A woman I know described to me once an experience she had in the process of giving birth to her first child. It was not too difficult a birth as births go, but at the point where the labor became most painful and difficult the doctor gave her an anesthetic to help her through the actual delivery itself, and in the few minutes that she was unconscious she had a kind of dream or vision that haunted her for months afterwards. She didn’t see anything in her dream, and that was part of the strangeness, just the darkness with nothing to get her bearings by, but she said that she heard a voice which in a very even-toned and relentless way kept telling her the same thing over and over again, and what the voice told her was to push and to keep on pushing harder and harder even though, the anesthetic notwithstanding, the pain was considerable and she believed that the pain and the pushing were going to kill her, the straining of her whole body, but she also believed that she was going to have to die in order for the child to be born.

And then the dream opened up or deepened into a kind of dream within a dream, and this was the dimension of it that haunted her for so long afterward. Because within that inner dream she came to believe that it was not just that she was going to have to push the baby out of her womb and die herself, not just that the birth of this one new life was going to cost her her own death, but that this was the way the universe itself had been born. The vision she had was of God laboring in cosmic agony in order to give the world life, and therefore the darkness of her dream was the unfathomable darkness of a world where God had long since ceased to exist.

The child was born and lived and the woman didn’t actually die in the process, but the vision she had under anesthesia is a vision which many people have had before her, to the point where forty years ago a theology became known by its name. This dream of life coming out of death, particularly this dream of life itself coming out of the death of God, like all the great recurring dreams of humankind, seems in some way to be the bearer of a truth, and it must be taken seriously and must be allowed to haunt us as it did this woman. She did not physically die that day; but there are more ways than one of dying, and there’s much that can die quite apart from the flesh.

The phrase ‘self-centered’ has come to have an unpleasant meaning in our day, and we use it to describe people who are self-contained the way someone is contained in their own house when the door is locked and the phone is off the hook — safe from the demands and intrusions of other people yet also in a way cut off like a prisoner from the companionship of other people. But in another sense, the phrase ‘self-centered’ describes us all, not so much that we’re selfish in these ways but simply that we make ourselves the center of our own lives.

We look at the world with our own two eyes from the place where we ourselves are standing, which is right in the center, and we see the good things and the bad things of the world, out there on the circumference, primarily in terms of the way they affect us. We may deeply sympathize with other people when bad things happen to them, but very often the bad things that happen that are entirely real to us are the things that happen to us. We may be glad when good things happen to other people, but very often the good things that really make the heart sing are the good things that happen to us. All of this gives us as selves a kind of partial invulnerability.

For instance, the 230 thousand people killed in the Indonesian tsunami or the discovery of a cure for a terrible disease, even the horrors and the marvels that happen to people known to us, may move us very deeply for a while but they don’t really hit us where we live for the reason precisely that where we live is not out there on the circumference where such things happen, but right here on dead center, so that the only way life can really get at us is by scoring a bullseye.

To that extent the self-centered person is invulnerable, and with invulnerability comes a measure of independence because you can move around through the world not very much or for very long weighed down by anybody’s problems but your own. And make no mistake, there’s much to be said for such a life and you don’t give it up easily, and you do well to think twice before you do, and there are many worse selves that a person can be than self-centered in this way. However. When the woman bore her child that was just the part of her self that died as surely as her body might have. I mean that quite literally. The person she had been before simply and quite literally ceased to exist.

It’s not sentimental claptrap to say that when you bear a child as this woman did, or when as a man you become the father of a child, you just cannot be the center of your own life in the same old way any longer because now there is your child at the center with you. No longer is it true that the only things that can hit you where you live are the things that happen to you directly because you live also in the child now and whatever hits her for good or ill hits you also, so you’re vulnerable on not just one front any more but on two. And by the same token, it’s not just your own welfare that’s at stake any more as you blunder your way around the world, but it’s also the welfare of this other self, too.

In this sense, then, the woman’s dream was true because her self as the center of her own life did die and not without pain, as she brought her child into the world. From that time onward it became her destiny to die again each time the child moved out into new worlds of its own to risk dangers and defeats which would also be in some way hers.

