Karma and Grace

It may come as a surprise to learn that the most comprehensive and clearly articulated views on divine justice come not from Western religions, but from Eastern ones. For Hinduism and Buddhism, what goes around does indeed come around, over and over, inevitably, across unfathomable eons of time. The wheel's turning pushes evil-doers lower and lower on the great chain of being, and elevates the righteous to higher and higher stations of being. Everything is in accordance with iron-clad, unchanging, and unchangeable laws that perfectly proportion actions and reactions in both the moral and the physical universe.

Who among law and order types could ask for a more perfect answer to the age-old question of why the rains fall on the just as well as the unjust? According to it, people get exactly the amount of rain on their parades as their wrong decisions and actions warrant, no less and no more, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. The good guys do finish first, and the bad guys last, eventually if not sooner.

It is just this kind of thinking that, in spite of every effort to keep it at bay, insinuates itself with astonishing regularity into even the most grace-filled witnesses to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faith. It is evident almost from the beginning in all three faiths. There we were, the story goes, happily sheltered in Adam's loins, only to have the promise of an everlastingly tranquil future snatched away from us by a single ill-considered judgment on our parents' part. We never even got to do the crime ourselves, before we wound up doing the time for it, in a world that all of a sudden became a prison-house rather than a garden. To wrench Abraham Lincoln's immortal phrasing from its original context, we should all tremble at the thought that God is just. Keep defying him, and bad things will happen to you in this life, and in the next …and the next…

This very tight, tie-up-all-the-loose-ends kind of thinking both answers a lot of questions and provides a lot of inspiration. Knowing how things really work in the world, we can now busy ourselves either with doing the right things out of a fear of punishment, or for the sake of jackpot rewards like having a bunch of virgins all to yourself in the hereafter for getting knocked off in a holy war on earth. (I still wonder how the virgins themselves will be feeling about their situation up there.) Whoever first put together these economics of salvation would probably think now that "he" (no woman would have ever done it this way) deserves a Nobel Prize.

No wonder St. Paul ran into such trouble with Jerusalem Christians and Thessalonikan Jews. He was intemperate enough to insist that Law enshrined in karmic-like thinking is death-dealing, not life-giving. That Christ frees people not just from the punishments prescribed by the Law, but from the force and authority of the Law itself. Not that the Law is annuled, any more than that the idea of a just God has become obsolete. But that in Christ, sinful acts are forgiven and the Law which defines them as sinful is, in instances of God's own choosing, nullified. Including the sinful act --- if it is one --- of choosing a different path than the one Christ followed, and the law that says we have to believe the right things or suffer everlastingly for not doing so.

Paul's kind of thinking is difficult to absorb, primarily because it demands so much more of us than the kind of thinking that puts everything into immediate good order by means of unambiguous statements about right and wrong, reward and punishment, present and future. For Paul, there are breaks in the karmic chain of cause and effect, work stoppages in the mills of the gods, changes of mind on the part of humankind's creator, a new order of being, an unfolding of a destiny beyond the logic of just desserts, in short, pure, unbounded, unfathomable, world-reconstituting grace. Grace, mercy, peace, love --- just the things quickly stomped underfoot by the platitudes and piety of people too certain for their own good and ours of what God has already decided for everyone else.
What I find especially ennobling in both Hindu and Buddhist thinking about karma is their characterization of it as a problem to be overcome rather than a truth to be enshrined. In very different ways to be sure, both religions offer liberation from karmic captivity, rather than baptism into it. Just as grace does.

Jesus As Hero, Savior, And Friend

One question I often think about during the Lenten and Easter seasons is whether historical knowledge about Jesus can help us much to believe that he is Christ and Lord. I try to keep an open mind on the possibility that it can, because modern methods of historical study do bridge all sorts of gaps between the present and the past, and because I continue to seek encounters with a very present, and not just a long departed friend and savior. The problem is that much of what can be learned about Jesus from the available records brings us no closer to the man himself than walking the walk with him brought his own contemporaries.

One image prominent in those records is the image of a heroic man who displayed extraordinary courage as he faced adversity of many kinds, in service to a cause that almost everyone who learned of it rejected. But to this distressing image was soon attached another, of a vindicated prophet whose resurrection was first proclaimed with a jubilant spirit, and later with a take-no-prisoners one. Death is swallowed up in victory. Then again, maybe not quite: the kingdom already here is a kingdom which, paradoxically, is still yet to come. And so, Jesus the hero became king either of a not quite ready for prime time kingdom, or of a kingdom not of this world at all.

A more complex image than that of Jesus as Hero is the image of Jesus as Savior. What makes this latter especially attractive is that it focuses attention on the very suffering that hero imagery wants us to get past. After all, what kind of a hero dies an ignominious death as a despised criminal? A hero ascending into the heavens looks much better, but at that point, of course, he stops being a hero and turns into something beyond the merely human altogether. The risen Jesus has always been a little spooky; it is easier to relate to him the longer he stays on the cross. Of course, that works only if we keep telling ourselves that he is the one who does all the suffering. After all, what kind of a savior makes us take up a cross ourselves?

