Taking pride in Christ's cross

Text: Galatians 6.7-16 

There are many things in life which people like you and I take pride in.  Our work.  Our kids and grand kids.  Academic or sporting achievements.  Our gardens or our mechanical skills (I stand in awe of anyone with mechanical skills!)  But today I'd like to reflect on what it means to take pride in the cross of Jesus Christ.  In the passage we read from Galatians, Paul says this:

May I never boast of anything save the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the life of the world.  For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision in anything; but a new creation is everything! (6.14, 15)

What's Paul on about here?  What is this concern he has with those who take pride in their circumcision more than in the cross of Jesus?  And what value could this rather bizarre and ancient controversy have for our contemporary life in faith?  Well, I'd like to have a go at answering those questions, but we'll need a little background first.

When Paul wrote to the Galatian churches in 54 or 55 of the first century, he did so with a clear purpose in mind.  Apparently some of the folk in the region had begun to teach that one had to obey the Jewish law in order to find salvation.  In particular, these teachers encouraged their followers to be circumcised, as a sign of their belonging to that community, the community of the Jews and of the Jewish law.  Paul's letter is a serious attempt to expose the futility of these claims.  

For Paul, you see, the Christian gospel proclaims a complete and permanent freedom from the Law of the Jews through the crucifixion of Jesus.  The Law, he argued, is double edged.  It is good in that it reveals the ethical standards of God for human beings. And these standards are very important.  But the law is also bad because not one of us is able to entirely obey the Law. The Law functions, in fact, to condemn us:  to sentence absolutely everyone to death as people unworthy of a holy God.  Paul's good news chimes in at precisely this point.  Through the law I am condemned to death.  But if, through baptism, I die with Christ himself, I then also rise with Christ, leaving the power of the Law for condemnation behind me.  Through the living Spirit of Christ, I am enabled to participate in a new life of freedom with Christ which is no longer subject to the crushing weight of the Law.

Now this is a seriously climactic move!  In one fell swoop, which has reverberated through the ages, Paul dispenses with the religion of law and social status; in its place he urges us to embrace a spirituality of death and re-birth in Christ.  Can you hear the difference there?  Can you discern how the landscape has changed forever?  

Let me reframe this whole discussion by bringing it into the present.  We ourselves live in a very religious society.  Karl Marx rightly said that the main concern of religion is social control.  Each person is raised to their allotted path in life, pre-destined to be bigger, better and more worthy than the generation before.  The religious person is mainly concerned with whether or not they're 'doing the right thing' in the eyes of their community, their elders or their peer group.  The religious person gains self-esteem and a sense of purpose from the positive feedback of that community.  So, as long as you do as you are told, you’ll thrive.  That’s the promise, at least!  

But religion fails, of course, when a person finds themselves either unable or unwilling to live up to the goals and expectations their community has allotted them.  Let me share with you a personal example.  From a very young age I was told, by a complex system of media and gossip, that I will have made it in life if I were able to buy a large house in the suburbs and drive a nice car—if, in fact, I were able to join the middle-class.  The funny thing is, that when I went to university on a scholarship and started hanging out with middle-class folk for the first time, I found that they weren’t very happy.  Many of them, even as students, already had nice cars and were well on their way to owning their own homes.  Yet they felt a constant pressure to do even better than that:  to own more, to have a better job, a better body and more prestigious credit-card than the other bloke, to have travelled more extensively and squeezed in more ‘experiences’ than the other person.  Even at University, many of the people I met were already being crushed under the weight of those expectations.  Some of them folded under that weight and thought themselves utter failures. Others gritted their teeth and set out to be happy in the terms their parents and their community had allotted for them.  But they, and most of us, never get there.  We never become good enough, or affluent enough, or good-looking enough, or credentialed enough, to be happy or content.

Paul suggests that if we really do want to move on from that point, we need to let go of religious concerns, the laws and concerns of our society and culture, and embrace the life of the Spirit.  Now, ‘letting go’ is like a dying, and that's why Paul is forever talking about crucifixion with Christ.  Note that Paul does not suggest, as some preachers still do, that the death of Jesus is able to achieve our salvation apart from what we ourselves do in response.  It is not simply the fact that Jesus dies in our place that is able to save us from the terrible weight of religion, but also our willingness to participate  in that death by dying ourselves.  In chapter 2 of Galatians, verses 19 and 20, Paul says: 

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.  I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 

What saves us, according to Paul, is our willingness to surrender every religious rule or aspiration that may have pushed us along, every socially-constructed behaviour or symbol which may have defined our sense of worthiness up until now.  Like Christ on the cross, in our baptism we are stripped of any status or power we may have possessed as a result of our conformity to religious rules or socially defined paths towards status or achievement.  We acknowledge, in a rather horrifying moment of clarity, that the sum total of all these things is nothing.  They are unable to save us, to liberate us from either guilt or the ever-present spectre of failure.  They are unable to fill the void, to bring contentment, to make us whole.  The American singer John Cougar Mellencamp put it well a few years ago when he sang 'There's a hole in my heart that I can't seem to fill/ I do charity work when I believe in the cause but my soul it troubles me still'.  

