God will never die; God will always make himself known one way or the other — maybe not in the church at all, but who knows how? I’ve often said in churches [that] the best thing that could happen is if the church burned down and all the computers were lost and all the bulletins were blown away by the wind, and the minister was run over by a truck, and you’ve got nothing left except each other and God. That would be the best thing that could happen to you, because that’s where it all began, and that’s what it’s all about. All the rest is window dressing; it is trappings, it is words, words, words, words, words, words, words, which after time become just babble — God babble.

On the Easter message:

The essential message is that nothing, no horror can happen that can permanently, irrevocably quench the presence of holiness that is always there “underneath the everlasting arms.” No matter what dreadful things take place, that remains the heart of reality. There is that wonderful thing from the British saint, Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all manner of things will be well.” That somehow remains true no matter what. That’s, I think, the message of Easter. Yes, this hideous death of a good man abandoned, as it would seem, by God. Yet the best has come out of it, which is this nourishing current of hope and new life that still flows in spite of everything. There must be a God. How else could it happen? Why else would it happen?

Martin Luther said once, “If I were God, I’d kick the world to pieces.” But Martin Luther wasn’t God. God is God, and God has never kicked the world to pieces. He keeps reentering the world, keeps offering himself to the world — by grace, keeps somehow blessing the world, making possible a kind of life which we all, in our deepest being, hunger for.

The post Frederick Buechner Extended Interview appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.