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 I am a rational person who embraces science and I believe in the resurrection.
Let’s start again. I AM a rational person. I can hear my husband laughing right now as I type these words, because he’s seen me lose my cool once or twice. Ignore his laughter; I am rational! Example: when I worry about my kids contracting some horrible childhood illness, I look up the statistical likelihood of someone actually getting that illness. Then, I embrace the rational numbers and move on with my day. When it comes to my faith, I also tend to be level headed. I don’t get hung up on virgin births or single miracle stories. Jesus walking on water? Powerful metaphor, but I am not concerned if it happened or not. I’m the first person to admit I think the Bible is riddled with mistakes and even some blatant mistruths. There are no biblical handbooks with statistics to reference there are for childhood illnesses, but I try to embrace the large sweep of love present in the Bible as my rational guide to faith. And I believe in the resurrection. In fact, I believe in the resurrection hook, line, and sinker. Literally. From a 21st century scientific perspective this is utterly irrational. Perhaps this is just faith. Perhaps this is just hopeful thinking. I’m not sure. But there it is. The belief that Jesus was dead and three days later walked out of the grave, appeared to the women, stuck out his bloody hands to Thomas to reassure him, and then ate fish beside the sea shore with the other disciples who had fled and gone back to business as usual. Yes, I believe it all. A faithful companion along the journey commented: “Sorry, Abby, I can’t worship a zombie.” I respect that and even find the comment comically accurate. So why do I believe in the resurrection? I don’t have an answer. At least not a good answer. I can only offer the following: I believe in God and for this reason, I believe in hope, even when realistic people tell me to be hopeless. I gave up believing that God could single-handedly rescue starving orphans, Haitians from earthquakes, mothers with debilitating depression, victims of violence, struggling families, or trauma survivors tormented by nightmares. So if I believe in a powerless God and every day I encounter the utter brokenness of this world, then what’s the point? I am left with no choice than to believe in a God who does something! I believe in a God who loves. I believe in a God whose love is more powerful, more healing, and more creative than anything we broken humans can imagine. I believe in a God who invites us into a dance of co-creating love. I believe in a God whose love is active in this world through this dance of co-creation. I believe in a God who grants hope to the hopeless. Real hope. What does this have to do with the resurrection? The resurrection is the ultimate expression of God’s co-creating love. God did not possess the sort of military power that could defeat the systematically violent Roman Empire. Hence Jesus died a brutal death on the cross. But God did possess the power of co-creating love that sprang Jesus from the grave. Together, Jesus and God defeated suffering and death with this co-creating love. The resurrection, the defeat of the grave, continues to offer today the final word: Love! This final word gives me hope for the starving orphan, the depressed parent, the individual facing PTSD after a childhood filled with violence, the cancer patient, the Palestinian and Israeli leaders trying to rebuild their communities in peace. The resurrection calls me to dance with love on my darkest days, when I am sure there is only suffering to be found. The resurrection calls me to co-create in this world, instead of sitting and weeping. The resurrection calls me to roll up my sleeves, to pull out my checkbook, to fall to my knees, to utter a prayer, to hold on. The resurrection is God’s final proof that love is more powerful than anything else, even evil, even death. I know that what I believe can be questioned. Pure rationalists can poke holes in my truth. I don’t care. It’s what I believe. It’s the faith of one broken disciple, a 21st century pastor following Jesus, placing one foot in front of the other on the journey, and feeling powerlessness yield to an even greater power—love.
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There’s nothing like a bloody, anguished Jesus to ruin your religious experience as a child. Did I just say that out loud? Yes I did. If you need to read the above sentence again, please do. On the cusp of Bad Friday (you might refer to it as Good Friday, but no day a human dies on a cross should be remembered as a good day), I would like to share a very powerful and haunting story from a childhood trauma survivor. This survivor describes their parent as a monster. As a child, they remember peering at the wretched crucifix in their church, Sunday after Sunday. They remember vividly kneeling beneath Jesus’ bloodied body and asking, why would they let this happen to you? Soon the violence of their home was mirrored each Sunday in church as they peered up at the crucifix hanging above the altar. As an adult, even after years of therapy, they have been unable to separate the domestic violence they survived from the vision of Jesus crucified. Imagine the imprint the crucifixion has on young minds. If our salvation comes from Jesus’s crucifixion, then the crucifix teaches children that violence is good. Worse, it teaches them that violence is sacred. For two millennia, the church has blessed violence and elevated it to the sacred. And we have exposed generations of children to this unholy endorsement of unholy violence. Christianity is so often associated with wholesomeness and a sanitary innocence. Children raised in “Christian homes” would never watch an R-rated movie. Instead, they are introduced to clean images of faith: pristine children running through sunny fields to attend church, happy families praying before bed, and all problems neatly resolved at the end of the movie. It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it? Such sanitary images of Jesus and wholesome images of living--- in a faith tradition that divinizes violence. Do you disagree? If you are adamant that the church does not divinize violence, can you please explain why churches are filled with 14 different venerations of the cross that depict every step of the horrifying crucifixion? The worship of the cross idolizes violence.  I have a friend who wears a “lethal injection Jesus” instead of a cross around her neck. Yes, you read that correctly. She refuses to pretend the cross is sacred. By offering an alternative image of Jesus' death, not by crucifixion but by lethal injection, this alarming necklace states the truth: Jesus died by state sponsored execution. There is nothing sacred, nothing holy, nothing acceptable about such a violent death.
Then how are we to mark this significant day in the Holy Week story? Simply with the truth. Jesus died a terrible death at the hands of unjust power. That death cannot and should not be venerated as holy. It should be remembered for what it was: horrifyingly cruel. Recognizing the truth of the crucifixion makes God’s resurrecting and transformative love on Easter morn even more powerful. What should we do with our children on Bad Friday? First, please don’t tell them that a loving prophet was tortured to death to save us from our sins. Second, without question, throw out all of the bloody images of Jesus please! Yes! I would rather destroy thousands of crucifixes than have one more child learn from an early age that violence is sacred. I would also encourage families and religious leaders/educators to teach children the entire story of Holy Week. When it is time to teach children about Friday, name the horror of the cross, making sure children understand that Jesus’ death was awful and wrong. Tell them that God had a different idea about power; that God used God’s power for love. This love is the answer to the violence of the cross, and this love is infinitely more powerful than the cross. That’s where we will find our healing---not in the violence of the cross, but in the miracle of the resurrection; not in useless suffering, but in creative hope; not in the power of empire, but in a community of love. We cannot celebrate the death of an innocent, beautiful man, but we can celebrate God’s victory over the machinations of evil. Please join me in changing the way we tell the story this Friday. |
Abby HenrichRev. Abigail A Henrich (ehm!) is an ordained minister who earned her stripes at Princeton Theological Seminary and Colgate University. That said, Abby is really a mother-pastor-spouse who lives in a kinetic state of chaos as she moves from her many vocations: folding laundry, preaching, returning phone calls, sorting lunch boxes, answering e-mails, and occasionally thinking deep thoughts in the shower. Unabashedly she is a progressive Christian who believes some shaking up has got to happen in the church. Categories
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