Thursday, April 27, 2017
The
second sacred image that the cross echoes is the “Lifted-Up One,” and it comes
from the bronze snake in the desert. YHWH tells Moses to raise up a serpent on
a pole, and “anyone who has been bitten by a serpent and looks upon it will be
healed” (Numbers 21:8). It is like a homeopathic symbol.
The very thing that is
killing the Children of Israel is the thing that will heal them! It is
presented as a vaccine that will give you just enough of the disease so you can
develop a resistance to it. The cross dramatically raises up the problem of
ignorant hatred for all to see, hoping to inoculate us against doing the same
thing and projecting our violence onward into history.
Jesus
becomes the seeming problem and the homeopathic cure for the same by
dramatically exposing it for what it is, “parading it in public” (Colossians
2:15) for those who have eyes to see, and inviting us to gaze upon it with
sympathetic understanding.
The
prophet Zechariah calls Israel to “Look upon the pierced one and to mourn over
him as for an only son,” and “weep for him as for a firstborn child,” and then
“from that mourning” (five times repeated) will flow “a spirit of kindness and
prayer” (12:10) and “a fountain of water” (13:1; 14:8). We would now call this
“grief work”—holding the mystery of all suffering, looking honestly right at
it, and learning from it, which typically leads to an uncanny and newfound
compassion and understanding.
I
believe we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified to soften our
hearts toward suffering and to know that God’s heart has always been softened
toward us, even and most especially in our suffering. This softens us toward
ourselves and all others who suffer.
Following
Jesus is actually a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of
the world. Jesus invited people to “follow” him in bearing the mystery
of human death and resurrection. It is not a requirement in order that we can
go to heaven later, it is an invitation so that we can live an entirely full
life now.
Those
who agree to carry and love what God loves, which is both the good and the bad
of human history, and to pay the price for its reconciliation within
themselves—these are the followers of Jesus—the leaven, the salt, the remnant,
the mustard seed that God can use to transform the world. The cross is a very
dramatic image of what it takes to be a usable one for God.
These
few are the critical mass that keeps the world from its path toward greed,
violence, and self-destruction. God is calling everyone and everything to
God’s self (Genesis 8:16-17, Ephesians 1:9-10, Colossians 1:15-20, Acts 3:21, 1
Timothy 2:4, John 3:17), not just a few. To get there, God needs models and
images who are willing to be “conformed to the body of his death” and
transformed into the body of his resurrection (Philippians 3:10). They are “the
new creatures” (Galatians 6:15), and their transformed state is seeping into
history and ever so slowly transforming it into life instead of death. This is
the basis for all of our hope—in Christ and for history. - Fr. Richard Rohr
