So what does Jesus accomplish on the cross? According to Adyashanti, a writer whom I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the cross is the moment of ego death, when divine radiance burns “all of the old conditioning that opposes spirit out of our system.” I like this well enough, and agree that Jesus is modeling the thing that must happen to us, but it can’t be what’s happening to Jesus. Adyashanti is not a Christian, which sometimes makes him invaluable, since he hasn’t been trained in all the expected ways of thinking about things and can look at the life and death of Christ from unexpected angles. But for Christians, Christ is perfect, from before time and forever, even when he’s arguing, questioning, and changing his mind. He has no ego that has to die. So although the via crucis and the via lucis are a model for us, I think it’s fair to say that Christ enacts the model without needing to learn from it himself.

I’m not sure he actually had to die. In seminary, we were taught that the Eastern Orthodox don’t really need western Christianity’s atonement theories. For them, the death on the cross was never part of some grand and cosmic plan. It happened because the people who found Jesus so threatening, the people in power who were all ego and didn’t want to be anything but ego, killed him. They didn’t have to kill him, but they did, because that’s what the defensive ego does. It kills those sneaky thoughts that threaten it, that whisper in the night that we’re not really that important, that we do not make and control the world, that the most we can be is witnesses to God’s glory. Of course, the Eastern Orthodox fathers and mothers didn’t use the language of ego, and of course they probably didn’t all hold to this thought, since people and their thoughts are diverse. But I loved learning about this point of view, and for the most part I’ve accepted it.

Jesus goes to the cross and refuses to save himself, not because he’s enacting some grand plan, but because he’s egoless. He doesn’t try to control events, especially if controlling them means hypocritically forsaking everything he said during the Sermon on the Plain. He accepts a blessed poverty, a blessed hunger, a blessed sorrow, and the blessed hatred, exclusion, reviling, and defamation of other people. He goes to the cross for the same reason the disciples set out on the road with nothing in their pockets. He goes to the cross in order to live the beatitudes.

I have not known this moment, since my ego is still very deeply present, but the person of Jesus on the cross reveals that there is a moment when the via crucis and the via lucis will cease to matter. A moment in which we will be as indifferent to pain and suffering as we are to health and happiness. The great saints, John and Teresa and all the others, have known this moment. They write about it and reassure us that it’s there. But they also tell us that it only lasts a little while. Teresa says no more than twenty minutes. Then we find ourselves journeying again, traversing the via crucis and the via lucis, because we are human beings, and not God. We will never truly be able to be like Jesus on the cross, eternally perfect and egoless. But we will know moments of such perfection, hanging suspended from our needs and our suffering, perfectly joyous, full of God’s love and compassion for the whole world.

I wonder if Jesus was really afraid, and if he really suffered.  I know that there’s some danger in saying this, because we take such comfort from his suffering.  It explains and dignifies our own. But I’m led to this question by my beloved Teresa of Avila, who wrote

After the rapture has passed, the will remains so deeply absorbed and the mind so transported that for days the mind is incapable of understanding anything that does not awaken the will to love.  And the will is so wide awake to love that it is fast asleep to all attachments to any creature…The soul would gladly have a thousand lives to be able to give them all to God. She wishes that everything on earth could be a tongue to help her praise him.  She has this strong urge to sacrifice herself for him, but the power of her love makes the soul feel that what she has to offer is insignificant. She realizes that the martyrs didn’t accomplish much in enduring the torments they endured because with the help of our Beloved such suffering is easy.

If this is true of the martyrs, and I truly hope it is, then how much more must it have been true of Christ, the perfect human soul?  

