Let's Not Flinch

Let’s Not Flinch

Girlfriend thinks I have a very gloomy Christianity, because I insist upon the blood and guts reality of Jesus’ death. I don’t think it didn’t hurt, or that the pain of crucifixion somehow didn’t matter to the guy they hung upon the tree. The moral of the story, as I framed it for Girlfriend, is that folks who threaten power structures are, quite often, murdered for it.

This may not be a cheerful way of looking at the world. For me it rescues Christianity from irrelevance, however. The world described in the Christian gospels is the world I’ve seen and heard about. Love is threatening: just ask the family of Martin Luther King, Jr. – or 15-year-old Lawrence King, for that matter.

Given the opportunity to write about the gospel parables, several of my students chose one of the ones about the fishes. The kingdom of heaven, the parable goes, is like a net of fish that’s pulled in from the sea. All sorts of fish are dragged to shore—the bad ones are tossed back, the good ones put into a basket. My students would, with great confidence, unpack the metaphor: the sea represents the earthly world, where good people (good fish) and bad people (bad fish) are both found in abundance. But in heaven (the shore), everyone is sorted out: sinners are tossed back, and the good people are taken to God (put in the basket).

“But can we think about it from the fish’s point of view?” I’d write into the margins. “If you were a fish,” I’d suggest. “Wouldn’t you rather go back to the sea?”

This prompted the occasional crisis of faith, among students brought up to believe that good people are rewarded with good lives. “God lies!” one student wrote in her revision: “Jesus makes it sound all cozy, good fish going into baskets—but really, that is terrible for fish.”

Fish in baskets, humans hung from crosses: both die of suffocation, finally. That’s not the only parallel I’ve found.

“How do we use the fish we put in baskets?” I would ask my students. “What is the central ritual of Christianity—begun at the Last Supper?” Beyond their death, the fish—and Jesus—nourish someone else.

The gospels say that Jesus promised everlasting life. The gospels make it pretty clear, however, that it isn’t life as we imagine. Every time those curious disciples tried to pin him down, Jesus would demure: he couldn’t really say who’d sit there, on his left or right; it wasn’t even worth discussing, who the woman married seven times would be married to, in heaven. Maybe Jesus was an early Einstein, or a Buddhist—and intended to awaken us to the truth of our life’s energy—that it is in the fish and in the sea, and in the stars above us. And it will carry on beyond us, everlastingly.

I don’t know what he really meant, and haven’t found it in my reading of the gospels.

But I have found this: a statement about human life that doesn’t flinch from all its violence. But, the gospels seem to me to say, there’s more than this. There’s something bigger to the story than its gritty end. And grittiness isn’t cause enough to flinch—not from living, spending, our “one wild and precious life” (in the words of Mary Oliver) in the best ways we can possibly imagine.

When I first tried to write a novel, I petered out about page 60. When I first started writing every morning, all the joy seeped out in just a week or two. I concluded that this meant that I was not a “real writer.” Until “real writers” told me these experiences were precise, and common, and surmountable.

If Jesus had lived to a ripe old age, if he had died some evening in his sleep, then those of us who suffer in this life just might conclude that suffering was symptom that we were living, somehow, wrong. Faced with opposition, threat, or violence, we might tell ourselves “well, this is not how Jesus lived—I’ll have to find a way to work for justice and stay friendly with king.”

I don’t believe that Jesus’ is the only model; I don’t think people have to hate you unto death before you can be sure that you are on some right and certain path. I don’t even think engendering some hatred is a good gauge of just and righteous living. But it seems to me the gospels tell us hatred is not cause enough to flinch.

I don’t find that gloomy in the least.

[For the parable about the fishes, see Matthew 13:47-48]