the comma between Jesus birth and death

In the word-frugal cadence of an aging man speaking in a second language, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann said this in a recent interview: “Between the birth and death of Christ there is a fairly emphasized comma.”

The legendary thinker was quipping on the habit that Christians have had, dating back to the authors of the Apostles’ Creed, of embellishing the importance of the last few chapters of our gospel stories and forgetting the rest of them. Perhaps the culmination of this 18 century trend is the tagline in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ which reads, “He was born in order to die.”

What we’re left with when we drop that “comma” is the three day narrative on that back end of Holy Week. What’s missing is any clue from Jesus himself as to why these three days might have any significance for us. The knee-jerk responses—“he died as punishment for my sins,” “he is risen so that I might be risen too”—are little help. Thought through critically, these are interpretations of these events that later generations have handed onto us, and if they appear self-evident now, it’s only due to sheer repetition. They were self-evident to no one standing before either cross or gravesite during those strange days. These first witnesses had neither Augustine’s 4^th and 5th century writings nor Anselm’s 11^th century writings to inform them. They were left to scratch their heads and look back across their memories of Jesus’ life, asking, “What does this mean?”

Perhaps it was inevitable that Christians would make this <.02% of Jesus’ life story into the main thing. The death and resurrection by themselves are theologically far more malleable than that “fairly emphasized comma.” They are not as demanding as the Sermon on the Mount, as confusing as the parable of the dishonest land manager, or as upsetting as the whole fiasco with the money changing stations in the temple.

If we subtly brush all those other events to the side, then the meaning of death and resurrection can be shaped as we please. They can ease whatever existential worries we might have, while, conveniently, asking very little of us or the status quos of our world during this lifetime. Baptism becomes fire insurance, life becomes a comfortable waiting room, and “what happens when you die?” is promoted to the only meaningful theological question.

But there is a tradeoff for this kind of easy existential satisfaction (Bonhoeffer called this “cheap grace,” though not, as some believe he meant it, to simply reinstate legalism). What we give up is any kind of purpose for which the Gospel might call us to strive, any call to embrace this world for all of its warts, and any of the joy of Zaccheus when Jesus told him, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” In short, all we give up in order to have just our death and resurrection cake is everything that Jesus lived and died for in the first place. The risk and the hard work of incarnation is undone, and God can once become scarce as a disembodied abstraction up in the clouds, perhaps just leaving some paperwork to guarantee us an afterlife at the end of the day. And we can get back to whiling away our time in entertainment and consumer distraction until our number is called.

But assuming Jesus wasn’t just yammering uselessly before fulfilling his Gibson-given purpose to die, what else could that “comma” have to show us?

Well, to name a few things:

All but one of our gods will abandon us. Take, for instance, our primary god, money. Turns out, we’ve been worshipping, fretting for, and fixating on a god that can’t even stand up to some moths and rust, let alone preserve our lives.

All social hierarchies and stratifications will be flipped on their heads. It’s been lost on generations of Christians, but Mary apparently intuited it even before her first morning sickness (Luke 1:46-55). Status and influence are a hoax, hierarchy is doomed, most of the titles and honors that we’ve been working so hard to achieve will be forgotten, and the only meaningful association will be association with an itinerate carpenter’s son.

Our private moral status no longer matters. All the times we’ve turned down a potential friendship with someone for fear that they might “drag us down to their level,” all the times we’ve patted ourselves on the back for the vices that we don’t have, all the times we’ve frantically dusted the windowsills before receiving company because “cleanliness is next to godliness;” too bad. No one cares.

Life is not fair. You want to beat yourself up? You want to receive the “forty lashes minus one” for some terrible thing you did? You want to skulk about with your tail between your legs because you can never forgive yourself? You want to punish others for the same reason? Tough. Our heavenly father “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 5:45).

Safety is not the overriding concern. Of all these things, this one feels the most heretical to even write in the post 9/11 world and the age of the “helicopter parent,” but the gospel narratives read almost exclusively as a series of dangerous binds that Jesus gets himself into, essentially for loving the wrong people and not saluting the right institutions. This ultimately leads to his own shameful demise, just before which, he tells his disciples, “…And you can too.” As a theology professor of my alma mater is noted for saying, “There is more to do with our lives now than simply to preserve them.”

Our religions don’t matter…Yes…Even that one! Jesus didn’t come into a world that was split between Christians and non-Christians and tell the former that they would be saved. Neither did he ever even hint that he would be establishing new doctrinal thoughts or holy institutions to which we must ascribe in order for his work to become activated for us. Rather he came into a world of stoic philosophers and neo-Platonists, of resurrection believing Jews and non-resurrection believing Jews, of Greek pagans and Roman pagans, of pious old ladies and iconoclastic young men. He was rejected by them all, he died at the hands of them all, and he was raised for them all. He asked for none of their permission to do this.

Hallelujah.

the age of the Jesus nerd

At this point, it has been around a few years and, of course, picked apart in scholarly circles. But anyone with even a passing interest in what’s going on in our church or, for that matter, our culture right now should familiarize themselves with Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence.