In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son we have not a baby coming into the world but a young man going out into the world, not the pain of the mother in her labor but the pain of the old man when his son decided to leave home and strike out on his own. If you consider how the old man rejoiced when his son finally came back, you can imagine something of what it must have cost to let him go in the first place, and how much he would have given to have had him stay. But just as in her dream the woman knew that she would have to die in order to give her baby life, the old man also knew that a part of him would have to die if his son was to have the chance for a life on his own. For the father it was the self-centered self that crucified itself in an act of love and let the boy go. And you might think twice about life on your own just as you might think twice about that word crucified.

The deepest and darkest part of the woman’s dream had to do with God’s dying in the act of creation. This was the part that haunted her for so long afterward. It’s this same idea that haunts the world still in what was called the Death of God theology. It’s a vision with a lot of terror in it and a lot of loneliness in it, and to try to fathom this vision’s meaning if it has any meaning at all is to move out beyond the reach of human thought. But I can’t help wondering if the same idea I’ve been trying to express in terms of the woman herself and Jesus’s tale of the prodigal doesn’t perhaps provide a kind of possible clue.

The ancient Hebrews spoke of God in God’s ineffability or holiness — God as the deus absconditus, the hidden God to look upon whom is to die and before whom even the angels veil their faces, the God who existed before existence itself existed, before the great “Let there be light” was ever spoken and before time and space themselves were brought into being. The Greek philosophers spoke of the Unmoved Mover, perfect and unchanging, whose nature it was to contemplate itself eternally. The Hindus have their idea of Brahman-Atman or the Void or Pure Being which can be described only by the Sanskrit phrase “neti … neti” which means “neither this nor that” — in other words that this Pure Being so far transcends our understanding that nothing we can say of it can be true.

In other words, it would appear that nearly every age and every culture has pointed with its own symbols to something like a God centered in and totally sufficient unto Godself. And then as widespread as that idea is the idea of creation, of the Ultimate Reality however you want to name it, as stirring in something like the labor of childbirth and bringing forth … light, water, earth, human beings, as another reality over against itself. This extraordinary vision of a God who exists beyond all pain and all joy sacrificing perfect invulnerability for the sake of giving life to a world and then leaving that world free even to deny him as the source of its life — a God who leaves the world free to suffer the consequences of its own actions and then suffers with it and for it.

To love another — a child, a friend, a neighbor — is to place your self at the mercy of the other and as a self sufficient unto yourself to die. So it is with God and all the prodigals who are all of us, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High gave life to, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High leaves free because though in freedom we can forsake God, only in freedom can we really love Him.

It was G. K. Chesterton who wrote, “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to say there,” but there are few if any of us in this age of revolt from the past who choose that way. Even if we do, even if like the elder brother we stay at home and play it safe, going about our business at God’s house, it can happen even there of all places that we’re far from God because we don’t notice how smug and self-serving we are, how loveless and cynical. If God is someone we can find anywhere, God is also someone we have learned to lose track of anywhere.

If God is dead in the sense that he has willingly died, if God is far away because he has drawn far away so we can have room to be ourselves — then God is also dead and far away because we have so willed him to be, and the darkness of our world is a darkness we have made for ourselves as in a thousand ways and every day each of us flees God into countries just as far as the one where the prodigal went to try his luck until finally his hunger drove him back home again. God is dead for us because we’ve shaken the dust of him off our feet and have struck out on our own with faith in ourselves.

But even at his worst the prodigal remembers the life he once had — we have God’s breath in our lungs and the memory of God somewhere deep in our bowels, and unless we know God’s presence as a blessing we are doomed to feel God’s absence as a reproach, an emptiness, a hunger. Unless we live with God we are destined to die without him as in so many ways we have died already, a death of the spirit, a death of the heart. In so many ways we have died already that if I thought I could, I’d try to start a Death of Us theology to replace the Death of God one. It is just when the prodigal sees that he’s wasted everything not least himself, that he sees there is only one risk left to take, and that was to take his chances back home. Having squandered his inheritance, he can’t go back as a child but maybe he can get back in business as a hired hand.

