READING: “I Feel Sorry for Jesus”, by Naomi Shihab Nye,
from The Antioch Review vol. 56, no 2 (spring 1998), p.206

People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, Wherever two or more
are gathered in my name …
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it
Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn't want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember that pass-it-on game
where the message changed dramatically by the time
it rounded the circle? Well

People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.
They try to feel like His Special Pet.
Jesus deserves better.

I think He’s been exhausted for a very long time.
He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into the golden chandeliers
and say, the truth tastes better here.

See? Even I’m talking like I know.
It's dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
every twist of the Via Dolorosa was written on my skin

And that makes me feel like being silent, you know?
A secret pouch of listening.
You won't hear me talk like this again.

Jesus of Nazareth — Jesus of Nazareth, listen to me. You do not have my permission to die for me. Would you really presume to take away my sins, centuries before I was born, without my consent? I will not have your death upon my conscience! You may have died for those who shared a Passover supper with you that night outside Jerusalem—for the vision of creative and compassionate community you held out for them You may have died for the tradition whose stifling legalism smothered its own noble spirit. But the weight of your slow, agonized death upon a crude wooden cross cannot fall upon the backs of future generations.

I don’t believe for one minute that you imagined it would. Nor can I believe that God willed such a tortured end to your ministry. The Divine I have encountered in my spirit's wanderings is a healing Presence. The sacred saga of Divine child abuse proclaimed by much of Christianity raises horror in my heart. Let Osirus die, and the winter king; let Persephone be abducted to the underworld. Let these beings of myth and legend die to rise again. Let them give form and meaning to the turning of the seasons, and to the inward struggles of humanity. But you—you were more than a myth. You were a man. You were a human being who suffered human torment and humiliation and agonizing pain and abandonment.

The Gnostics didn’t believe it. They thought your suffering was an illusion, for a divine being couldn’t suffer. They imagined a laughing Christ who left his body behind as it struggled up the hill with a cross upon its back. Or perhaps, they fantasized, a substitution was made. It was someone else who really died upon that cross.

You were a marked man, for you had ridiculed and defied the priests and the Pharisees. You dared to name the hypocrisy of a law that forbade healing on the Sabbath. You sat at table with tax collectors and sinners, and you fraternized with women. You undermined foolish pride, and exposed human frailties. You accepted the love of a prostitute as a passport to heaven.

You prayed for the cup to pass you by, they tell us. You prayed until the sweat beaded upon your brow, and your friends all fell asleep from exhaustion. Yet in the end, they say, you considered it God’s will that you be taken by your enemies. Did you really? Or did your fidelity to your own vision—your glorious vision of the kingdom of God come among us in the power of loving community—did your own vision leave you little choice?

Aren’t there times when integrity demands sacrifice? Aren’t there realities—loyalties—more important than physical life itself?

Many through history have made the choice to suffer for their convictions. Many have died unsung—while hundreds of thousands commemorate your triumph over a painful death this day. What makes you different? Is it not that your human story became entwined with a powerful myth to give people something their hearts cried out for? To give them a God who suffers, who shares their humanity, who can understand their hopes and fears?

In a time when most people had little power over their destinies, it was not enough to trust that life would be renewed in the spring. In a part of the world where nature is harsh, it was not enough to wait for the winter to pass. Hope required a more lasting victory, a victory beyond the brokenness of this world. So powerful was this blended story that the Jews themselves, after your death, began to speak of their God as a God who suffers with humanity.

If you suffered for others, you did so out of the depths of your own caring humanity. The gospel stories tell us you were often wrenched in your gut with compassion. If you suffered for others, it was as one who must protest the insensitive and life-destroying practices of your own time. If you suffered for others, you did so because you understood their limitations, and you saw how desperately they needed to be led towards hope and courage and self-acceptance. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”They know not what they do.

You put yourself into the hands of your enemies with the absolute assurance that there is a reality more powerful than princes and principalities, that Life is stronger than death. Yet you went in dread, knowing that the path would likely bring you excruciating pain. The story says you had your moment of despair: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is not the voice of a God, but the cry of a passionate, dedicated human pushed to doubt and despair by the inhumanity of his own kind.

Your story touches me, as a human story of a courageous and faithful visionary who could not compromise even in the face of torture and death. Times and circumstances, and perhaps the breath of the Spirit, combined to give your story power beyond most of the other stories of our history. It has brought God closer to humanity, and lifted up compassion as a divine virtue.

For the community you gathered around you was transformed and deepened by the power of your presence among them – so transformed that, after their initial grief, they discovered that the spirit you had evoked in their midst was still with them. For all their imperfections and fears, they felt the living presence of creativity and compassion in their midst as they came together to console one another, thinking that all was lost.

You taught us that we are called by something deep in the nature of things to say ‘yes’to Life. We are also called to say ‘yes’to one another. When we do, what happens between us can be sacramental. It is a religious encounter. The Holy finds a space to dance in our lives, and moves us to grow our souls. Egos may develop in isolation. Personhood, however, is the gift of our relationships—including our relationship with the mystery which dwells within and between and beyond ourselves.

Don’t misunderstand, elder brother. I am grateful for your life, for your teachings. I am even grateful for your courage to be faithful unto death. And I do believe that life and love are stronger than death. I do believe in resurrections—many of them.

Yet there is that in the myth which has grown about you to which I must say no. However much compassion we have for one another, we cannot take from any other the responsibility for his or her own life and spirit. We must each give our own accounting before the Holy. Our love can make a difference—even a saving difference. But neither you, nor anyone, can bear responsibility for my sins.