At that moment, according to Paul, salvation arrives as from another place.  When all our own achievement comes to nought and nothingness, Christ arises to face us with a word of surprising grace: you are forgiven, you are loved, you are free . . .  But I hesitate at this point.  I am reluctant to talk of grace too quickly.  I suspect, you see, that many of us have been taught about a rather cheap kind of grace, a grace that arrives apart from the gospel injunction to take up one's cross and follow after the way of Jesus, a grace that tries to skip over the necessary experience of emptiness and void which John of the Cross called the 'dark night of the soul'.  Don’t get me wrong, grace is real, it is powerful, and it is freely given.  But it is certainly not cheap.  In order for God to come to us as the healer and the liberator of souls, we must be prepared to lay ourselves bare.  We must let go of every religious pretension, every cultural certainty, every economic doctrine, every aspirational rule.  Then, and only then, when we have been stripped bare of every skerrick of cultural capital . . . then we may be ready to receive that mystery we call grace.

And so I ask you today:  what is the circumcision in your flesh which you rely on for your salvation?  Is it your attendance at worship?  Is it the fact that you're heterosexual rather than homosexual?  Is it your generosity or charity towards others?  Is it your self-effacing nature?  Is it that fact that you've worked hard to provide for your family, or remained faithful to your spouse?  Or is it, more nakedly, your caste or position in the social pecking-order?  Whatever it is, hear this word of God today:  'neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!' 

This sermon was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, in 2004.

God's Revolution

Psalm 127; Hebrews 9. 24-28; Mark 12. 38-44

In the Four Quartets T.S. Eliot wrote this:

. . .   In order to arrive there,

to arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

        You need to go by a way in which there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

        You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

        You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

        You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

There is a revolution from God, an impossible turning in which the very worst that may visit us in life is able to reconfigure itself as the very best.  It is a revolution that resists explanation or representation.  It happens in our experience.  We know that it happens, and we can recognise it when it happens to others.  But we struggle to understand or tell it, to name its dark contours even for ourselves.  To my mind, the gospel of the crucified and risen Jesus is our best telling of this revolution.  “Best” because here the story unfolds from our lips and imaginations, from the lips and imagination of the church, and yet it does not come from us.  We hear it, first of all, from God.  What we confess with our lips and know in our hearts begins not with our own hearts, but with an event that happens in the heart of God. 

The gospel story of the widow who gave all she had, all she had to live on, is a version of that telling.  Although we have it here, in Mark, as a story about discipleship - an allegory and paradigm example for us of what a disciple of Jesus would do - its context in the larger gospel story suggests something else.  Since Jesus himself is about to be arrested, and everything taken from him through the humiliation of torture and crucifixion, and since Mark casts this great loss as a willing loss, a sacrifice or gift on the part of Jesus and his Father for the life of the world, so this simple act of a widow’s offering is not primarily about what disciples do, but what God does.  In the larger story about Christ’s offering, God’s gift, the woman’s willingness to part with everything that she has to live on prepares the reader to hear the story of the passion: that she is like the God who loses everything, but willingly, in the encounter with human evil. 

Consider, if you will, what has happened in the story so far.   In chapter 1 we read that Jesus had come to inaugurate a kingdom, the kingdom of God.   In chapters 2 through 7 we read stories about the signs of that kingdom’s arrival:  the preaching of good news, healings, exorcisms, and (not least) the shattering of human traditions about what is right and what is wrong.  In chapters 8 & 10, Jesus tells his disciples that salvation comes only for the one who is willing to die, to be baptised into death, to become the slave of all.  Also in chapter 10, in what I take to be the key utterance of the gospel, Jesus declares that salvation, while impossible for human beings, is indeed possible for God.  Can you see where Mark is leading us with that story-line?  To suffering and to crucifixion, as a direct and necessary consequence of God’s encounter with human beings.   But also to the revolution revealed there, that strange turning in which death becomes life, poverty becomes riches, and the loss of self the key to a newly made identity that God gives freely.  So what Mark is trying to tell us in this stark story about a widow who gives away even the little she has, is nothing other than what he is telling us in the gospel as a whole.  That one can never be saved from life’s cruelties unless one is willing to confess and acknowledge one’s own involvement in the system that perpetuates those cruelties, giving oneself over, instead, to a different logic, the logic of God which is called by the beautiful name of grace.