There is not much about the biblical images of Jesus's heroism --- e.g., setting his face "resolutely" toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51); insisting repeatedly that he lays down his life of his own free will (John 10:18) --- that draws me especially close to him; earthly heroes do stuff like this all the time. And the suffering savior image of dogma is little better: it has never made sense to me that someone else should have to pay for sins that are uniquely my own. This kind of substitutionary sacrifice, ransom to the Devil, appeasement of an offended God kind of thinking is highly dubious, from any moral perspective worthy of the name.

Another Savior image in the New Testament is more promising. It is the one that Luke seems to have had in mind when he put his own distinctive spin on Peter's three denials of Jesus. They take place in the courtyard of the high priest's house. Under heavy guard, Jesus sees and hears at least the third denial, and "turned and looked at Peter." (22:61) When I think of what that look must have shown, at least in Luke's mind --- a disappointment and a sadness beyond all human reckoning --- I want to run frantically toward the soothing words of his theology, and of John's even more, with their idea that since Jesus knew what was coming all along, he couldn't have been all that surprised by Peter's betrayal, and I shouldn't get too upset about it either. But that is theology talking, not Jesus. At least, not the Jesus into whose face I look when I face my own uncountable denials. It is the suffering on that face that sears me, and saves me. It is the suffering on the face of a lover who lays down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

I wish that it were possible to know with certainty whether the distinction between being Jesus' servant and being Jesus' friend came from Jesus himself or whether it emerged somewhere along the way of a developing tradition. The truth is, historical knowledge leaves this kind of question unanswered about all of the Gospels' images of Jesus. But the image of being friends with a man who loved people so much that God's very own love became transparent through him is an image that could draw the whole world close to him on its own.

The Mystery of Jesus' Suffering

There we were, at our agreed upon end of a Lenten study on John's Gospel, and I was nowhere close to covering its final chapters. Then, some members of the group suggested that we continue by way of noon-time meetings the first four days of Holy Week. For me at least, it was a great suggestion. I only brought the lessons; they brought the lunch. Little did we know that we were establishing a tradition of both which would span decades.

Had I known at the time that I would be the one leading most of those sessions, the first question I would have asked myself should have been: Who do you think you are, presuming to know enough about just eight chapters of the New Testament (two in each of the four Gospels) to talk about The Passion Narrative across 30 years? Now, the question is: what was wrong with me back then for presuming that the Passion Narrative might not be able to speak for itself?

But speak it does, in the way that all of the other materials John assembled for his Gospel spoke to him: if all that Jesus did were recorded in detail, he concluded, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (21:25) The overwhelmingness of just the Passion Narrative comes to me most especially in the form of unanswered questions. Meditating on Jesus' final week on earth leads you straight into one question after another, and to the gradual discovery that none of the questions admits of any easy answer. Rather, all of them together seem more to open out on unfathomable mysteries.

I still shake my head over the incomprehension to which Jesus' earliest followers descended, even though they had been privileged to press in on him from all sides during the highest moments of his earthly ministry. At its lowest moments, they abandoned him altogether. Thinking about those few women standing off at a distance from the cross only makes it worse. Their distance says it all. Further still, it is searing to remember that only a Roman centurion might have had even a momentary insight into what the whole ghastly denouement on that hard to locate hill was all about.

And then there is the mystery of what Holy Communion celebrates as the "full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world." I understand the logic behind this language. It goes like this: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and for this outrage, no amount of contrition, confession, penitential action, or sacramental observance can possibly suffice as atonement. Only forgiveness from God Godself can possibly rescue a sinful humanity from its deserved and everlasting punishment. But God does exactly this; the Judge forgives, by sending His only Son to suffer on our behalf.

There is logic here, but not mercy. For it leaves it to the only one among us who has not deserved to suffer for anyone else's sins to suffer the most because of them. Meditating upon Jesus' sacrifice sometimes brings me to a sense of gratitude, but I still do not know how to release the guilt that comes over me for making Jesus go through what I will never have to go through. Our "interest in his blood" is no cause for boasting.

What heightens still further the mysteriousness of Jesus' "suffering under Pontius Pilate" is having to confront the idea --- or, for the early church, the fact --- that the humiliation and execution of the world's Savior were essential to the process of salvation itself. Were there were no other options open to God for reconciling the world to himself? Was forgiveness itself somehow not enough? If somebody still had to pay a price, where was the forgiveness at all? The answers must rest somewhere deep in the heart of a God whose thoughts and ways never run along the pathways that ours do.

Three centuries ago, Isaac Watts wrote about a "wondrous" cross, and conveyed in his hymn an image that has been especially comforting to me in all my struggles over the years to understand the horrific fact that the Son of God suffered and died at human hands like mine. When I survey that cross for myself, I see somewhat dimly what Watts saw very clearly: flowing down from Jesus' head, hands, and feet are "sorrow and love," mingled. The sorrow that Jesus feels over my failure to be all that his Father wants me to be has to be a depth of sorrow beyond all my comprehending. But so also must be his love, the only kind of love in all creation powerful enough to make me "pour contempt on all my pride."