This is the part of the story that is as moving as anything in any literature. He’s tried his luck only to find that his luck didn’t hold very long and he stinks of the sty and he’s lost everything, so finally he decides to go back home. And with the pathetic cunning of the panhandler he figures out that the best way to do it is by crawling back on his belly like a worm. So he works out ahead of time a rather mealy-mouthed little speech about how sorry he is for what he’s done and how he’s willing to be treated as one of the hired servants if the father will only take him back again. Only it’s a speech he never gets to make the way he planned to because before he finds a chance to make it the old man sees him coming up the road and rushes out to meet him and throws his arms around him, and to the scandal of all who prefer justice to mercy, speaks the great words, “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry for this my son was dead and is alive again.”

The whole truth of it is even more than that, for it isn’t just the son but the father too who comes alive again because he has the son back home. The real truth is not that God is dead but that to turn to God in whatever half-hearted and half-baked way we choose — a confession, a clumsy prayer, one little act of compassion done for Christ’s sake and in his name — is to find what at its richest and most profound life really is, both God’s life and our own. The very source of life chooses to enter into death in order to give us life as we were meant to live it. Jesus’s death calls on us to die to our own self-centeredness that we would live not for ourselves any longer but for him who dies and for those God dies to welcome and give life to, with tears and embracing and gladness and a Feast.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away — and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

The risen Christ is not a generic mysterium tremendum. He is the one who identifies with the God who spoke in Deuteronomy. God is not unknowable, but encountered in a language that Jesus subjects himself to and exalts by his obedience. “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.”

Even Jesus knows his will and the will of God are not automatically the same. He had to conform his will to that of the Father. And his judgment about that will is not mystically endowed by inner voice, but by knowing the God whose will has been revealed in Israel’s scriptures, where sacrifice and ransom and the will that all nations be blessed are passages that conspire to insist Jesus must die not on Groundhog Day or the Winter Solstice, but during the festival of death out of life and life out of death. It is the psalms that comprise Jesus’s last words from the cross, not universal expressions of anguish or hymns to a dying and rising God from the Ancient Near East or Greco-Roman milieu.

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from my sermon A Room Furnished with Grief and Resurrection based on Luke 24: 36 – 48

Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels, 
and let your trumpets shout Salvation 
for the victory of our mighty King.

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth, 
bright with a glorious splendor, 
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.

Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church, 
and let your holy courts, in radiant light, 
resound with the praises of your people.

It is truly right and good, always and everywhere, with our whole heart and mind and voice, to praise you, the invisible, almighty, and eternal God, and your only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord; for he is the true Paschal Lamb, who at the feast of the Passover paid for us the debt of Adam’s sin, and by his blood delivered your faithful people.

This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

   How wonderful and beyond our knowing, O God, is your
   mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you
   gave a Son.

   How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and
   sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy
   to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings
   peace and concord.

   How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined
   and man is reconciled to God.

Holy Father accept our evening sacrifice, the offering of this candle in your honor. May it shine continually to drive away all darkness. May Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting, find it ever burning—he who gives his light to all creation, and who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

The first question Pilate asked Jesus when he was brought before him was, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

Consider the history of monarchy to the Jews. It wasn’t long after they’d entered the Promised Land that they started lobbying the Most High for a king. They wanted the PR value. The neighboring nations had kings and they liked the caché. They kept putting in requests with Yahweh for a king they could call their own. At one point, God said (and I paraphrase), What do you need a king for? Who do you think I am!

It went right over their heads. They wanted royal dragoons and beefeaters, the gilded accoutrements of a monarch, all which Yahweh knew they needed like a hole in the head. Stubborn as mules, they kept kvetching for a king until finally the One who alone was to be their king let them have what they wished for. With a couple exceptions to prove the rule, the experiment proved to be a disaster.

And one day a man came riding an ass into Jerusalem as if he were the king Israel was meant to have all along. Among things peculiar about him was that he referred to himself as I Am.

Forgiveness is like other gifts. It must be received as well as given to be complete. If someone forgives me for being a fool, unless I not only am a fool but also know that I am, his forgiveness is without effect. I don’t appropriate his forgiveness, I don’t let it take root in my heart where it can grow and eventually choke out in me the folly that it is forgiveness of. It would appear that we cannot be forgiven for what we do not know we do or are.

