“My Eros is crucified.”
Still now, forty-five years later, I remember how startled I was when
I first read that use of “Eros” in Ignatius of Antioch’s early Second
Century letters. I was just beginning seminary and was searching hard
for something to replace the
Atonement-by-Vicarious-Suffering-Evangelicalism that I’d grown up with.
Would Ignatius’s use of THAT word “Eros” for a loving God point to
another way of understanding Jesus’ cross and resurrection?
Ignatius wrote as a bishop under Roman guard; he was on his way to
martyrdom, writing when the ink was barely dry on the four Gospels. As
St. Paul had done before him, he wrote letters to churches in Asia
Minor, offering a personal mix of news, theology, encouragement,
direction, and reports on his own spirit as he walked toward certain
death.
What startled me in his use of “Eros” after was his total disregard
for the kinds of careful distinction C.S. Lewis made among four
different Greek words for love. I’d read Lewis’s book and had heard
those distinctions of different kinds of love in countless sermons and
scripture commentaries. The Four Loves made a clear hierarchy and Eros
came across so hungering, so desiring, so reaching toward as to be
barely love. But Ignatius used “Eros” and not “Agape.” Did he mean
Jesus’ death on the cross shows us the holy power of desire in Christ’s
and the Father’s love? Could this be part of the way I was looking for,
a way beyond moralizing, legalistic speculations about paying a price
to satisfy divine justice?
Ignatius’ unexpected use of “Eros” sharpened my ear to hear new notes in the Bible itself.
With this fresh hearing, I began to hear Eros and God’s desire for us
ringing through the Gospel resurrection stories (and St. Paul’s
untimely encounter with Jesus as well). How had I not heard it before?
When the Gospels show a resurrected Jesus comforting frightened who had
abandoned and betrayed him,
- “Do not be afraid…”
- “Peace be with you…”
he speaks tender, embracing words of love.
When he breathes on them,
- “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
he stirs their hair like a mother or a lover.
When they’re hungry for hope and understanding,
- “Children, you have no fish, have you?”
he feeds them and eats with them,
- “Come and have breakfast.”
When he calls Mary Magdalene by name,
- “Mary”
the tender life in his voice provokes her to use an affectionate nickname –
- “Rabbuni”
And (though the word never appears in the New Testament) Eros, desiring
love, flashes like lightning when he says to Mary Magdalene,
“Do not touch me.” Not now, not yet
As Eros dances through Jesus’ repeated questioning of Peter - -
“Peter, do you love me?”
In the resurrected Jesus we meet our Love again - that’s what I heard in
Ignatius’s flash of vision; all of our erotic, tender, longing,
desiring ways of loving do suffer and die with Jesus our Eros on the
cross. And in the next moment, the same moment, our resurrected Eros
invites us to live our passionate, desiring love as he did and does -
with no fear of death.
If we’ve felt and seen the power in his life and presence and are
moved by its power and beauty to follow him, our path, our race course,
as followers of Jesus, is shaped by desiring love
“…let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,
looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the
sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding
its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of
God.” ~Hebrews 12:1b-2
“…for the sake of the joy that was set before him…”
Jesus’ desire transforms the story of his capture, torture, and
brutally shaming execution into a startling story of freedom. For the
Gospel writers and the earliest Christians, Jesus’ freedom drives the
story that gives them life. Jesus’ freedom through the Passion guides
us to recognize the Jesus we knew through all the Gospel stories in the
healing, blessing, and forgiveness in his resurrection embrace.
Writing now in the great Fifty Days of Easter, I’m savoring this year’s Easter joy of preaching Christ Church, Los Altos’s
Prayer Book Palm Sunday liturgy,
their 100th anniversary and then at the other end of a formal/informal
liturgical spectrum presiding at a handmade, partly unscripted Maundy
Thursday Eucharistic supper and foot washing with
Society of St. Polycarp,
that extended New Orleans group of young friends – attorneys and
teachers, social service workers, musicians, and actors meeting for the
Great Three Days in Krewe de Vieux’s Mardi Gras warehouse. After my
first evening presiding with them, I joined other musician song-leaders
making passionate, unaccompanied music for their Good Friday and the
Easter Vigil and Feast. From Palm Sunday through Easter, all the events
formed a single whole, a celebration of fearless living and love that
God would not abandon to death. Both ends of the week and both ends of
the liturgical spectrum steadily dropped the fake solemnity of
pretending we’d somehow not heard the whole story. Throughout this Holy
Week, our practice and proclamation came together to discover Jesus’
freedom embracing us, facing our darkest fears and our most fragile
hopes, and through it all blessing our desire with love.
