I know nothing at all about the faith or spiritual life of Zach Condon, frontman of Beirut, but I'm kind of sort of pretty sure that his addictive "Santa Fe" is not an oddly upbeat song about Good Friday. Then again, maybe it is. Watch the video and come to your own conclusions.
Lyrically the song leaves itself open to interpretation. While cheerful brass arrangements are definitely in Condon's wheelhouse, enunciation is not, so only about a third of the words are intelligible, including things like "this day undone", "full of grace", "the kind that breaks under", "on the cross", and "call your son", that certainly might lead one with ears to hear in a certain direction. Oh yeah, and then add on the repetition of the phrase "I and I and I alone" and you've all but clinched it with a veiled reference to the Holy Trinity.
Three blog posts have been itching at me recently, all from the Lead, kind of a digest of the Episcopal and to some extent mainline blogosphere that is on my daily reading list. The first is a discussion of the question of why God allows evil to exist, which concludes that in the hierarchy of things that God wills for the world, God privileges free will above elimination of evil, thus allowing humans to inflict evil on each other without divine intervention. There's a certain appeal to the argument, in that it is the existence of free will that keeps our relationship with God from being best characterized as assimilation into the Borg.
But strict observance of this prioritization seems to place God in the camp of the Pharisees, which doesn't feel right. I don't know what the answer here is, other than that if you've never read it, Job is one of the most horrifying, cynical, and mysterious books of the Bible, and is as satisfying an answer to the question as I think can be given. Which is to say, not very satisfying, but at least it involves no simplification or platitudes.
The second is one about why Jesus had to die, via the Huffington Post. Here, Derek Flood tears down the notion of substitutionary atonement, which is the idea that Jesus was punished instead of us. There's a certain appeal to that, perhaps expressed most clearly (though, one must say, not unambiguously) in Paul's letter to the Romans: "If, because of the one man's [Adam's] trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ" (5:17).
Taken out of abstraction, this idea is pretty troubling, because it turns us into a religion that practices human sacrifice. Of course the followers of Jesus didn't kill him, but if we recognize that we needed him to die, then really all we're saying is that we outsourced it to the Romans. And just because we don't sacrifice humans today doesn't absolve us of being a faith that relies on one guy having been murdered by our hit men 2,000 years ago. Can we say that a religion that only kills a guy once in a few thousand years is better than one that kills a guy every week sheerly by virtue of quantity of our actions rather than their quality?
Enter "I and I and I alone", and why as little as "Santa Fe" probably has to do with Good Friday, it still takes me there. The idea of the substitutionary atonement, that Jesus died to shield us from the wrath of a vengeful deity, is contrary to the idea of the Trinity. Because Jesus, dying on the cross, is acting out the will of the undivided Trinity. God the Father does not allow Jesus to be crucified because it His will for Jesus to substitute for a kind of mass death penalty. He is not so powerless that he cannot rescue Jesus from the cross if he so chooses. But the Trinity, the I and I and I alone, decides instead to take the incarnation to its obvious conclusion. Namely that in joining us in life, God chooses to join us in death as well, and take us through to the other side, whatever that is.
I don't know what that is.
I mentioned a third blog post that was bugging me. This was an obituary, presented three years late, of Nancy Eiesland. I don't know a lot about Eiesland, but I was moved by this excerpt of her obituary that reflects on her writing about Jesus appearing to the disciples after the resurrection, still wounded:
Lyrically the song leaves itself open to interpretation. While cheerful brass arrangements are definitely in Condon's wheelhouse, enunciation is not, so only about a third of the words are intelligible, including things like "this day undone", "full of grace", "the kind that breaks under", "on the cross", and "call your son", that certainly might lead one with ears to hear in a certain direction. Oh yeah, and then add on the repetition of the phrase "I and I and I alone" and you've all but clinched it with a veiled reference to the Holy Trinity.
Three blog posts have been itching at me recently, all from the Lead, kind of a digest of the Episcopal and to some extent mainline blogosphere that is on my daily reading list. The first is a discussion of the question of why God allows evil to exist, which concludes that in the hierarchy of things that God wills for the world, God privileges free will above elimination of evil, thus allowing humans to inflict evil on each other without divine intervention. There's a certain appeal to the argument, in that it is the existence of free will that keeps our relationship with God from being best characterized as assimilation into the Borg.
But strict observance of this prioritization seems to place God in the camp of the Pharisees, which doesn't feel right. I don't know what the answer here is, other than that if you've never read it, Job is one of the most horrifying, cynical, and mysterious books of the Bible, and is as satisfying an answer to the question as I think can be given. Which is to say, not very satisfying, but at least it involves no simplification or platitudes.
The second is one about why Jesus had to die, via the Huffington Post. Here, Derek Flood tears down the notion of substitutionary atonement, which is the idea that Jesus was punished instead of us. There's a certain appeal to that, perhaps expressed most clearly (though, one must say, not unambiguously) in Paul's letter to the Romans: "If, because of the one man's [Adam's] trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ" (5:17).
Taken out of abstraction, this idea is pretty troubling, because it turns us into a religion that practices human sacrifice. Of course the followers of Jesus didn't kill him, but if we recognize that we needed him to die, then really all we're saying is that we outsourced it to the Romans. And just because we don't sacrifice humans today doesn't absolve us of being a faith that relies on one guy having been murdered by our hit men 2,000 years ago. Can we say that a religion that only kills a guy once in a few thousand years is better than one that kills a guy every week sheerly by virtue of quantity of our actions rather than their quality?
Enter "I and I and I alone", and why as little as "Santa Fe" probably has to do with Good Friday, it still takes me there. The idea of the substitutionary atonement, that Jesus died to shield us from the wrath of a vengeful deity, is contrary to the idea of the Trinity. Because Jesus, dying on the cross, is acting out the will of the undivided Trinity. God the Father does not allow Jesus to be crucified because it His will for Jesus to substitute for a kind of mass death penalty. He is not so powerless that he cannot rescue Jesus from the cross if he so chooses. But the Trinity, the I and I and I alone, decides instead to take the incarnation to its obvious conclusion. Namely that in joining us in life, God chooses to join us in death as well, and take us through to the other side, whatever that is.
I don't know what that is.
I mentioned a third blog post that was bugging me. This was an obituary, presented three years late, of Nancy Eiesland. I don't know a lot about Eiesland, but I was moved by this excerpt of her obituary that reflects on her writing about Jesus appearing to the disciples after the resurrection, still wounded:
“In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God,” she wrote. God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued — he is not cured and made whole; his injury is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing.I think if we worry too much about the what and the why - the why of evil, the why of Jesus' death, the what of the next life - we tie ourselves in knots that we'll never get out of. I prefer instead to focus on faith as a sort of divine mirror to our lived experience. I don't know why God permits evil but where the Gospel trumps Job is that it shows that God does not inflict harm but suffers it with us. God does not die for us, but dies with us. And on the other side, I don't know. But we and our creator are changed.
No comments:
Post a Comment