Yet this is what Jesus on the cross prays for on our behalf — that we be forgiven something whose significance we do not or cannot fully understand. We understand some of it. As Christians we have two thousand years of preaching to remind us that we are all guilty of the death of Christ. We have it on good authority that we crucify him each time we add directly or indirectly to the world’s alienation. Jesus himself makes this clear in those words that have more terror in them than any in the Gospels: “Inasmuch as ye have done it … did it not … unto one of the least of these …”

All this we know. But Jesus asks God to forgive us for something apparently deeper that we do not know. Maybe it is not simply what we have done or left undone or are, but what we are not and yet might have been.

In Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory the fugitive priest, slipshod and semi-alcoholic, father of a bastard child, awaits in a Mexican prison his death the next morning before a firing squad. In the absence of a confessor, he tries to confess himself and pronounce his own absolution. It does not work very well, and suddenly

tears poured down his face: he was not at that moment afraid of damnation — even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to be a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted — to be a saint.

Perhaps this is at least a part of what Jesus means. Forgive them not just for their halfhearted complicity in killing me but for the halfheartedness that has kept them from being saints.

We are not given to know the might-have-been of our lives, but from his cross, Jesus gives us a glimpse. To see his pain is to see the pain that might have been our own. Not the suffering of death, but the suffering of love that says My Life for Yours, which is at the heart of a life lived fully. He forgives us for not being the saints that we do not know we have it in us to become. It breaks the heart, breaks it upon him the way a woman once broke open an alabaster jar of costly perfume upon him and bathed his feet with her tears.

The notion of Christ as a young warrior entering the battle on our behalf is one that occurs frequently in Old and Middle English literature. One well-known example of it is in the fourteenth century poem called The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Ploughman by William Langland. Here is how the poet visualizes Jesus coming to Jerusalem and the Cross:

A man came riding along barefoot on an ass, unarmed and without spurs. He looked like the Good Samaritan — or was it Piers the Ploughman? He was young and lusty, like a squire coming to be dubbed knight and receive his golden spurs and cut-away shoes. Then Faith, who was standing at a window, cried out, “See! The Son of David!” — like a herald proclaiming a knight who comes to the tournament… .

So I asked Faith the meaning of all this stir. “Who was going to joust in Jerusalem?”

“Jesus,” he said, “to win back Piers’ fruit, which the Devil has claimed.”

“Is Piers in this city?” I asked.

He looked at me keenly and answered, “Jesus, out of chivalry, will joust in Piers’ coat-of-arms, and wear His Helmet and mail, Human Nature; He will ride in Piers’ doublet, that no one here may know Him as Almighty God. For whatever blows He receives, they cannot wound Him in his Divine Nature.”

This is a picture of Christ’s work on the Cross. It has warrant in the promise in Eden of the One who would bruise the head of the serpent and himself be wounded. What is going on in the Cross is close quarters combat. Piers the Ploughman writes about it in his commonplace book. And Piers the Ploughman is reading it.

What does the Cross and Jesus bar-Joseph dying on it mean among so many crosses in history? Crucifixion was nothing new in the Roman Empire. Crosses with men dying in agony upon them in public places and along well-traveled roads were familiar sights. In 4 BC when there had been a rebellion in Syria, the Roman governor Varius led his legions to restore, as they say, the peace. To show that he meant business, Varius ordered the execution of two thousand men at once on separate crosses. Fast-forward to the Jewish Wars of 66 – 70 AD, after which Jerusalem fell again to the Romans. The Roman general Titus, to show his mettle, crucified as many as five hundred Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem.

But if you want truly spectacular cinema, go back to 68 BC. The gladiator Spartacus was leading one hundred thousand slaves against Roman authority. When the legions eventually put down the uprising, the authorities crucified six thousand rebels. To amplify the horror, they put crosses alongside the Appian Way, one every 116 feet for 132 miles from Rome to ancient Capua. To imagine the sheer linear scale of that message, imagine a trip from where you sit here at Saint Francis to my brother Sean’s house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Take River Road to the Beltway/495 North to 95 North up past Baltimore and past Wilmington. Follow US 202/the Concord Pike north to PA Route 322 East. Take the left fork onto East Strasbourg Road, turning left on Ellis Lane. Turn right onto his long driveway. From where you are now to his door: 132 miles, all of that marked by a crucifixion every 116 feet.