What I’m grateful that didn’t hear in those services in California and
Louisiana was our old habit of ignoring (or even denying) Jesus’ freedom
and desire in the early parts of the one story. We didn’t reduce our
telling of the Passion to a catastrophic tragedy. We didn’t try to make
Jesus’ resurrection a surprise happy ending. I felt people responding
with steady hope, a real stirring of faith, and most deeply with love.
The alternate version of the story, the one I inherited and was looking
to replace, the story of the inevitable destruction of Jesus’ faithful
obedience (watching over our shoulders for the divine wrath that lurks
in the background) makes God the enemy of our heart’s desire and Jesus
our mentor in victimhood.
Another ancient Christian writer sensitized my ear to Jesus’ freedom
through the arc of the Passion-Resurrection story. Only a few days
after I first read Ignatius words, “My Eros is crucified,” I read
Hippolytus of Rome’s second century Eucharistic Prayer. Hippolytus’s
prayer with its insistence on Jesus’ freedom felt wonderfully and eerily
consistent with Ignatius’s use of Eros. And like Ignatius, it pointed
to the wholeness of God’s desiring love as Jesus walked the way to the
cross -
To fulfill your will and win for himself a holy people, he
[Jesus] stretched out his arms when he came to suffer, that by his death
he might set free all who trusted you. [And the night when] he was
handed over to death, a death he freely accepted he might bring to
naught death, and break the bond of the devil, and tread hell under
foot, and give light to the righteous and set up a covenant, and
manifest his resurrection, he took bread…
Hippolytus insists that Jesus freely stretched out his arms to suffer
death to destroy death’s power. He would do no less, because he loved
to make us free.
After reading Ignatius and Hippolytus, I began to discover these
themes of theirs in the Bible, as I wondered how, with all the scripture
passages we’d memorized for Sunday School, in our Sword Drill practice
of digging into scripture, in so many exegetical sermons, we’d never
heard,
"The Father loves me for this: that I lay down my life to
take it up again. No one takes it from me; I lay it down freely. I have
power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again" (John 10:17-18).
The writer of the Gospel of John isn’t trying to make the crucifixion
pretty. The writer is telling the story to get us to the dark
transforming power of truth and beauty. The Evangelist knows we’ll miss
the whole story unless we keep hearing that the Father’s unwavering
love and desire for us simply IS the whole and consistent context of
Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. Jesus doesn’t bow to the
Father’s will (like a devout serf acknowledging the holy power of the
duke or prince who owns him), Jesus’ will and the Father’s are one as he
chooses to enact the Father’s self-giving in his own free, self-giving
love.
Yes, the civil and religious authorities did their determined best to
reduce Jesus to a victim (as civil and religious authorities did and
continue to do to those who step outside their system and order). And
yes, Jesus was stripped of community and friends, stripped naked of his
clothing, mocked, shamed, tortured and yes, they killed him. But he
came to Jerusalem freely and he never consented to the legitimacy of the
power he was facing down. The religious sacrificial system of
appeasing a righteous God and the civil sacrificial system of
sacrificing inconvenient people and vision for the sake the “peace” of
the Empire both claimed their right and need to destroy him. And
because Jesus sustained his loving freedom to the end, God’s
resurrecting power is fully present even in Jesus’ death.
Taken together the four Gospels four different “final words” make
four notes of a powerful chord. “It is finished,” Jesus says in John’s
Gospel. And it’s the same word as the piercing cry in Mark’s Gospel and
“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus
freely sustains his desiring love into the darkness of death, and in
that freedom, the God and father who seemed to have abandoned him
reveals that Love is truly stronger than death. The resurrection is
revelatory fulfillment of Jesus’ courageous, creative love.
With Jesus’ freedom in his Passion-Death-and-Resurrection before us,
lives of generous witness (and sometimes death), shine with the presence
of his Spirit – Gandhi, Maria Skobtsova, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin
Luther King, Stephen Biko, Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Su Kyi. Yes,
add your own names to that list. No, on my list they’re not all
Christians, but how can we not see the Spirit in lives that shine with
such freedom to love. St. Paul tells us, “Where the Spirit of the Lord
is, there is freedom.” Eros. My Eros is crucified. Come my way, my
truth, my life.
This meditation was borrowed from www.episcopalcafe.com. The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.