When we talk about Christ’s suffering as he is beaten and mocked, I think that we need to acknowledge that this is not the kind of suffering that we know.  If we agree with Teresa that the suffering of such torments is easy for a soul that’s aligned with God, then Jesus’ suffering must be something different than physical pain or psychic fear. And yet we assert that he suffered. Teresa helps me see that he suffered on behalf of, not because of. It was not the scourge, the crown of nails, the spit and the insults that made him suffer. It was because he saw that his tormentors were in a kind of agony, the cruel agony of separating ourselves from God. Their cruelty could only arise from fear and deep self-hatred. They could not see themselves as beautiful and beloved, and so they couldn’t see others as beautiful and beloved either. Christ was egoless, but within his tormentors the ego continued to make its fierce and arrogant demands.

When Manet painted Christ being mocked by the soldiers in 1865, he gave Christ eyes that look upward, away from the soldier who is showing him the switch with which he will beat him. Christ is focusing on God, of course, but to me it always looks as if he’s also rolling his eyes. Is this the best that the ego can do? Try to threaten us with the pain that it feels, the shame that it dreads. Doesn’t it know that our our souls have the capacity to move past such pain and shame? For the transcended soul, the Christ-like soul, even the switch that the soldier holds could, in Teresa’s words, be a tongue to praise God.

I write this knowing that I myself am bad at suffering. I’m always affronted and outraged by it. It awakens my dormant ego, as if I had been sleeping and had cold water thrown on me. The ego wakes up shouting. It is true that this diminishes as I grow closer to God. Yet, although my soul has not transcended my ego, it is good to have the example of Teresa, of the martyrs, of Christ, to show me what it would look like if this ever came to pass. I can’t force it through my own actions, but I can hope for it, and be open to the grace that would render suffering irrelevant.

 

Yesterday I talked about how Jesus’ teachings provided an alternative to the other types of Judaism being practiced at his time. In an anxious world that was predicting its own destruction, Pharisees worked at mutating their religion so that it could survive, Sadducees doubled-down on the old ways and traditions, Zealots sharpened their weapons and prepared for revolution, and Jesus looked and saw all of these choices and realized that they were united by one thing.  Each was an attempt to avoid the coming destruction, to somehow deflect the coming suffering. If only we follow the rules closely enough, the Pharisees said, we will not suffer. If only we maintain our power and privileges, the Sadducees said, we will not suffer. If we are successful in tearing down a corrupt and evil system, the Zealots said, we will not suffer. Jesus saw these beliefs as illusory. Suffering cannot be avoided, he said. The question is not whether we can escape suffering. The question is whether we can suffer and still love.

The disciples assume that they’ll be saved from suffering. After all, they belong to Jesus’ in-group. And, since the Kingdom of God is a vision of the world where there’s no suffering at all, it’s easy for them to assume that they can follow Jesus around the suffering. That the Kingdom of God is, for them, a kind of escape hatch. Yet when someone asks him if only a few will be saved, he tells them that there are no guarantees. “Try to enter by the narrow door,” he says, and then he goes on to talk about his own coming suffering in Jerusalem. The narrow door is cross-shaped. It is not an escape from, but a journey through, suffering, and not everyone is very good at accepting and living through suffering. Many will try to escape it, like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots do.

I am one of those who is not very good at accepting suffering. Suffering always feels like an insult to my capacity for control. When I suffer, my prayer practices tend to fall away. I grow sad and angry. I eat too much. I know this about myself, yet it always takes me by surprise. I pray through the good times, dedicated to my devotions, and I expect them to support me in the bad times. They don’t. This is mostly because they are mine, an effort of my own will. My ego is involved in them, and suffering strips the ego away. I strive to enter through the narrow door, but in the end, it is only grace that brings me through. Far from being the first, I am invariably the last to come to terms with suffering and let it shrive me.

Our world right now abounds with Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots. They’re entwined in our political and religious lives. I am often one of them, or at least I let my mind travel down hallways of expected self-perfection, authority, and dominance. Yet these are the very things that have to be stripped away if we are to enter through the narrow door. We all journey to Jerusalems of our own making, and our crosses will find us eventually. There is no just and loving way around suffering. There is the only the passage through it.