I must make my own reparations where I can, beg forgiveness where I cannot. Yes, I do need God’s grace, and the grace of my brothers and sisters, for I am imperfect. I need to be forgiven. We all do. You knew that.

But I am born again in each moment that I am able to let go of what has been, and move on. I can move through death into new life. The person I am today is not the person I was last week, or last year. Each of us is constantly being made new, if we allow it.

I believe that is what you tried to teach those around you. “You must be born again.” “The one who loses his life will find it.” Not by taking on a dogmatic set of beliefs, or ritual actions. The Pharisees did that. Not by declaring that you were God, for you told your followers, “All that I do, you shall do, and more.” You taught that we find our lives by choosing, in the spirit of love, to let go of what binds us to the past. You saw the Divine incarnate within each of us, and helped us to understand that we can breathe life into one another. It was never your intention to sit on the franchise!

You taught us, did you not, to judge people by the love and generosity of their hearts, not by their beliefs or the circumstances of their lives? You taught us that we had in each moment the possibility of deciding to “go and sin no more.” We have in each moment the possibility of beginning again, supported by a web of relationship which will not let go.

So, Prophet of Nazareth, I say yes to much of your teachings, as they have come to us. Yet I say no to aspects of the myth which has grown like ivy to hide the shape of your being, I say ‘no’to the doctrine of vicarious atonement. I say ‘no’to the myth of a dying/rising god. I say ‘no’to the prideful assertion of some of your followers that your path is the only one.

And I say ‘no’to the notion that suffering is virtuous. If it were so much to be desired, why did you ask that the cup be taken from you? I think you understood that suffering could not always be avoided, if we are to be committed and faithful. We cannot be open to living if we try to shut out pain. There may be no greater sin against Life—against the Spirit—than struggling to avoid necessary suffering. For it is impossible to heal a soul, or a world, without facing and feeling the pain it has borne.

Yet suffering for the sake of suffering itself must be considered a great evil. Your life cried out against the unnecessary pain inflicted by humans upon one another other. Your death, and the resurrection of your story in the face of persecution, remind us not to be enslaved by our own fear of pain. You yourself taught that the kingdom of the divine was to be found in and among us, now—in this life. You offered hope of transcending our cycles of suffering—not by escaping from them, but by the spirit in which we faced them—together. In this, you brought something new to an old, old story.

In my religious tradition, we tend to be an optimistic bunch. I think we are sometimes convinced that in a “proper”world, no one should ever suffer. I have learned, not easily, that mourning is necessary. Healing often requires suffering. It is easy to celebrate the return of the Spring, and the Christian resurrection story gives a human face to that eternal celebration. But few of us in my tradition celebrate Good Friday. Few of us identify with the suffering of an abused prophet of a conquered people. I can’t speak for the others, but I, for one, am often in too much of a hurry to be born again. I have learned that mourning is necessary, but I am still learning to spend sufficient time with it.

No, prophet of Nazareth, you cannot take away my sins, and show me a way to escape from the cycles of sorrow and delight which are the human condition. My sins are my own, and mine the rebirth as life and love and redemptive relationship give me strength to let them go. But your example helps me to look within myself, and within the web of connectedness which sustains me. It helps me to hear my brothers and sisters whose lives have held pain no one—no one—should ever need to bear.

Your story helps me to have faith that we are none of us stuck in repeating cycles from which we cannot escape. It helps me to remember that in the very midst of suffering it is possible to be touched by love in a transformative way. It helps me to remember that, while love may not always be enough, still I must be faithful in loving as best I can. Because sometimes—sometimes—love is enough—especially as sustained within a spiritual community. It is beyond my power to know. Therefore my Universalism tells me I cannot give up on anyone.

I can only be faithful, to the best of my ability, to what I am called to do with my life. I am not called to be sinless. I am not called to be perfect. I am called to give my life back to the Love which brought me into being. I am called to invite forth that love within the healing and joyful dance of community, that transformation may happen. Often the love and courage and wisdom I can muster will not be enough. But together we can incarnate the spirit more fully than any one of us alone—even you.

No, my brother, you are not the Redeemer of humanity. Our species looks in vain for a redeemer to save us from ourselves. We take our sins very seriously, and create stirring dramas from the events of our lives. But finally, I wonder if the Gnostics, with their “Laughing Savior,” did not have a piece of the truth? I know your suffering was real. Yet it was not the last word about the meaning of your life. Suffering is real, yet we have the choice not to let it define us. Suffering is real. And Jesus the holy fool in The Lord of the Dance, who says “it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back”—that Jesus keeps right on dancing. For your dance goes on, Jesus of Nazareth, and the pattern of the dance is grander than even you could grasp.

Our hands touch briefly as we pace through the figures of that Holy dance. The sharing of pain binds us as much as the sharing of delight. It is ours to choose which we allow to define us. It is ours to learn from whatever Life brings to us—and sometimes the deepest learnings come from events we did not ask for—the Creative events which break into our carefully ordered worlds and transform them beyond our imagining.

As for me, I would to be born again—and again. I would protest against unnecessary suffering. I would mourn and to be comforted. I would build the kind of compassionate community which invites the presence of the Spirit. I would rejoice in the first signs of the coming of Spring. And I would join you in the Dance, Elder Brother, for the dance goes on.

Yes, I choose to believe that life is stronger than death. I choose to believe that the Spirit you served with your life and death is among us and between us; that—within community engaging the Holy—we encounter Creative events which transform us as we cannot transform ourselves. I choose to believe that resurrections are possible … for individuals, and for the communities they create together. Possible, but probably never final. And that is enough. That is more than enough.