What I mean is this.  For Mark – and, indeed, for the Letter to the Hebrews before him – there are two powers or logics in the world:  the power of religion or karma, and the power of the gospel or of grace.  In Mark’s world, as in ours, it was the power of karma that appeared to reign supreme.  Karma is the power of necessity, you know, the compulsion we feel to ‘get ahead’ by paying our dues, working hard, and keeping our patrons happy.  Of course, we would not feel such compulsion unless we believed in karma ourselves, if we did not want to get ahead, if we were not already invested in the very system that enslaves us because we believe it will reward us.  Yet this is where most of us are.  Compelled, entranced, invested.  Yet, the karmic system can only ever lead us to despair, for it condemns us to reap only what we sow.  It is like capitalism, which delivers to us only what we produce ourselves – images of the real, but not the real itself.  The real eludes us, for we are not God.  We cannot create even ourselves, let alone what we need for happiness or peace!  This widow of Israel, for example, was probably caught in a double-bind, a circle of despair with no exit.  Like all good Jews, she longed to be part of the people of the redeemed, those who were acceptable to God because they obeyed the priestly law.  Yet, she wanted to survive as well, to live.  When her male patrons died or put her aside, she had to turn to activities condemned by the law in order to feed herself and her children – to prostitution or stealing or slavery in the houses of idolators.  The only way to achieve both ends, to stay alive and ritually clean at the same time, was to accept a form of moral blackmail, to pay the priestly caste a large portion of her ill-gotten earnings in return for their acceptance and protection.  Unfortunately, her willingness to do so almost certainly kept her in a state of perpetual want and need.  It also perpetuated and repeated the very system that oppressed her, so that nothing was able to change.  She reaped what she sowed, her poverty and need creating nothing but more poverty and more need.

Thank God there is another power in the world, the power of grace!  Grace, as I have been preaching for some time now, is the opposite of karma or religion or myth.  It is like the blessing of children of which the Psalmist speaks.  Children cannot be produced by the machinations of our human longings, needs or planning.  They are not a reward for our labour or a right to be possessed.  Children come, as many of you know very well, as a sheer gift from God, without reason or foretelling.  Children are therefore signs to us of grace, that condition of blessedness and peace which comes not from ourselves but from somewhere other, from God.  Grace is that which comes to question, to interrupt, to displace and even destroy the cycle of despair which is karma.  With the gift of grace, we reap what we have not sown, and live in the power of that which we have not produced or made for ourselves.  In grace we experience the love of God shown in Christ’s self-sacrifice.  In Christ, God is totally for us, even to the point of so identifying with us in our karmic cycle of despair that he suffered the full consequence of what that cycle produces:  nothingness, and only nothingness.

Of course, having given itself over to nothingness and to death, grace is not exhausted.  It rises, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its own destruction, and proceeds to infect the karmic system like a virus which cannot be quashed.  In the gospel story, this power or property is called resurrection.  It is the perseverance of love in the face of death and despair, the never-depleted surplus of possibility over necessity.  In Mark’s world, the widows of Israel were forever caught in a web of karmic despair.  In trying to escape its demands they succeeded only in fulfilling its demands.  Not so, we are told, with the widow who gave her all, all she had to live on.  In the context of the gospel as a whole, we must understand this act evangelically, that is, as a picture or metaphor of salvation.  As for Christ himself, and for all who follow his way of the cross, it is only by finally allowing the karmic system to have what it seeks – our very lives – that we shall find ourselves free of its determinations.  For while she, and we who are Christ’s, indeed give our lives daily to the system we inhabit, that system need not possess us thereby.  For we are Christ’s, and our truest selves are hidden with Christ in God, as the apostle says.  Therefore we are being freed from the desire to get ahead, to succeed in terms determined by the law of karma.  We are people who know a love which is stronger even than death, and the gift of a life and future we have not produced.  Therefore we choose, over and over again, in all the minutiae of life, to serve our neighbour without thought of cost or ego.  For the price is already paid.  What can karma take from us that Christ cannot return a hundredfold?

The movie known as Matrix: Revolutions, can be read as the third volume in a three-fold re-telling of the gospel as I have proclaimed it today.  In that story, it is at the precise moment when the new Son of Man, Neo Anderson, gives himself over to the power of karmic inevitability, that the revolution begins.  As he lies crucified upon the power of the machines, absorbed, it seems, into the power of the same old thing, a miracle begins to happen.  What was absorbed begins to absorb.  What was dead now begins to infect the whole system with life.  What had been given away now returns more powerfully to inhabit all the world, bringing light and life and peace where once there was only darkness, death and enmity.  So it can be for us.  Jesus promises that if we will face our deepest fear – the loss of our very souls – and if we will trust in his love, then we shall live, even though we die.  “In my end is my beginning,” wrote T.S.  Eliot.  Let us give thanks that it is so.