Viewed from the standpoint of Roman politics, Jesus’s crucifixion meant another chance for Rome to remind everybody who was boss. If the spindly-legged one hanging up there is King of the Jews, that’s all to the good. See what Caesar does with would-be kings: he puts them up like billboards. That is what the cross was. An object lesson in power.

But there is another way to see the cross. It is to see the cross as a place where something of extraordinary importance happened. To understand what I mean you have to go back to the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur in the Old Testament.

The people of Israel were bound to God in a covenant relationship. And the covenant relationship was predicated upon the people of Israel keeping the laws of God. To the degree that the laws were broken, so was the relationship broken. And coming out of that problem for Jews — when you violate the divine laws you’re out of relationship with God — emerged the sacrificial system. Sacrifice was the way that a relationship was restored with God.

Yom Kippur was the annual great day of sacrifice. It was the day when all the burdens of all the people of Israel were lifted. It was the day when all the burdens of all the people possibly related to Israel was lifted. It was the day when all the burdens of the people of Israel and those related to the people of Israel in all possible places in Israel was lifted.

If your heart united itself to the great sacrifices of Yom Kippur, all of your sin was lifted, and not only all of your sin, but all the sin you knew about and all the sin you did not know about. And not only that, but all the sins you committed accidentally, as well as those you did deliberately and in rebellion against God, they were lifted. More than that, all of the transgressions that are not even yet realized, that you have yet to act out, to perpetrate, all of those are lifted. Anything that estranges the people of God from God was lifted in the sacrifice, if their heart bound itself to the sacrifice.

The very dramatic moment of Yom Kippur was the moment when the scapegoat was let out. This was a goat, chosen by lot, to do an awful task. He was a most unfortunate victim, because on Yom Kippur this unlucky winner of the lottery was brought before the high priest. The high priest laid his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confessed into the scapegoat all the sins of the people of Israel. In fact the Talmud even tells us the exact words that the high priest said. With his hands on the goat’s head, he said, “O Lord God, your people, the house of Israel, has sinned. They have committed iniquity, and they have transgressed against you.”

They may sound to you like mere words. But in the Hebraic imagination, words are reality-making, words effect what they express. In the priest’s view and in the view of the people of Israel, the sins of Israel were actually going into the scapegoat, actually going into it. That’s why it was so awful to be the goat. When the sins were put into the goat, a relay of men led the goat little by little out to the desert, to a lonely place, and there the goat would die. There is a legend about that, the legend that the high priest would go and tie a scarlet cord to the tabernacle. And when the goat died, at the hour of the goat’s death, the scarlet cord would turn to white. Many Bible scholars believe this legend is what Isaiah had in mind when he said, “Though your sins be as scarlet as blood, they will be as white as snow.”

So off the goat went into a place alone, but a very public figure; out it went carrying the burden of sin, the sins of all Israel, of all people related to Israel, out it went into a desert to die. Eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Isaiah prophesied about the Servant of God. Isaiah says that this Servant will bear the sins of many, he will be a human scapegoat, and he will look for a place to do his awful work, carrying the sins of people in a way that the animal sacrifice could not.

And so the cross becomes the desert, the forsaken place. The cross is the lonely place yet so public, so humiliating, so painful, and so terminal. The cross is a place for the holy dreadful work of God, the place to which all of your sins and all of mine, the place to which all of your burdens and all of mine, are taken by the scapegoat, by Jesus, to die in his death.

I remember seeing a forest of giant redwoods for the first time. There were some small children nearby, giggling and chattering and pushing each other around. Nobody had to tell them to quiet down as we entered.

They quieted down all by themselves. Everybody did. You couldn’t hear a sound of any kind. It was like coming into a vast, empty room.

Two or three hundred feet high the redwoods stood. You had to crane your neck back as far as it would go to see the leaves at the top. They made their own twilight out of the bright California day. There was a stillness and stateliness about them that seemed to become part of you as you stood there stunned by the sight of them. They had been growing in that place for going on two thousand years. With infinite care they were growing even now. You could feel them doing it. They made you realize that all your life you had been mistaken. Oaks and ashes, maples and chestnuts and elm you had seen for as long as you could remember, but never until this moment had you so much as dreamed what a tree really was.

—Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark