Over Easter weekend, we pulled out a movie from a few years ago called “Risen.” The movie tells the Easter story from the point of view of a Roman centurion (Joseph Fiennes) tasked with recovering Jesus’ body to prove that he did not rise from the dead after all. Predictably, he fails in his mission. I have nothing against such imaginative retellings of Bible stories, acknowledging that there’s no way it happened that way but there may be value in exploring the story from an unfamiliar angle. Certainly as someone shaped by Ignatian spirituality, letting imagination fill in some of the gaps in the story is part of my practice. One of my favorite exercises is the one Ignatius sets for the beginning of the fourth week: Jesus appearing to his mother. Yes, there’s not a word of it in Scripture, but Ignatius can’t imagine a good Jewish boy (or Spanish one for that matter) not going to relieve his grieving mother of the sorrow of his gruesome death.
That said, one line from the movie sticks in my craw. The centurion finally runs into one of the disciples and hears the testimony that Jesus is indeed alive again. “What does it mean?” he asks. “It means everything,” the disciple answers. “It means eternal life.” That line sticks out like a sore thumb to me. Quite apart from the willful suspension of disbelief over the premise that sets the action of the film in motion – the Jewish authorities are afraid the disciples will steal the body and claim Jesus is risen, and so enlist the Romans to guard the tomb – this line seems completely out of context. What would “eternal life” possibly have meant to the disciples in those days of fear and bewilderment when Jesus appears sporadically in their midst and mysteriously disappears as quickly as he appears? The idea that the immediate response of Jesus’ friends, who had followed him and participated in his ministry of healing and preaching the nearness of God’s kin-dom, would immediately make the leap to “now we know how we can go to heaven when we die” bypasses the actual drama of the moment. If anything is clear in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, it’s that the disciples were anything but sure about what was going, let alone what it meant. The bland confidence of putting the words “eternal life” into the mouth of this disciple seems another example of how we sometimes don’t actually read the Bible, just assume we know what it means.
Sitting with that phrase today, I find myself wondering what “eternal life” means. The phrase appears most often in John’s Gospel, where it seems to replace the language of the kin-dom of God in Jesus’ teaching. Primarily, it refers to the quality of life, not its endlessness (though that may be implied). It is the life of the ages or of the age to come. It’s the life enjoyed by someone participating in Jesus’ Resurrection life, not primarily after they die, but here and now. It’s life empowered by the Spirit, who Jesus promised would enable his followers to “do greater things” than he had done. It is manifestly not the life of church people who have prayed a prayer or assented to certain beliefs and then sit back content that their ticket to heaven has been punched.
Richard Beck has been republishing a series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas about “religionless Christianity” based on the hints in his Letters and Papers from Prison. In the last year of his life, sitting in Nazi prisons awaiting his inevitable execution, Bonhoeffer started sketching ideas for a book about Christianity in a “world come of age.” Beck helpfully points out that the main question Bonhoeffer is asking is, “Who is Christ for us today?” The utter failure of the German church to resist Hitler and the disastrous unfolding of both the Holocaust and the German war effort lie behind that question. Bonhoeffer had put his life on the line in an effort to put a “spoke in the wheel” and derail that train, and he was killed just weeks before Germany fell to the Allied forces. In that context, he reviews the progression of Western science and philosophy that has pushed “God as a working hypothesis” out of the picture, and he concludes that it is a good thing.
Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.1
After the news of Holy Week was full of the release of a Christian nationalist Bible as a craven scheme to raise funds for a certain person’s legal defense, this idea of turning from the power of God in the world to embrace a suffering God feels like a refreshing glass of water. Religion as a human enterprise wants to control the levers of power and claims to control how and why God shows up in the world. The message of Holy Week is that God gives up all power and suffers with and for us on the cross. Bonhoeffer wrote some poems in prison, and while they may not be cherished as great poetry, they do flesh out this aspect of his thinking. This one in particular shows what he was getting at in saying, “only the suffering God can help”:
Christians and Pagans
1
Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.
2
Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.
3
God goes to every man when sore bestead,
Feeds body and spirit with his bread;
For Christians, pagans alike he hangs dead,
And both alike forgiving.2
The idea that the meaning of Resurrection is “eternal life – that’s everything” belongs to what Bonhoeffer would call religion, the natural human instinct to look for the power of God in the world, that kind of faith seeks a quick out, a triumphant last word. But the “religionless Christianity” Bonhoeffer would have argued for “stands by God in his hour of grieving.” It is the faith of disciples who watch with Jesus in Gesthemane: “Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.”3
I hear in these words an invitation to seek Jesus in the places of suffering, to embrace the discomfort of not having the answers, just being willing to stand there and be awake. From that perspective, Resurrection undergirds the freedom on display in the lives of saints who were willing to pursue Jesus in service to the poor and hurting, the ones who surrender everything, as Ignatius does in his famous prayer that starts, “Take Lord, and receive, all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will.” Knowing that death does not have the last word somehow moves us not only toward the celebratory joy of Easter Sunday, but back again into the garden agony and the suffering of Thursday and Friday.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison (NY: Collier, 1971), p. 361
Letters & Papers, pp. 348-349.
Letters & Papers, p. 361.