Working It Out
Some of us go through years of therapy to get there. Others become fitness fanatics and try to run or swim or weight-lift it out. Others plunge into artistry, trying to paint or sculpt our way through. Sometimes we go through nightmarish addictions to get there, nearly destroying ourselves in the process.
But one way or another, we must do it. Somehow we must resolve the mighty struggles raging within us.
God went through it, too. The Bible, in all its verbose majesty and travesty, might be reduced to the following short, mythical synopsis of God’s inner struggle:
Before the beginning, God was alone, and desperately lonely. So he decided to create a friend, and a world to sustain this friend. But as soon as he created humanity, God was ambivalent about us. God was afraid we would get the better of him, get too clever and take his place. God wanted to keep us below him, but intimacy requires the risk of being an equal, or even being a servant, to one’s friend. We wanted to go farther than God would allow, and this angered God, who kept changing the rules and limits he placed on us in an ever-more-frustrating attempt to manage us. And God’s anger was so great that he hurt us in ways that far outweighed our alleged crimes. He heaped terrible pain and loss on Job, who had been a loyal friend to him, punishing Job for no good reason. Job complained bitterly to God, whom he had loved and honored. God hated himself for what he had done to Job and to so many others. So finally God could stand it no longer and gave up and became a human being himself, a human being who suffered the full weight of God’s anger, so that God would know what it was like to be cursed by God. And as a human being he realized he needed to become better than the God he used to be. As a human being, he became more God-like than he had been when he was God. And as a human being, he showed other people that they could rise to a higher level of divinity, as well.
He suffered and died, and then he was reborn as a new God, a God of mercy and forgiveness and compassion. And this is the moment we celebrate at Easter. Easter was the time when the old-fashioned God of vengeance and jealousy and ambivalence and rage was buried in the tomb, and then emptied it, reborn as a new form of divinity that would dwell in every human heart. The God who died on the cross was reborn out of the tomb as the God of unconditional love, the God who rejoices in us just as we are, the God we can’t embarrass no matter how foolishly we behave, the God who is not afraid to be our friend no matter how clever or ridiculous we may be. This is a reborn God who decommissioned his thunderbolts and dried up his floods and quenched his hellfires. A God who died on the cross as a domineering male, and rose up as both male and female. A God who died on the cross as a tyrant, and rose up as a servant. A God who died on the cross as a rage-o-holic, and rose up as a gentle friend.
We all have to work it out somehow, even in the strangest of ways. At Easter, we celebrate the moment when we leave our inner turmoil behind, when we rise from the death of bitterness and resentment and frustration and disappointment, and take up the new life of peace, patience, kindness, hope, and creativity. God got there at Easter, and so may we! Have a Passionate week, and see you on this holiest and happiest of Sundays....
