When my pastor invited me to consider the racial-justice role, I took it as a divinely appointed gift. When my role ended and my church collapsed, I took it as a blow to my certainty that I had understood Jesus correctly, or at all.
As we visit new churches, I think constantly about Christ’s insistence on living among the people who will betray him and about his refusal to escape his captors. I find this newly irritating for reasons I can’t explain.
Jesus gives himself to a world that promises to brutalize him, and all available evidence indicates that he never once retracts himself. He gestates in the body of a Jewish woman oppressed under Roman rule, and he’s born into an empire that targets infants of his description with state-sanctioned violence. His earliest moments on earth are fraught with hostility; even so, he remains. related God Didn’t Have to Do Anything for Us Sandra McCracken He is raised by parents whom he loves, whom he understands will soon be unable to protect him. He absorbs the instruction of his religious teachers, aware that they represent a corroded institution that he will grow up to challenge. He must know that this is a world he will overturn and divide. Somehow, this does not deter him from immersing
If Christ’s trajectory led away from the common dysfunctions that no church and no group of people has fully overcome, then following him meant letting the possibility of communal life recede into the distance. This can sound like a reasonable conclusion. Responding to Christ’s example of radical goodness may consist of shearing off our morally ambiguous entanglements. Yet this choice is not radical enough. Its logic is indistinguishable from the thinking that already pervades our culture.
Most of our contemporary idioms prescribe divestment as a cure for the problems endemic to life with others. Without needing the example of Christ, we can protest or defund the institutions we dislike. We can cut off toxic relationships. We can pull our children out of school. The idea that we should create distance between ourselves and the rest of the world in order to pursue ideals is not revelatory. If the conclusions drawn from a study of Christ’s life are indistinguishable from the conclusions that can be drawn without him, they are not sufficiently considered.
Engaging with the church can be so painful that I want to argue I don’t need the church in order to consummate my beliefs. Any group of people will do. This idea falls apart as quickly as it comes together: I know, as much as I want to think otherwise, that I need to go back to the church because it is the ultimate proving ground for all that is conveyed through Christ’s story.
Christ appears before Thomas with a gash in his side and punctures through his hands and feet. How can Thomas discern whether he is seeing a body in collapse or a body that has overcome decay and is passing into glory? Is this body to be mourned or celebrated, buried or embraced? If the present-day church is the extension of Christ’s body, I can sense the degree to which it has been ravaged. Every church has been pierced, not only by our contemporary disagreements but also by the generational animosities we have inherited. Just so, when Christ presents his body to Thoma
