These are Saturday times
I cannot help but feel these are Saturday times. We have seen the crucifixions. We have witnessed the earth quake and the temple curtains rend. And yet resurrection’s promise seems to remain an impossible fantasy in an imagined future with little purchase on the conditions of today.
We have recounted and have fought to remember how many names now, felled for the color of their skin? How many feet rumbled the pavement and yet where is the revolution? How many decades ago was it when Gloria Anzaldúa called our Southern border “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds?” Does it not still bleed? How many millions on this globe have marched and lamented and feared for a planet already turned toward catastrophe? And yet do we not hear of new oil fields opening every day? Our Rome may be in her twilight years, but is that not simply because other empires, more terrible perhaps than our own, knock at the door? Are we not proving as deadly to our own in these times as we ever were? Certainly if there is such a thing as a movement of Jesus followers today, it is in most corners as broken and splintered and muddled and self-doubting and self-defeating as it was on that first day of grief.
What happens when the life and crucifixion are all we have?
In these Saturday times, I have on my mind the words of Jon Sobrino. A Spanish-born Jesuit theologian who lived most of his life among the poor and their struggles for freedom in El Salvador, he wrote Jesus the Liberator in the midst of violence — violence which, some forty years later, remains unhealed.
Reflecting in the introduction on why he chose to write another book on Jesus, he says:
This book has been written in the middle of war, of threats, of conflict and persecution, producing innumerable emergencies requiring an immediate response, and therefore innumerable interruptions to the work schedule. The murder-martyrdom of my brother Jesuits, of Julia Elba and Celina Ramos, left my heart frozen, virtually empty…
The reality of this country has made me think a lot, and has also helped me to think about Jesus Christ….The gospel’s finest and most original phrases—often taken for granted in christologies—resound here with real power, as something real. It is a fact [in El Salvador] that there are crucified peoples, ‘flogged Christs,’ and this gives a better understanding of Christ, the Suffering Servant of Yahweh, hidden among the poor.
Are we not also in a time of crucified peoples? Viewed from the underside of our consumer culture so desperate to paint itself in faux shades of happiness, don’t these words mean something here, now?
I can no longer count on my hands the number of people I have known who lived rejected on the streets and who are now dead. None were raised by Sunday. Friends, if the life and death of Jesus is not in solidarity with them on their endless Saturday, I am not sure if the hope he supposedly offers is any longer one I want.
If Jesus came not to prove to us that he was God but to show us how to become like God, then without fear let us inhabit this Saturday space which is most honest about the condition of our lives. For Sobrino, this inhabitance follows what Jesus revealed about God through action more than words.
Jesus did not bear witness to just any God but to the God of the Kingdom, the God of the poor, the God of life, mercy and justice….The fundamental witness that Jesus bore to his God is therefore expressed primarily in his works of love rather than in a confession of faith. It is expressed primarily in a sacramental way by making the true God present, rather than by defending true definitions of this God. When such witness requires Jesus to give his life, then remaining faithful to this love is his final witness to a God who is love.
Saturday does not invalidate such a witness, it deepens it and begs it spread.
Sobrino thinks carefully about what this reality of crucifixion means for the concrete relations of our lives.
We human beings understand very well—without finding a logical explanation for it—that in history there is no such thing as love without solidarity and there is no solidarity without incarnation. Solidarity that was not prepared to share the lot of those with whom it wanted to show solidarity would be paternalism, to put it mildly, or would lead to despotism. Solidarity in a world of victims that was not prepared to become a victim would in the end not be solidarity.
Jesus’ death—like the death of all martyrs—is the validation of a particular kind of life. “The divine confirmation that this life is the true life is the resurrection,” Sobrino writes, “but the historical confirmation that Jesus’ life is liberating and good news is—paradoxically—the cross.”
This life, informed by those who died unjustly or in resistance to injustice, is shaped like a love that looks like solidarity with the poor, the suffering, the little ones, the forgotten, the excluded, the grieving, the weary in need of rest. “Living the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ implies a mysticism of life,” adds Leonardo Boff. Such mysticism, the mysticism of the Dark Night of our long Saturday, leads to compassion and the struggle for justice. It invites us to become, as Henri Nouwen described it, a wounded healer. It is an inward journey as much as an external practice. It is a prophetic mysticism calling us to unmask and undo structures which continue to wound.
The terribly strange thing is that the world is still beautiful on Saturday. Yellow and orange daffodils, porcelain blue skies, the smell of homemade waffles spread with rhubarb sauce, and the awe of children filled my morning. Such sights and smells are, paradoxically, present every morning, somewhere, after each injustice. Deeper than the relentlessness of violence is the relentlessness of beauty and the joy of creation, human and beyond, singing as it was always meant. To live as though this deeper down joyful song is the real thing will always lead to crosses amidst empires and lashes from plantation masters who confusedly believe they are the really real.
I cannot shake the grief that our long Saturday has a long way to go. I will huddle around fires and tables with my fellow brokenhearted. But neither can I shake the wonder that someone once lived a life of solidarity so beautiful that it once shook open the earth.
The life of the crucified remains. It waits to live again in all the living.