Good Friday,1997

Good Friday 1997

The asymmetry of Jesus’ love

Last night, Holy Thursday, we thought about the Eucharist and celebrated Jesus washing of the disciples’ feet and I suggested that if we look at that scene very closely and do it from the perspective of trying to deepen our understanding, as I’ve suggested throughout Lent, then you come to the rather extraordinary conclusion of the result of the asymmetry of Jesus’ love. That is, people didn’t know how to respond to that, and yet the stunning thing is that this did not deter Jesus. So you have this sort of one-sided love, and this one-sidedness is very clear in the desertion of Peter and the rest of the disciples when things got bad.

But I think there is a larger scale of this asymmetry because the love that we find attributed to Jesus is not the kind of romantic love, that one-on-one sort of affection that we talk about routinely as love. It is an intensely political kind of love. It is a love that excluded nobody and sought to include everybody in a kind of equalization of everybody’s status, and that sort of arrangement is too menacing. The asymmetry just becomes starker, and starker, and starker when you talk about that kind of love on a massive political-social scale. And so, not surprisingly, it is not an innocuous asymmetry, it is an asymmetry that is politically destructive and so the only way to treat people who are going to upset the established order is to get rid of them, which is of course how we move from Holy Thursday to Good Friday.

But I’d like to take yet another angle on this whole business of Jesus’ crucifixion and look at it from our favorite North American perspective; I’d like to look at the Crucifixion in terms of its efficiency. I think we are driven by notions of efficiency: Faxes can communicate with anyplace on the planet in seconds, less than seconds, fewer people can accomplish far more, or so we think today... We are driven by a sense of more efficiency and now that everybody’s budgets are being cut back we must become even more efficient. So we examine everything in terms of some cost-benefit analysis. In those terms Jesus’ death looks like a waste. (This was a really nice man, he may have been mildly problematic but we could’ve, with the proper drugs, or the proper therapy, or a little incarceration, organized this man in such a way so as to render him a reasonably benign presence in the society.) What I’d like to suggest is that this notion of love far transcends, in fact destroys the quid pro quo kind of love that most of us want most of the time--I surely do. And so we find this asymmetrical kind of love. And I’d like to suggest that Jesus also profoundly sets in question our notion of efficiency.

The fundamental element in efficiency is some sort of correlation between what you do and what happens, what is produced. That is the very essence of any kind of understanding of efficiency and that’s why it seems that in my normal day-to-day calculations the death of Jesus seems an immensely inefficient thing. What did Jesus produce in dying? We can very quickly reply, "Oh, he saved the world... It’s wonderful; we’re all redeemed." No, that’s too fast. You have to step too fast over too many stages to get to that comfortable point where you don’t have to look very closely at Jesus’ death in terms of some sort of efficiency. What Jesus achieved, I put it to you, was the fullness of his own humanity. In the very dying of Jesus what is produced? The effort of his dying, which is simply a consequence out of his faithfulness to the people to whom he spoke to, the life that he lived to, the God that he believed in and served and worshipped, cost him his life. And what was produced in his dying was the fully human Jesus, the fully human human, period, full-stop... In other words, looking at the death of Jesus in this way I think we may well, not only may but must go back and see what we are producing by all our vaunted efficiencies.

I confess that it is Sue Rodriguez and Jack Kervorkian that have made this problem urgent for me... of not being productive any more... And yet what are we to produce in the limited time we have on this planet? Being fully faithful to the world I live in, to the people with whom I live: this the only thing that is the point of any kind of efficiency understood from the perspective of Jesus. This is a fully human life.

I bring this up because I really do think we have a badly, badly skewed, and even destructive understanding of what it is to be efficient. In a massive way I think we’ve lost sight of what it is that we really want to produce. What do we want to produce? And what we want to produce ought to determine how we go about producing it. The Gross National Product is not the bottom line; a deeper, fuller, and freer human existence for everybody is the bottom line. And that’s the only bottom line that we as followers of Jesus can lay any claim to. It is absolutely true, it is unquestionably true that Jesus is supremely inefficient. What a waste... What a waste... Oh, was it really? What goes into that dying? It is expressed in the Gospel of John over and over: that mysterious ironic statement that precisely when Jesus is lifted up the fullness of God’s glory is achieved and the fullness of God’s glory is a fully human human being.

So Good Friday is a splendid opportunity for us to try to deepen what it is we really think, what it is we really believe about ourselves, about what we do, about why we do it... The agency stimulating such thought is the paradoxical vision of this man breathing out his life on this cross, totally helpless, and yet absolutely vital in that helplessness which is simply the cost of the asymmetrical love that I talked about last night. It stands as a challenge, if not a condemnation, of so much of what I do. We need to redefine what are costs and what are benefits, and Good Friday is an extraordinarily rich opportunity for doing that.

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RT 12/4/97