My very simplistic summary is this: approximately every 500 years, throughout its history, Christianity has had to radically reinvent itself in order for its “Good News” not to turn into bad news. Ways of thinking and doing the Christian faith, which were once believed to be permanently valid, eventually fail to hold water as the world changes around them, and new ones need to be adopted. In each case, there is a moment of cultural crisis where the church either needs to adapt or lose all relevance.

These “cycles of history” actually begin in the context of an intra-Jewish dispute, with Jesus himself totally turning the idea of covenant faithfulness on its head, seeking out the unclean and the sinners rather than avoiding them in order to preserve his own ritual purity. A little less than five centuries later, the whole western world is nominally Christian, but with the fall of Rome, after which the “Gospel” can no longer be synonymous with the growth and triumph of the empire, a handful of oddball mystics smuggle it out into the desert. Five centuries later the schism between Eastern and Western church shattered any notion that the one universal church might be visible across all particular geographies and cultures, each with their own limited hierarchies and thought patterns. Five centuries more bring us to the Great Reformation, which, on the surface, was a grievance against corrupt men in power but, at its core, signified the breakdown of the medieval way of doing Christianity. And that brings us up to today. 

I don’t think you need to buy the almost Asimovian prophesying of her 500 year schema, and I question how much she has left out in order to tidy up a bit (e.g. the rise and then re-encounter with Islam, Copernicus, Darwin, etc.). But it’s hard to deny that she is basically onto something. Christianity changes.  And it’s changing fast right now. What each of Tickle’s 500 year crises have in common is that they all result from a breakdown in authority of some sort, and when authority breaks down, the church tends to move from visible unification to fragmentation.

Now, whether the imperial church of the 4^th century was actually more unified than the protestant church of the 20^th century on the ground is a much more complicated question, but the decreasing centralization of money, authority, and influence is undeniable. This is a byproduct of the increased spread of information, which enables people to think for themselves. The more people feel authorized to think for themselves, the more difficult it is to get a whole lot of them to lend you authority. The Gutenberg printing press skyrocketed the number of Bibles and the writings of the reformers in circulation. For everyday smiths and cobblers (who likely couldn’t read, themselves, but knew a parish pastor who could), this unlocked the previously inconceivable notion that the Pope might be wrong about something. How much more now that a live tweet of an American political debate can be read by a kid in San Salvador?

We call this postmodernity. In philosophy-speak this means the breakdown of any overarching “meta-narrative.” In normal-speak, it means that we’re not all on the same page.

As the church grapples with what postmodernity means for us, the culture is having to figure it out too. One of the most interesting manifestations of this is the rise of the nerds. If you still assume a jock-centric hierarchy in popular culture, you probably haven’t talked to a high school kid in quite some time. 

The geeks have inherited the Earth. By “geek,” I don’t necessarily mean someone who is academically inclined, though it could be that. Geeks are any persons who both exercise their individuality and find community through the shared love of anything that is not general interest. Whether it be theater performance, the Harry Potter series, or expensive barbecue sauce. The particular object of affection doesn’t matter so long as it can act as a conduit, connecting small pockets of community in a wearyingly massive and pluralistic world. In my life this looks like “Blazer-Con,” a convention for American fans of English Premier League Soccer who wear tweed and listen to the “Men in Blazers” podcast. My wife and I will be traveling to the next convention in Brooklyn late this year.

I wouldn’t suggest that people are merely feigning interest in Battlestar Galactica or designer cheeses in order to meet people. I think the enthusiasts of these things really like them. But in a world without one overarching cultural narrative where almost no commonality with a random passerby can be assumed, people are building sub-communities through the things that they like.

This has relevance for the church. In a weird way, we have the opportunity to be Jesus nerds in a way that we have not been able to replicate for 17 centuries. When 4^th century Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman world, in one day, the word “Christian” went from describing about 5 to 10 percent of the population to 100 percent. Only one of two things could result: either everyone in the empire would start actively seeking to reflect Jesus in their lives—forgiving each other’s faults, protecting the vulnerable, renouncing violence, etc.—or the meaning of the term “Christian” would become diluted. I don’t need to tell you which one ended up happening.

It’s the paradox of church history that if everyone is a Christian, then no one is a Christian. Christians who fear that the faith is dying because smaller numbers of people are showing up to church on Sundays, or we don’t have the ten commandments posted in public schools, or we use of the term “holiday” rather than “Christmas” have likely not thought much about what it would really mean to embody Christ’s way of being in the world. In the US, the data is clear: there were way more people sitting in pews on Sunday mornings in the 40s and 50s. It’s not at all clear that the country was more Christ-like back then.

The decline of Christendom is a huge loss, if your goal is to get a large collection of warm bodies together once a week. But it’s so much the better for the more discerning Christian. Suddenly, we are entering a time where “Jesus nerd” might actually mean something.

Battlestar Galactica appreciation groups have a clear commitment to something and there is no ambiguity as to who they are. Finally, we are nearing a time where Christians can say no less than that. Perhaps we can even say more.